The MMO title Bless Online that is currently in Early Access received its latest V1.0.0.3 update on May 30th which resolved some issues and identified others. In a Steam update, Producer Sungjin Ko apologized to players and explains what NEOWIZ BLESS STUDIO are planning to do.

The letter starts off:

This is Sungjin Ko, Executive Producer

The entire Bless Team and I would like to express our deepest gratitude to all the Founders for your support shown since our Advanced Access on May 28th.

I would like to address the connection, login, and server crash issues from the large influx of players that some of you have been experiencing. First of all, we would like to sincerely apologize to everyone who participated our Head Start as Founders for the recent issues which resulted in long waits and many inconveniences.

The entire development team is committed to identifying and addressing the causes of current performance issues and we are doing our best to solve them as our TOP PRIORITY.

Sungjin explains that the studio had prepared three NA servers along with two EU servers for Advanced Access. Within three hours all three of the NA servers flooded with players to the point that many experienced waiting queues while the studio struggled to add more servers. They have now expanded to six NA servers and four EU servers as a result.

We saw a similar situation unfold when Blade & Soul had to add new servers to cope with the increasing influx of players back in 2016.

A client crash kept being caused by Player Duels which has also been resolved, along with an issue where the Bless Online launcher stopped at 40% or became delayed.

Sungjin goes on to discuss the issues that still remain but should be fixed through the V1.0.0.3 update.

The issue with getting stuck on the “BLESS” loading screen issues has now been fixed. Authentication failure was identified as the issue between STEAM and BLESS servers when players attempted to log-in. We will closely monitor the situation after the patch.

We experienced database I/O delay due to the large influx of players. This caused a lot of the lag you experienced with looting, quests, and other actions. With the urgent maintenance, we upgraded database system/storage to top-end models in order to solve I/O delay. This should improve the lag players see during crowded server times.

It is also mentioned that they have additional backup servers (Six NA and five EU) that can be applied instantly with minimal maintenance. The in-game logs are now reinforced to help the studio identify the cause of server crash errors.

The letter continues with,

Again, I would like to sincerely apologize to all the players who experienced any inconveniences due to server problems or connection errors. We will be a development team that communicates with you.

We know that these issues are just a few of the things that need to be worked on with the Early Access of Bless Online. We chose the Early Access format on Steam because the development and release of content for Bless will be a many-layered process throughout the EA period. We understand that many players are disappointed that not all of the content they expected to be in at Early Access launch is there.

Along with the performance issues, our top priority is addressing the reported potential item duplication bug. Once we can replicate this issue and solve it, we will let all of our players know.

Finally, the missing end-game content is brought up in which Sungjin states that 15v15 PVP and high-level dungeons will be added in 1-2 weeks time. More content is on the way as well.

Any players who are unhappy with the current Bless Online Early Access experience, or can’t wait for the upcoming content have been told they can requests refunds.

Bless Online is currently available on PC.