Payday 3 Developer Promises To Fix Matchmaking Issues
Co-op heist shooter Payday 3 launched last week to a myriad of server issues. Many players were simply unable to play the game, as server issues continued despite fixes. Developer Starbreeze has promised to re-evaluate matchmaking and make the game easier to access.
Starbreeze released a statement, outlining the issues and clarifying its plans going forward. The statement expresses disappointment at the problems and blame to a third-party service for the issues. The full story, as told by the statement, is as follows. Payday 3's matchmaking software encountered an unexpected error, which rendered the servers unable to handle the large amount of launch weekend players. An update to the matchmaking software did improve performance. However, after another software update from Starbreeze's matchmaking partner, the multiplayer infrastructure faced struggles once again.
Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren said, "We are disappointed in the issues our playerbase has faced during our launch weekend, but we are confident in our core product and the quality of Payday 3 – and all available metrics point to it. We have a lot of diligent and consistent work ahead of us to regain community trust, but we will work hard to do it." This is the CEO's second statement concerning the server issues. The first was an apology issued shortly after launch day.
These issues didn't occur in either the Technical Betas or Early Access, which Starbreeze said was "due to the specificity of rapid user influx and load-balancing." Starbreeze intends to repair player experience in the short term. As for the long term, it plans to evaluate a new partner for matchmaking and to adjust Payday 3's reliance on online services. That could mean that Starbreeze will remove the game's always online requirement, but the statement does not explicitly say that will be the case.
Despite the issues, Payday 3 did have a massive opening weekend with a peak concurrent player count of 218,250 and a high of 1,347,510 unique users. Payday 3 is avaliable on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S as well as Xbox Game Pass. Later today, September 25, Starbreeze devs will stream on Twitch to talk about the future of the game. The Payday 3 official Twitter will continue to update with the official status of the servers.
