Tripwire Interactive offers a "state of the game" update about Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, saying the first-person shooter sequel earned more revenue within two days of launching than its predecessor earned in it five years on the market. They also discuss what they admit was a rough launch, and what's been done since then to help smooth things out, saying that having addressed issues with the stats system, they plan a global stats reset, a double XP period over the next few weeks, and a new "B4 Reset" award. Here's word:
By most business measures Red Orchestra 2 has been a smashing success for Tripwire Interactive. Within 2 days of the launch of the game it had surpassed the lifetime revenue of the original Red Orchestra that has been selling for over 5 years. The pre-sales and launch week sales of the game broke all company records, even beating out our hit game Killing Floor by a three-fold margin. But for all of this success we've not done as well as we would have liked in the most important area to us - the happiness of all of our customers. To put it bluntly, the game had a rough launch. We've been working diligently since launch to get these issues sorted and have made great progress fixing issues with matchmaking, VOIP, and stability as well as improving performance. The final major area that we've been working on is stats, player progression and ranking.
We have now fixed all of the major issues with the stats system and released an update yesterday to address these issues. Due to the problems with stats and players either earning stats and achievements that they didn't actually earn or earning stats at many times the intended rate, we are going to have to do a global reset of all stats for the game. This means all achievements, stats and player progression will be rolled back as if all players were new. This was not an easy decision for us to make, but one we felt we needed to do to preserve the integrity of the stats and ranking system, and to provide all of the players the best experience with the game over the long term. Knowing that there are people that have been playing the game for a few weeks now and will lose the stats for that time we are going to provide a special bonus to all players. For the next few weeks all players will earn double experience in Red Orchestra 2. This means if a player plays the game during the double experience period they will quickly get their experience up to where they would have been had these issues never existed. Additionally, we are going to give those playing the game during the double experience period a special achievement called "In B4 Reset". Right now this is just an achievement, but we're going to be looking at ways to give special rewards to the players that have this achievement in the future.
Thank you to all of the players that have made Red Orchestra 2 a hit so far. We've got a lot of exciting things in store with free content coming for the game so stay tuned over the coming weeks for more news on that front!
