Bug Hunt

No one is more grateful for some of the new items in We Rule than I. I advocated for winter items, diamond groves and sapphire groves and ngmoco:) delivered. As players level up they can build their kingdoms around the Mediterranean, Mardis Gras and even Mechanical wonders.

Admittedly, the new mechanical wonders may be perplexing players. We could see the mythological, Egyptian and even far eastern elements with a little bit of rationalization. After all, commerce and mythology were important elements of medieval civilization and no university student could be considered educated without a through grounding in the classics.

We could even embrace Santa Claus and Mardi Gras. After all St. Nick has roots in customs dating back to the third century and Carnival was the church’s attempt to accommodate the Roman practice of Lupercalia while letting Christians blow off steam before getting down to the serious business of lent.

But machines? I felt as though I had stepped from the pages of Le Morte d’Arthur and into one of Michael Moorcock’s multiverse novels. (It doesn’t matter which one, he’s written hundreds.)

Surely we could have stayed closer to home. How about a Da Vinci helicopter? Or an alchemist’s studio with beakers and green smoke? If developers insisted on mechanical devices, why not take their clues from the Inquisition? They came up with racks, iron maidens and any number of devices which later inspired the Bush administration to reinterpret the Constitution.

The cog quest

The cog quest may be the most bizarre launched so far. To finished the quest, players have to successfully place orders at the brand new steam ship, flying machine and inventor’s studio. Since the studio requires L45 and 7o0000c and the flying machine requires L37, there aren’t going to be many out there. In fact I looked in more than a L37+ dozen kingdoms and only found quest shops in mine and Carol’s.

ngmoco:) seems to have figured this out because you don’t need to finish the quest to get the steam-clock reward.

Which leaves the question, why bother with the quest? By the time players have their shops installed, ngmoco:) will probably discontinue the steam-clock anyway.

Number 1 player request: More bugs fixed, fewer new shops

I find myself agreeing more and more with players like glitchcity: Less stuff, more bug fixes.

Partially I say this because I would like to get a little of my life back. It took me forever to process Thursday’s three new shops to crunch the numbers. Usually I install a shop, use mojo to vacate two or three orders and then place a sample order with a dummy kingdom.

Thursday people were placing orders faster than I could clear them out. After spending about a hundred mojo to clear out shops in a futile attempt to place an order, I finally had to reject several just to get in to order from the new shops. Then I had to use mojo to build two of them and mojo to process the orders.

When I say more bug fixes, I don’t want ngmoco:) to get too hasty. They’ve spent a lot of effort (and, by some accounts, still are) trying to prevent stacking which many players still see as a cool feature. I think players are doing fun and creative (as well as admittedly unsightly) things with stacking and no longer even consider it a bug.

So maybe I should say, less stuff, less attention to stopping stacking and more attention to the bugs that make it difficult to play the game.

I would say the number one player complaint remains a bug that has plagued players from the beginning. We Rule likes to crash. Some evenings it crashes six or seven times (not counting the “can’t connect to server” messages) in the course of ten or fifteen minutes.

With iOS 4, dealing with excessive crashes is more complex. You have to shut down all of your running apps (double click on the home button, hold your finger on the app until the “x” appears) and do a hard reboot (hold power and home button at same time until the apple appears). If that doesn’t work, you may need to delete and reinstall the game.

Since the game crashes for players with different frequencies I suspect there are a couple of places to look. The first is the server. Crashes tend to happen more often in the evening (at least for me), which is when I suspect more players are logging on.

But I also think the game has some serious memory leaks. I suspect this because two or three times a week I will touch an item to harvest and suddenly another game app opens (usually another ngmoco:) game app).¹ In addition, if I put my iPad down with We Rule running in order to run to the bathroom or flip through the channels, it shuts down.

Carol reports entirely different problems, so I have to suspect the game bugs react differently with different apps running in the background. This also tends to indicate there may be some problems addressing memory.

Let’s start a bug hunt

I know there have been a number of comments about bugs, but I honestly don’t have the time to review the hundreds posted (and keep up with the charts and my life). So please submit the most irritating bugs and crashes in the comments over the next week and I will compile them for ngmoco:).

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¹Notice how their company name (ngmoco:)) screws up the whole open and close parentheses thing? suddenly the smiley face turns into a double chin. Maybe they should have done more focus testing. back

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