Embers Adrift Down for Days After Motherboard Failure
Some games just can't catch a break.
Embers Adrift has never been a giant. It's a niche MMORPG in a corner of gaming that is already pretty niche to begin with. But it has built a habit of running into trouble with outside services, and this week it happened again. A dead piece of hardware, followed by a shipping mix-up, kept the game offline for most of the working week.
To be clear, this wasn't the worst thing to happen to the studio. An earlier incident with a third party left developer Stormhaven Studios out of pocket. This time the damage was to time, patience and player goodwill rather than the bank balance. Even so, nobody wanted it.
A promising Monday, then silence
The week started well. On Monday, Stormhaven announced plans for custom GM events, the kind of hands-on, staff-run activities that small communities tend to love. A day later, the game went dark without warning.
What followed was a stream of updates as the studio worked with staff at its data center to get things running again. The developers were clearly frustrated. "This will likely mark our longest unscheduled outage in the game's 4 year history. So much for 'the cloud,'" they wrote.
That jab at "the cloud" says a lot. However abstract hosting sounds, there is still a physical machine sitting in a rack somewhere. When that machine breaks, the game stops.
One motherboard, one bad delivery
On Tuesday afternoon, Stormhaven finally had a proper explanation. The motherboard in one of the zone server boxes had failed. The hosting provider took a long time to work out what was wrong, and once it did, it didn't have a spare motherboard that would fit the machine.
There was some good news, at least on paper. The provider said a new board was being shipped overnight, which meant Embers Adrift should have been back by Wednesday.
It wasn't. On Wednesday afternoon, the developers delivered the bad news. "Overnight shipping apparently did not mean what they thought it meant," they wrote. "Motherboard will not arrive until tomorrow, so we have hit worst case scenario of getting the game back up on Thursday."
And then Thursday came and went. No return, and no new date.
Back on Friday, with some apologies attached
Friday finally brought the announcement players were waiting for. Stormhaven, sounding very relieved, confirmed that Embers Adrift was live again.
The studio also offered compensation for the downtime:
- All active subscriptions get seven extra days for free.
- New players still on the free trial get their trial extended by seven days too.
- Every character logging in starts fully rested and with a full ember stone.
The GM event that kicked off the week also went ahead as planned, and this time nothing went wrong. After a week like that, it's a nice note to end on.
Our Take
The lesson here isn't about one motherboard. It's about how exposed a small online game is when one failure can take a whole zone server offline and the fix sits with someone else. A bigger publisher might have spare hardware, failover systems or several providers to fall back on. A studio the size of Stormhaven appears to depend heavily on its host's response time and stock levels, and this week that dependency cost several days.
To its credit, Stormhaven kept talking. Regular updates, a clear explanation and generous compensation are exactly what a small community needs to hear. The extra trial days for newcomers are a smart touch, too, since losing a new player during an outage hurts a small game far more than it hurts a giant one. Other indie teams, such as the one behind Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, face similar questions about funding and infrastructure.
It's worth watching whether Stormhaven says anything about redundancy or changes to its hosting after this. Two run-ins with third-party services suggest the studio may want more control over the parts of its game it doesn't currently own.