‘Early access isn’t a crutch,’ Wayfinder devs acknowledge, promising compensation for fumbled launch

As we noted this morning, Airship Syndicate’s looter-shooter Wayfinder has had a bit of a chaotic launch, with login issues and throttled servers that drove angry players who’d apparently never seen a big MMO launch before to reviewbomb the game on Steam. Airship had been tweeting and posting in Discord overnight, promising a full update – and as of this evening, it’s out.

“Yesterday sucked,” the missive on the official site admits. “There is no other way to say it. It sucked for people who purchased Founder’s Packs and couldn’t play, and it sucked for us to see players unable to get into the game after believing in us and our vision. Early Access isn’t a crutch. It’s a conversation between a studio and the community that’s helping build the game alongside the studio. We said from the start that we’d be transparent and open with the community and that continues now that we have players entrusting us with their money, and us failing to deliver.”

The team explains what happened in a nutshell: So many people showed up for launch, even in contrast with the beta, that the queue system “failed immediately,” followed by failures of the stabilization fixes the devs deployed – hence the server caps that the team used as a stopgap measure late last night. The good news is that over the course of the day, the engineers have got the login queue back up, although of course nobody wants to be stuck in the queue.

“We’ll continue to make optimizations to the queue and servers in the coming days and weeks until all players are in and playing,” Airship vows.

Additionally, the studio makes several concessions to players: It’s aware of some missing founder pack items (it’s working on that), it’s tweaking bundle prices in the cash shop following feedback, and of course, compensation for the downtime and early access woes will eventually be en route.

“Yesterday proved that Wayfinder has an audience, but we must take action to meet the demand that audience deserves. First and foremost that involves us fortifying our underlying platform and technology to deliver our vision for an online world for friends. It’s about winning back our player’s trust through actions and not words, and it’s about getting the game into a playable state for all.”

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