Windrose developers ask players if they 'happen to know someone at a major ISP' who can help diagnose online co-op issues
Windrose is an entirely PvE focused co-op survival game, so it makes perfect sense that players are eager to party up and run their own Windrose dedicated servers. Overall launch has been pretty smooth for the early access game—on day two on Steam it reached a peak of nearly 100,000 concurrent players, and reviews remain very positive—but online connectivity has been bumpy.
Bumpy enough, even, for developer Kraken Express to put out a call in Windrose's Discord server: Any ISP pros in the house?
"If you happen to work with, or know someone at a major EU/NA ISPs who might be open to speaking with us, we would truly appreciate an introduction. It could make a real difference in improving co-op connectivity for everyone," the developers posted in the Discord on Wednesday.
While playing Windrose myself with PC Gamer's Chris Livingston, huge, multi-second lag spikes and hangs were common. And we live only a couple hours away from each other by car in northern California, so our ping should be pretty good.
Users attempting to set up dedicated servers have also noted that Windrose is unusually barebones in terms of features, and does not let players connect via a specific forwarded port as is typical. This is even odder considering Windrose publisher Pocketpair launched Palworld with more comprehensive dedicated server tools; surely that's the sort of thing a publisher should be assisting with for a game's launch?
Developer Kraken Express is clearly hard at work tackling the current issues, given its message on Discord. But it also seems a bit out of its depth in diagnosing the full extent of the connectivity problems if it's asking players to put it in touch with someone who works at a major internet service provider.
"Several hotfixes are already in development, and your help is incredibly valuable in making sure we address things properly," the team wrote in the same Discord message. They also obliquely addressed one of the more concerning issues raised on Steam regarding the dedicated server infrastructure, that it "is requesting registration from a Russia Endpoint," as Steam user Headbasha wrote here.
I checked the dedicated server code myself, and found the specific URL—https://r5coopapigateway-ru-release.windrose.support/—which does indeed route to an IP address in Moscow, as confirmed on IPlocation.net.
Kraken Express didn't reference the Russian address outright, but wrote on Discord:
"We’ve received multiple reports that some of our server addresses and backend services used for co-op may be restricted or blocklisted by certain ISPs across Europe and North America. To be completely transparent, we’re still trying to figure out what exactly is going wrong here. We don’t yet have a clear answer, but we’re doing everything we can to get to the bottom of it. Something is clearly interfering along the way, and if you can help us shed some light on this, we would sincerely appreciate it."
Kraken Express is based in Uzbekistan, not Russia, and the server software also contains similar URLs pointing to IP addresses located in Europe and South Korea. So maybe it's all no big deal—but until the developers explain why players in other countries are pinging Russia every time they start up a server, some are bound to stay suspicious.