I want to start by expressing my sincere apologies to all customers who have been experiencing challenges with Palworld or Shockbyte services in the past 2 weeks.

We are aware that customers of Shockbyte are experiencing delays in server activation times, server performance issues and delays in customer support responses.

The purpose of this article is to address all ongoing issues, explain how we are solving them, what we have learned, and provide solutions to all issues where possible.

It’s a lengthy post - but I think it’s important to share all the details and be clear about what’s happening and what actions we are actually taking.

Table of Contents

Palworld's unprecedented popularity

Palworld is a new & exciting open-world survival game populated with creatures called “Pals”, drawing many similarities to Pokémon and ARK: Survival Evolved.

Despite being developed by a small indie game studio, the game looked promising and we were expecting a very successful launch - however, we were wrong.

In fact, Palworld was the largest game launch we have ever seen or experienced as a game server host.

Palworld far exceeded everyone’s expectations. The small indie studio PocketPair sold 19 million copies of Palworld in less than 2 weeks. To put that into perspective, Minecraft, the largest game in the world, took 4 years to make the same number of sales.

This was a monumental launch of unprecedented scale.

Palworld sold 19 million copies in under 2 weeks.

How Shockbyte prepared for the launch of Palworld

Over the past few years, Shockbyte has gained a lot of experience with launching new game servers. As of writing, Shockbyte has launched server hosting for a total of 50 game titles.

We have become so experienced and efficient with game launches that we went from launching only 2 titles in 2020, to 19 new titles in 2023 - that’s almost one game every 2 weeks.

The only way to achieve this level of efficiency was by iterating and improving upon what we learned with each and every game launch, further and further refining our process. We have it down to a science, and we only get better with every new title.

Shockbyte Title Launches
Our team is getting better at launching new games every title we launch.

Preparation for a game launch touches every one of our teams and includes things such as integration within our infrastructure, compatibility, hardware & performance testing, market research, sales forecasting, staff training, customer documentation and more.

Preparing for Palworld went smoothly just like all of our other recent game launches, except for one key difference - nobody could have anticipated just how popular Palworld would be.

Prior to the launch of Palworld, Shockbyte expanded the size of our entire infrastructure by about 10% in preparation. Considering we host 49 other games, are one of the largest game server hosts and have been in business 10 years - this is huge and we thought it was far, far more than would be necessary.

It became clear by day 1 this wouldn’t last long and our engineers immediately began working to acquire & provision new servers to keep up with incoming demand.

During the launch weekend of Palworld, demand was so high that our entire website went down for a few hours due to what we initially thought was a DDoS attack. After investigation, it turned out to be genuine traffic - many thousands of users trying to purchase servers at the same time.

Learning from Valheim

We have experienced high demand for game servers multiple times in the past. At the time we thought these were huge, and thankfully we learned a lot from those experiences.

In reality, Palworld’s launch turned out to be about 25x bigger for Shockbyte than the biggest game launch/update we have seen in the past.

Valheim launched in 2021 and in the 3 years since launch has sold a total of 12 million copies (as a reminder, Palworld sold 19 million copies in 2 weeks!).

Valheim is a game that has been renowned as a new era for private server hosting, opening the eyes of game developers to community servers and this genre of games. Valheim’s success was so significant that it paved the way for games such as V-Rising, Enshrouded and even Palworld itself.

We learned a lot from Valheim’s success. Though the biggest change we implemented was improving our supply chain so that in future we would acquire more stock on short notice.

How we are resolving all Palworld issues

We are aware of all issues customers are currently facing, both with Shockbyte services and the Palworld game itself. We are listening, and our team is actively working every day to resolve them.

Below, I have tried to extensively cover every issue & explain what our team is doing to resolve them.

A theme you’ll notice is that just about every one of these are due to the extreme demand for Palworld servers, however each one poses a unique challenge and requires a unique solution.

If you would like to read about refunds or compensation, there is a section dedicated to this below.

Issues & Resolutions - Table of Contents

Delayed server activations

Before reading this section, I would advise starting with the section above titled “How Shockbyte prepared for the launch of Palworld”. The section above includes a lot of context that is relevant to this section.

We are sorry to any customers experiencing delays in service activation. I want to assure you that our team is working around the clock to resolve this.

Why the delays happened, and how we are solving them

Shockbyte normally activates servers instantly and automatically upon purchase.

Since the launch of Palworld, server activations have been slower than usual. This happened for two reasons, which we have been working to resolve independently.

[Already resolved] Time to provision a server

When a server is purchased, it gets added to the activation queue. Our system automatically processes this queue and prior to Palworld, it normally would take 2-3 minutes to completely activate each server.

This sounds like a long time, but that’s because the backend system has to do a lot of work - checking the payment status, finding an available node in the selected region, finding an IP, configuring the game server, assigning the server to the user, etc.

The first issue we faced with activation times was that we were receiving orders every few seconds. This meant that even though stock was available, the activation queue was stacking up much faster than orders could be fulfilled.

The only way to solve this problem was through optimising the code so that the system could activate servers as fast as we received them.

Our developers began working on this on day 1, and managed to solve this problem within 48 hours.

  • Day 1: We were able to make a small optimization to the code which took activation time from 2-3 minutes, down to a max of 60 seconds.
  • Day 2: Our IT Manager (shoutout to James Hawkins), made a massive breakthrough and was able to optimise the code further to activate servers within only a few seconds.
We were receiving orders so fast that we had to optimise our order provisioning code.

[Ongoing] Stock availability

Since Palworld’s launch, our entire IT Department has been focused on acquiring and deploying more stock.

Although our initial stock ran out within a few days, we have been expanding our infrastructure each and every day - day, night and weekends.

We know that some customers have been waiting several days for their servers. In extreme cases, I have seen some customers waiting 6 or 7 days.

We know how frustrating it can be to wait and we recognise that it may feel like progress is slow, however we are actually fulfilling a huge number of orders every day.

Currently, we are delivering over 2,000 servers every single day.

The reality is, all game server hosts and our suppliers are in the same situation. Palworld has torn through stock of every provider we’ve seen - it has been so extreme that upstream providers across the board are also out of stock.

What we are doing to resolve & mitigate it:

  1. Infrastructure expansion - We have heavily invested into our infrastructure and have so far expanded our entire infrastructure by almost 50%. We are deploying new servers each and every day.
  2. Warnings before purchase - We have added a large warning to our website that server activations are delayed due to the Palworld demand.
  3. Delay notices per-region - Some regions have been labelled with a 7+ Day Wait.
  4. Supply-chain expansion - We have been further expanding our supply-chain to improve our ability acquire stock.

Server performance & crashes

As Palworld is an early access game, there are a number of bugs and performance issues present within the game.

These bugs are actively being worked on by the Palworld game developer and we expect many of them to be resolved in game updates in the coming days and weeks.

That being said, we do have tips for you and changes we’re making on our end to help mitigate the issue.

Server crashing & Palworld memory leak

Palworld currently contains a memory leak bug that causes all servers to crash after they have been online for a period of time.

As this is a bug in the game, it must be fixed by the Palworld game developer.

While a Palworld server is running, the RAM usage will continually increase until it eventually reaches the limit and crashes.

Allocating more RAM to a Palworld server will allow it to remain online for longer, but it will still eventually crash.

Our recommendation: Configure an automatic restart for your server every 2-3 hours.

This will ensure your server safely stops and saves your progress. We know it’s annoying, but at least you’ll be able to keep playing - and we’re sure Palworld will release a fix for this soon.

We have seen some customers mention that the game recommends 16-32GB RAM likely due to this issue. Servers typically require less RAM than the game itself as the server does not need to load any graphic/visual assets. Our team has conducted extensive testing to confirm that this much memory is not necessary for the server.

Shockbyte’s Lamball Palworld plan comes with 4GB RAM, and it is possible to upgrade the RAM on the server to the Grizzbolt plan. However, it is important to note that RAM is expensive, and plans with 16-32GB RAM would need to be within the range of $40-80+. We have been able to offer our plans as low as $12.

Note: We did increase memory of our lowest Palworld plan from 3GB to 4GB shortly after launch. However, this did mean we had to slightly increase the price of this plan.

While no amount of RAM can resolve the memory leak, our team did perform extensive testing to ensure plans are fair and affordable. Once the bug is resolved, we expect RAM usage to stabilise. We will then continue to perform testing & update our plans and recommendations accordingly.

In the future, we plan to perform even more rigorous testing, keeping servers running for longer periods of time and hunting for in-game issues & bugs.

Palworld Road Map

Server performance

We expect Palworld performance to continue to improve as the game continues to update, optimise and resolve bugs.

Behind the scenes, we have also been upgrading our hardware for Palworld servers to help mitigate performance issues - specifically, the CPU.

Since the launch and seeing real servers in use, we have learned that Palworld is more CPU-bound than our tests showed. All new hardware that we are provisioning for Palworld is now running on beefier CPUs with more cores than before.

This has come at an extra cost to us, however, we have chosen not to reflect this in our pricing.

Other in-game errors

We have provided solutions to many common issues on our Knowledgebase: https://shockbyte.com/billing/knowledgebase/78/Palworld

Palworld developers have already published a fix for an error that was causing data loss and player data to reset.

Customer support delays

With the huge increase in demand and website traffic, the number of customer support queries also increased accordingly.

We cannot control the number of users who contact our support team - all we can do is adapt as quickly as we can.

The truth is, our support team is completely overwhelmed right now. Our support volume increased by 394% overnight.

We are doing everything we can to adapt to the demand as fast as possible.

At the beginning of Palworld, we had 50 support agents. Hiring an extra 197 staff overnight would be an impossible task, let alone doing that in only 2 weeks - we still need to onboard and train all of these new staff members.

To solve this fast, we need creative solutions - and that’s what we are doing.

Shockbyte Support Ticket Increase
We cannot expand our staff team by 394% immediately - we must implement multiple strategies.

What we are doing to adapt to the support demand:

  • Of course, we are expanding the size of our support team.
  • Our entire support team has been reallocated to focus on support tickets.
  • Live chat has been replaced temporarily with an AI Chatbot - we are training the model, and it’s actually incredibly impressive. So far it is solving about ~90% of queries. This is a temporary measure.
  • We are doubling down on strategies that were effective for us in the past.
  • We also have many more ideas that we are discussing and working on each day.

We made a breakthrough in support

The graph below shows the number of unresolved tickets we have had open over the last 3 months.

You’ll see that throughout this entire period the number is sitting on essentially zero - that means every day our support team is responding to essentially all open queries.

The immediate spike begins on January 19th - the launch date of Palworld. You can see how sharply demand grew and how quickly our team was flooded with requests.

Our support backlog has been almost 0 for months. Upon Palworld's launch, it rapidly grew to 13,000.

We began implementing strategies from day 1, however, the surge was so extreme and most solutions take some time to begin seeing results.

After ~10 days we made some breakthroughs that allowed us to resolve just about as many queries we received per day - this can be seen on the graph where ticket growth stops.

A big part of this was our AI - after the model was trained sufficiently, it has been able to successfully resolve thousands of customer queries per day.

We are already implementing additional strategies to bring the backlog back down to zero as quickly as possible.

Refunds, Compensation & Service extensions

For any customers affected by activation delays, service issues and support delays we will be offering refunds or compensation in accordance with our refund policy.

Refunds

Refunds can be requested by submitting a customer support ticket.

We understand refunds are currently being processed slower than usual due to support delays as outlined above, however our support team are working to issue refunds as fast as possible

Please rest assured that the response time of our support team does not affect your eligibility for refunds or compensation - if you are eligible for a refund, your refund will be granted as soon as our team is able to get back to you.

We appreciate your patience and assure you our team is working hard to issue refunds as fast as possible.

Compensation & Service extensions

We will provide compensation to customers who experienced a delay in their server activation - even those who already received a refund and cancelled their service.

Our team are currently developing a system that will allow us to automatically apply these compensations to all affected customers. We expect the system to be completed and to start rolling out the compensations next week.

In the meantime, you may also request compensations for your individual circumstances by submitting a support ticket.

Shockbyte’s commitment to customers

We are committed to listening, learning, and resolving all issues faced by customers. Your satisfaction is our top priority, and we are dedicated to doing what is right by you, ensuring that you receive the quality service and support you deserve.

Lastly, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to all Shockbyte staff for their tremendous efforts over the past two weeks. Your dedication during this challenging time has surpassed anything that could be asked of you. Thank you all for your exceptional efforts.

Through these challenges, Shockbyte has learned valuable lessons that will strengthen our foundation and allow us to serve you better going forward.

Your feedback is crucial to us, and we're dedicated to ensuring that your experience with Shockbyte is nothing short of exceptional.

Mitch Smith
CEO & Founder
Shockbyte

Share this