iCulture forum | iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV en iOS

We Rule - Latest Service Update
Posted on: 4/7/2010

To all our We Rule players,
Firstly, thanks for all of your comments - positive and negative. We read each and every one that is sent to us in Get Satisfaction, Twitter, Facebook, email and any other way that you’ve contacted us.
Now down to business…in the past few days we’ve had a couple of service outages that I wanted to address as well as giving you insight into the other issues we’re tracking and what we’re doing to address them. First the outages…
1.*** Monday’s big service outage - On Monday we had a power failure at our server colocation facility. This was actually not a We Rule server issue but rather one that affected our plus+ network. While the outage itself was brief it did leave some of our services in a broken state. We elected to power everything down and cleanly restart the system, which unfortunately meant that we lost all of plus+’s locally cached data. As the cache’s repopulated the service ran very slowly and the result for games that require a plus+ login was that they often timed out on login. The plus+ services were fully restored late on Monday and have been up and running smoothly since with one exception…
2.*** Wednesdays brief service outage - On Wednesday the We Rule servers went down. This was the result of us pushing new content to the game. As you connected to the game, it tried to automatically grab the new content from the content server - which shares connections with the game server. As the download took (on a relative basis) a long time, the connection pool that you use to attach to our server became occupied by clients doing content updates and the result was that you couldn’t connect. As soon as we understood what was happening we stopped the content push and are currently testing a revision to this that we hope to deploy later this week.
On the game side, we have 5 issues that we’re tracking that have been affecting the service, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge those issues and let you know what we’re doing about them.
3.*** Intermittent long login - There is an intermittent fault related to our game analytics server that manifests itself in a long connection time. This is a result of load (there were 3.5m+ game sessions of We Rule played yesterday) and is being addressed but as a slightly lower priority than the “Big 3” issues below…
4.*** Big 3.1 - “Can’t connect” - Some of you have experienced “can’t connect” errors and, despite what it looks like this is actually more often than not a bug that we have with the client that requires an update. In order to deal with the changes in the client to fix some of these issues, we’ve also made some changes on the server. The server side changes are being deployed now and once those have been tested, we will submit the client update to Apple. This fix will help address a lot of the connection issues some of you have faced.
5.*** Big 3.2 - “Push Notifications” - 3.5m+ sessions x ~10 push alarms per user = more pushes than we were anticipating. We’re working to build a better prioritizing and queuing system to ensures that your pushes (especially your crop alarms) arrive on time. We will have a fix to this deployed very soon.
6.*** Big 3.3 - “Some users Friends Kingdoms show as having open businesses when they don’t” - We believe that we have a fix for this issue that’s currently in test and we will push live as soon as we’ve verified it addresses or improves the issue.
7.*** Finally - we will also be enabling soon the system that will allow you to get free mojo for trying other apps, much like we do in our other applications.
That’s the update - as always we’re committed to giving you the very best experience possible and we will work around the clock to make sure that you can enjoy a consistent and rewarding We Rule.
Thanks you very much for your support and patronage…
—- Neil Young, CEO & Founder