PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds studio sorry for server issues
Pledges "will do our best to improve".
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been experiencing a lot of server and connection issues recently. Players have been struggling with matchmaking, logging in, long queue times and crashes, but developer Bluehole has now apologised for the problems and assured players it is working on improvements.
Writing in its developer blog, Bluehole explained the increasing concurrent player numbers had been causing a strain on the team, and the servers, especially at peak times.
"We anticipated about one million concurrent users in the beginning of our Early Access period and that is when our lobby server was initially designed," Bluehole wrote. "Since the end of June, our concurrent player base saw a rapid increase so we started designing a new server architecture. However, the number of users increased faster than our development speed which resulted in more connection and server issues recently.
"It has become increasingly difficult to manage servers during peak times. To alleviate the above, our development team will prepare our servers far more in advance so that they can handle a much larger number of concurrent players. This is something that we plan to continuously improve on."
The studio also addressed its server issues in Asia which, alongside VPN ads, has resulted in the game being review-bombed on Steam.
"Many players have asked us about the increased number of server crashes in Asia. Recently, the number of concurrent players in Asia has rapidly increased and there were times the cloud service we've been using could not provide more physical servers. To address this problem, we added servers from another cloud service without sufficient testing. Some servers overloaded, which caused frequent crashes. Our development team is investigating the issue in order to prevent it from happening in the future.
"The entire development team is doing their best to make sure all PUBG players in the world can play PUBG smoothly whenever they want. Again, we would like to sincerely apologise to all the players who experienced any inconveniences due to server problems or connection errors. Please rest assured that we have doubled our efforts to improve the quality of the service. On a side note, we have been continuously working on optimisation and doing our best to make gradual improvements.
"Our team will not be content with the status quo and will do our best to improve your experience."
Last month, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds passed one million concurrent players on Steam and announced it has sold over 10 million copies - an incredible feat for an Early Access title. But with great power comes great responsibility, so it's not surprising the team is struggling to cope with the game's surge in popularity.