It's still been less than 24 hours, but the highly anticipated launch of Ubisoft's online shooter "The Division" is already facing some problems. Problems like these are to be expected with MMO's, but the issue is that these problems are rendering the game nearly unplayable.
The major one being that people are unable to access the game due to server outages and various connection issues.
The outages began shortly after the game unlocked at midnight, much to the chagrin of players who stayed up that long just to play it early. Due to the AAA-status of the game, many people around the world rushed to play the game, putting a strain on the Ubisoft servers. This issue only became worse once players in North America were finally able to play, and soon became the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, causing the servers to buckle.
Users began reporting a range of error codes, named with letters in the NATO phonetic alphabet (Romeo, Mike, Sierra, etc.) The most common among these is Mike, prompting many to blame "Mike" for problems and some going so far as to create a subreddit titled "f--kmike" to air their grievances.
Reddit wasn't the only place to go to if you wanted to find people voicing their complaints about the onoging issues, with some posting GIFs to add at least a modicum of humor to their anguish.
Tom Clancy’s The Division Servers Down pic.twitter.com/zZuTzsRgGo
— FumaR GambinO (@FumarGambino) March 8, 2016
The Division servers right now pic.twitter.com/39KHtmYzgc — FumaR GambinO (@FumarGambino) March 8, 2016
The issue here is that since "The Division" requires an Internet connection at all times - think "Destiny" - and doesn't offer an offline single player mode, then if your connection to the servers goes down you can't play at all. Many had expected that since Ubisoft ran two beta tests for the game ahead of launch, and even prolonged them on strong demand, that these problems wouldn't occur. However, it seemed that Ubisoft, as well as fans, gravely underestimated just how many people would want to play "The DIvision" on launch.
Overnight, Ubisoft provided an update, revealing that the severs are back up and are "monitoring the situation," but some people were still reporting issues.
Widespread server crashes like this are hardly unheard of. Back in 2012 when Blizzard's "Diablo 3" launched, many players who waited over 10 years for a sequel to the critically acclaimed "Diablo 2" swarmed Battle.net servers at once, making the game close to impossible to play.
