Thank you for your comment. Fascinating, to say the least.

Most baffling to me: Why would they even implement a hard limit on the number of accounts? What purpose does it serve?

And How is this possible? Do you have to create an account on a third-party service? How does it look like on a player's side if the limit is hit and he can't even join the game?

I can't shake the feeling that the developers were inexperienced and a ragtag group that quickly disbanded, hence why things couldn't be changed afterwards. Just purely from a game preservation perspective, this game should be made playable again and with bots, as it does look like a fun game, even if it will never be completed.

Originally posted by Hideo:

Thank you for your comment. Fascinating, to say the least.

Most baffling to me: Why would they even implement a hard limit on the number of accounts? What purpose does it serve?

And How is this possible? Do you have to create an account on a third-party service? How does it look like on a player's side if the limit is hit and he can't even join the game?

I can't shake the feeling that the developers were inexperienced and a ragtag group that quickly disbanded, hence why things couldn't be changed afterwards. Just purely from a game preservation perspective, this game should be made playable again and with bots, as it does look like a fun game, even if it will never be completed.

The server is running on Microsoft Azure PlayFab. There are two possibles states: development mode, and live mode. The PlayFab of this game is in development mode.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/pricing/development-mode

If you check the pricing, you can see that the development mode is free ($0/month) but it has a 100k users limit: https://playfab.com/pricing/
They have to pay to switch to live mode and have an unlimited number of users, but they never did that.

Once 100k accounts have been registered in the game, new players can't play because PlayFab stops to register the new accounts.
It happened around Dec 2020, when new players began to report a PlayFab error code while trying to play: 1490 - EvaluationModePlayerCountExceeded (evaluation mode refers to the development mode)
There's no way to play offline, so at this point the game was unplayable for the new players.

The game was already abandoned but this problem put the last nail in the coffin.

However the server is still running, I can still play because my account is registered and the PlayFab hasn't been stopped (anyway it's $0/month so they don't pay anything lol)

Thank you for the info.

How could the developers knowingly do that? This is very unprofessional. It seems like they'd have to go for the Standard Plan at Azure PlayFab for $99 per month to unlock more player slots.

Ultimately, I blame Explosm, as I would've thought that they'd partner with someone more experienced and/or professional.

Dang it, I didnt even get to play the game
Just now going through some old keys I have n saw I couldnt find this game on steam lol

So no chance I can check it out huh ;-;
Guess the servers would all b ded anyways

[i forgot to sub to discussion, in case anyone says anything lol