Forum: empire-en

Board: [816] News from the world of Empire

Topic: [363705] April Update Status Quo

[-363705] Crom Cruach [Community Manager] :: May 8, 2019, 3:45 p.m.

We would first of all like to thank you for your patience over the last few days. Secondly, we would like to take a moment to explain what happened and what the plan is moving forward.

On Thursday the 2nd of May we updated Empire. This update contained a required fundamental overhaul to some of the cornerstone architecture of the game. The goal of this was to rework the database in which the data of all of your castles are stored. This entailed restructuring the entire database.  This major overhaul and the update itself were tested for a month on our Beta server and no issues were uncovered there. This restructuring would have enabled us to more easily manipulate the data which could in turn be used for various purposes such as the more efficient implementation of future features and better testing capabilities for our Quality Assurance department.

Once the update went live we very quickly became aware that players were experiencing severe problems while playing the game. We responded quickly to fix the errors. The issues fixed included not being able to transport resources or move troops between the castles.

After these problems were resolved we encountered yet more issues. These are not reproducible on our test server as yet and affect a minority of our players, albeit a significant one. Due to this, we are only able to proceed slowly with fixes. To ameliorate the situation we are prioritizing each issue based on the effect it has on gameplay and enjoyment.

We have a lot of issues on our radar, but the current major issues we are working on are:

• Storm Islands
• Berimond
• The food display is not calculating and displaying correctly and shows too high a level that slowly decreases to the correct value.
• Moving Castles and abandoning Outposts is not working as intended
• The spy reports are throwing occasional errors making them unreadable from the world map.

The list above does not indicate the priority or the order of being fixed it is also not a complete list of the current bugs. As mentioned before we have to proceed slowly and carefully. Please continue to report bugs as you have been doing. Your help is invaluable in seeing that we get everything corrected and running as it should be. Once again we would like to thank you for your patience while we work to fix the errors.

[5048576] Crom Cruach [Community Manager] :: May 10, 2019, 1:13 p.m.

Today, we have deployed two hot fixes to tackle two problems we have been facing:

• No tooltip was being displayed with all of the Castellan effects.
•  The Alliance Smithy was displaying the incorrect price for players when they were forging new items.

We are expecting another update early next week, possibly Monday, to fix further issues. We are hoping to include in this a change to the display for the Lost and Found button. We polled our games moderators on this solution and they have resoundingly approved it.

Have a good gaming weekend everyone!

[5049994] Crom Cruach [Community Manager] :: May 13, 2019, 8:46 a.m.

Over the course of the last few days we have been alerted to another set of errors and bugs occurring in Goodgame: Empire and we felt that updating you as to what these are was important. These bugs are mainly occurring within the Outer Realms and necessitated a hot fix and reset of that server on the 10th of May. For the few players that had already started the event before we realised that it was not working as intended, we are truly sorry. We have refunded any payments made during this short period and if you haven't received a refund please make sure to contact our Customer Support. Thankfully we were able to fix the bugs relatively quickly due to them being very similar to what occurred with Storm Islands and the Outer Realms event is for the most part running as it should. 

As mentioned above these errors stem from a required fundamental overhaul to some of the cornerstone architecture of the game and as such they require a lot of time to fix. We do still have outstanding problems which our maximum effort will be going into fixing early this week, these include:

• Outer Realms: Two Keeps being displayed in your Castle, this is purely cosmetic but does occupy space that could be used for something else.
• Outer Realms: Attacks only take two minutes and don't provide a warning to the Defender.
• Bloodcrows Relic Quest: Filling the War Chest is not currently capable of being fulfilled.
• Moving Castles and abandoning Outposts is not working as intended
• Food production being displayed incorrectly

The list above is not based on priority or the order of being fixed. It is also not a list of all of the current bugs, rather it is a list of those most likely to affect game play. If you encounter bugs in the game please make sure to report them to us as you have been doing, include screenshots of the problem where possible. Your help is as always invaluable in seeing that we get everything corrected and running as it should be. We are very thankful for your understanding and patience while our team works hard to resolve the current issues.

Having said that we would like to mention that both the Storm Islands and Berimond events have been fixed and will run as scheduled.