Fellowship launched and became popular instantly

The online game Fellowship from former Blizzard employees has gone down well with longtime World of Warcraft fans. According to gamers, it feels like a classic MMORPG with the fluff stripped out. You simply put together a party and, without lengthy leveling, head straight into a raid on the next boss. At the same time, players still have a full role system and a wide selection of stat-boosting items. On the flip side, the project has had issues from day one—some were fixed by a recent patch, while others still need ironing out.

Even though the game is in early access, that’s no excuse for its mistakes. The team at Chief Rebel voiced essentially the same sentiment in their public statement. The project’s main problem right now is the huge influx of players onto the servers, causing impenetrable queues and hurting server stability on top of that. The matchmaking algorithm even factors in ping and whether friends are present, so wait times before raids vary, which leads to crowds of people wanting to fight in the fairy-tale lands. The developers’ current measure is to forcibly shrink queue size, but they promise to find a more elegant solution down the road.

The game also received a patch that fixes item duplication in heroes’ inventories. The bug occurred because the Fellowship client interprets data from different sources in its own way, and each source can have its own latency. As a result, users would see two identical items on their character even though only one was actually equipped—causing confusion. That duplication is now gone. The update also fixed the malfunctioning «Leave Dungeon» button and tweaked the highlight color for gems and currency so they’re easier to spot.