I wanted to write a brief note and let you know what's going on with the servers.

Rewind to several weeks ago, with what appeared to be minor symptoms:
  • taking a long time for Consignment Shoppe searches to respond
  • taking a long to get past the 'authenticating' screen
  • taking a long time to host/join a game


I believe there were 3-4 instances where that would occur and a server restart was required to fix the issue. That all fine, but this shouldn't have happened in the first place (and restarts should never be required to fix problems).

After much research, we knew what the symptoms were, but could never really find a definitive problem. We believe the problem was related to the hardware setup of our database. So, two scheduled downtimes and two upgrades later, we are where we are now.

The new symptom [problem?] which happened yesterday morning and this morning appears to be the inability to login. The player can authenticate and patch fine, but the client is then told they can't connect to the server.

The programming team is alerted (paged) when crashes occur, but unfortunately, since the server didn't actually crash in these cases, we're not alerted to this until users start posting on the forums/Facebook that they can't login.

It's our goal to provide you with the best possible mobile gaming experience. Problems like this always seem to happen on weekends, but we are looking at it and please bear with us while we figure things out.

Thanks for your support!

-ALS