*Long* thread inbound, will QRT with a tl;dr:
First of all, thanks again to everyone playing Among Us. This remains a totally wild experience that we're extremely thankful for.

But let's talk about servers:
This is a graph of the last 72 hours of Among Us players. (Times in PST)

There are six lines because I like to have the Master (Matchmakers) report the same data as the CM (Cloud Manager). The spots where the lines diff show that something weird/bad is happening.

Example: The matchmakers can get so overwhelmed that no one can join/create games. (Matchmaker is full errors.) This empties rooms, which causes more people to join games, which makes CM stop empty servers, which creates a shortage of server. So I stop CM while Master struggles.

So I hope that you see already that "adding more servers" isn't meaningful. Each server holds 350-400 players, so I use *thousands of servers*. But one part can hold up the other part.

Alright, so why not just... add more matchmakers?

There are databases between the matchmaker and game servers. The game servers post up all the game info that you see in Find Game screen (100k games). Matchmakers need *all* of that data to find games via code, show game lists, find empty rooms on servers. *way too much data*

This is why I will remake Among Us 2 backend from scratch. The databases exist so the game servers don't help DDOS the matchmakers, but now both try to DDOS the databases! For now, I am just spreading the load linearly, but this is a slow, losing battle.

So here's the solution: I need 5 days to change room codes to 6 letters so I can include server info *in the code* to reduce matchmaker and database load. The app and thousands of very active servers need updating. There may be a big outage, I'll warn you first.

But remember I am the only programmer. If I'm doing this, server maintenance weakens. The graph shows 6pm to 11pm as a tough time to play, but also try using other regions, they are smaller and easier to join.

Finally, I have been working 12+ hour days for a week now, and I'll probably work a little today too. But I need a break. I hate that I need a break during the busiest weekend ever, but you will have to expect some issues this weekend so I can fix them for next weekend.