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Ngmoco 'fesses up We Rule issues; working around the clock to fix 'em

Re-grouting the kingdoms

Ngmoco 'fesses up We Rule issues; working around the clock to fix 'em
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| We Rule

I might be in a minority thanks to the UK time zone, but I've had fun playing ngmoco and Newtoy's iPhone MMMOG We Rule this weekend.

It's clear however the majority of players have suffered with server connection problems which have eventually seen the entire game shut down for a couple of hours on Sunday. Such are the issues when you're globally launching an MMOG - even an iPhone one - despite three weeks of experience in a Canadian beta.

But to be fair to publisher ngmoco, it's been open in terms of its failings, with CEO Neil Young posting a long explanation of what's gone wrong.

Broken plans

This breaks down into three areas.

The first is fairly technical - what Young calls "database deadlock", which results in players not being able to harvest their crops due to the number of players accessing the main database.

Significantly, the second issue relates to the number of friends players are attempting to add: something Young raised as an issue with PocketGamer.biz when we spoke with him about the Canadian beta at GDC 2010. In terms of the current situation, he explains:

"The average number of friends per user is 11, and the number of followers per user is much, much higher this is creating a lot of additional load. We have a fix for this issue in our staging environment and will be testing it before pushing it live."

The final issue is down to inconsistency between the game server and what's shown on your iPhone or iPod touch (technically a server versus client issue).

"We believed that we had addressed before going global - they are at the nexus of server load and caching," Young says.

"If these are indeed the same issues that we saw in Canada, then the consolation is that the state that you have on the server is actually the true state of the game and that these issues are more confusing than they are a permanent problem with your kingdom. We hope that the net result of addressing the issues above will be that your kingdom is restored to its accurate state."

More generally, we expect ngmoco - and developer Newtoy - to deal with such launch issues over the coming days.

"We do not take service issues lightly and please rest assured that everyone who can address these issues at ngmoco & Newtoy are working around the clock to get the game in the right state," Young ends.

Assuming this problems are dealt with, we recommend you try out We Rule. If nothing else, it's free to play and I think you'll enjoy it.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.