Escape from Tarkov Increasingly Popular; Thousands of Players in Queues
Escape from Tarkov has experienced a sudden surge in popularity. The number of players quickly exceeded the capacity of available servers.
- Escape from Tarkov is experiencing a sudden surge in popularity;
- The developers had to introduce queues, which limited the overload of servers;
- There are thousands of players stuck in the waiting rooms.
Just before Christmas, Escape from Tarkov got another major update. Patch 0.12.12 introduced the first new map in two years and VOIP communication. No wonder that it became a good opportunity to return to the game for many fans. As a result, in the past few days Battlestate Games' title experienced a real explosion of popularity.
Apparently the developers were not prepared for such a large influx of veterans and new players. To reduce server overload, they decided to introduce queues and control the number of simultaneously active users. This solution, however, led to even greater problems. Very soon tens, if not hundreds of thousands of players (DM wrote about this phenomenon in his article) started getting stuck in the waiting room.
The problem was quickly addressed by the studio, which published a series of posts on Twitter. The developers admit that traffic on Escape from Tarkov servers is much higher than at any time in the last two years. They also confessed that renting more servers will not solve the problem. Changes in software and optimization of the game's backend are necessary to deal with the issue.
The culmination of the problems occurred on January 3 - since yesterday the situation seems to have stabilized. During peak hours you can still encounter queues, but they should not be as long as a few days ago. Apparently the developers have dealt, at least partially, with server limitations.
Now the developers can celebrate. They certainly have reasons to do so, given how popular their game is right now. All that remains for them is to keep the player attention.
