After having focused on the Scent Hound in the recent weeks we are happy to have released the new companion yesterday. Thanks to everyone who gave it a go so far and to those who have been providing feedback. The team is grateful for all the positive comments and they go a long way towards helping recharge our batteries. Also, a big thank to everyone who helped with testing the Scent Hounds during our closed beta. You've done excellent work!
On the other hand, yesterday's released was plagued by issues, disconnects and downtime yet again. In tackling this, we wanted to give you an overview what we've been doing about this in the past and what is to come.
First off, we want to sincerely apologize for the amount of trouble recently. We are working every day on these issues and the overall stability of the game, however it proves difficult, especially translating the work from a very small internal testing area to the rest of the world. This is what presents the biggest challenge for us at the moment.
After moving our servers and services to Google, fixing the statistics and improving download rates, we worked on a couple of backend improvements (the server and database side of things).
- Increased security by enforcing secure connections
- Moving game data (kills, etc.) to a faster database
- Improved performance for checking user missions
- Better cache logic for getting more recent data when performing actions
- Faster server-side fetching of player inventory
- Caching results for frequent web API calls
- Reworked multiplayer game list to be ordered and filtered by the launcher
Now on to the things that are lined up for future improvements for stability:
- Ordering events in the client code
- Reworking MySQL get connection as it is rather slow
- Better query system for competitions
- Load testing for a current solution that failed yesterday
Another current suspect is the "Personal Bests" in your statistics. We disabled this function for the moment in order to allow us time to investigate, improve and enable it again once it's fixed.
Still, we are confident in the solutions that we are working on and we are fighting for stability, step by step. We understand how frustrating it is having to end a great hunt without being able to harvest the animals you successfully hunted, or to be timed out during the harvesting process.
We will fix it.