Anthem apologizes to the players of the VIP demo

Anyone playing Anthem’s VIP demo is facing a lot of problems, including a pretty nasty bug. BioWare apologizes to the players and gives them a present.

That’s why BioWare apologizes: Anthem’s VIP demo is anything but stable. Above all, a loading screen bug makes it difficult for players. They hang on the loading screen before embarking on a mission, which in principle makes the demo unplayable.

BioWare gives away vinyl skins: As compensation, BioWare now gives the players of the VIP demo a second Vinyl-Skin. Anyway, there’s already a blue vinyl skin for all Javelins for playing the VIP demo anyway. The vinyl skins come with the release of Anthem. They can not be repainted.

BioWare explains the problems with a letter to fans

Chad Robertson highlights in a blog entry the problems around the VIP demo. Robertson is the Head of Live Service of BioWare. He assures that Anthem and the platforms have been tested for several months.

Servers should not be the problem: According to Robertston, nothing would have gone wrong in the planning of what sufficient servers are concerned. BioWare would have ensured there was enough capacity to serve the growing number of players. There would even have been excess capacity and these still exist to accommodate more players.

These are the three biggest issues:

Platform connections – this was caused by the spike in players entering the game when we opened up. Unfortunately, these issues did not present themselves during our internal testing. Investigations are ongoing, and we will continue to apply fixes throughout the weekend.
Entitlements – these are account flags that grant players things like their pre-order incentives and demo access. During the demo weekend, we identified a bug where VIP players with a specific combination of entitlements were being blocked from accessing the demo. We believe we’ve resolved most of these, but have additional cases we are addressing.
“Infinite loads” – this is occurring for some players, particularly when they transition from Fort Tarsis to an expedition. We saw this only in isolated cases during internal testing and believed it was resolved. Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated in the real-world where differences with player’s ISPs and home networks introduce new behavior.