Christmas Crash and Burn: Overloaded Servers

It’s Christmas morning. Some kids stayed up until 12 to open their presents on Christmas Eve, and some slept merrily in their beds awaiting Santa’s arrival to tear into their presents when the sun rose on another Christmas morning. However, as gamers, there’s one thing we all should expect – overloaded servers. There are only a handful of times in a console’s lifetime that the servers will be overloaded: December 25th of every year, or on the launch day of a brand new console. Despite this being expected, people still complain about how they can’t log online to pump 5 clips into someone on Call of Duty or hide in the crowd to avoid their pursuer in Assassin’s Creed multiplayer.

Most people tend to say, “Way to be prepared!” But is there any true way to be prepared for a rush of hundreds of eager children, teenagers, and adults who want to get their system up and running? Servers, like anything else, have a capacity. When this limit is breached, or nearly breached, problems are bound to occur. Technology in itself isn’t flawless, so why do we all react as though it should be? It’s no secret that launch days and Christmas are bound to have a massive influx of players

When it comes to times like these, it’s best to just wait it out. There’s no point in stressing yourself out for hours throughout the day and, possibly, make you so angry you regret the purchase. If there are alternative methods to setting up your console offline (e.g. downloading the firmware update to a flash drive then installing it in safe mode on PS4), then do it that way. If not, try your best to get the console set up before wrapping it up. It’s better to prepare it before the inevitable influx so that way the gaming can begin immediately. It’s better to be prepared than to have unnecessary stress tacked on.

In these situations, everyone wants to blame the hardware manufacturers. But, when you stop to think about it, is it really Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft’s fault that there are a ton of people trying to play with their new presents? There is really no one to blame when these things arise. You can’t blame the company for their “lack of preparation” seeing as there is very little they can do aside from having their workers at the ready to perform maintenance on the servers the second an issue arises. Furthermore, you can’t blame the eager people celebrating Christmas for wanting to give their new console a try – you’re trying to do the same thing, aren’t you?

Therefore, we should all expect overloaded servers on Christmas day; it’s an inevitable occurrence that can’t be avoided. You can either take the steps I mentioned before, or just wait it out. To reiterate, give these steps a try: try to set the console up before wrapping the present, if there’s an offline setup option like on the PS4 then do it, or you can muster some serious patience and wait it out until the 26th.

*The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect SpawnFirst as a whole