22 Cans apologizes for Curiosity's popularity, working on fixes
The last 48 hours have been tough for Peter Molyneux's new outfit, 22 Cans. After launching Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube? earlier this week on iOS and Android, the servers were overloaded by the sheer numbers of players participating. There is also another significant bug that seems to be erasing player coins, which are used for in-game boosts.
The video update above was made by 22 Cans designer Jack Attridge, wherein he tours the office and asks a bunch of employees what they're doing about the problems. The team looks to be working to resolve these issues but, in response to the server overloads, 22 Cans has also opened a PayPal page for donations – you know, in case you really want to know what's inside that cube.
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We are learning an incredible amount from our first experiment Curiosity - what's inside the cube; not only in terms of player motivation and behaviour but more importantly the technical side of running something as concurrent as Curiosity. Even in the most popular MMO games it is rare for 10,000 people to be playing in the same level at the same time, currently up to a million people are trying to get access to our server. What has blown us away is the number of taps each player wants to do, we estimated it would be hundreds, but it is actually thousands, and in a few cases millions. We simply did not anticipate this level of curiosity.
We are extremely disappointed with ourselves that we underestimated the popularity of Curiosity. This is manifesting in a subpar experience for the majority of curious people around the world. We can only offer a heartfelt apology at this stage; our programmers have been awake pretty much since Curiosity came out. We implemented what we thought would be a major fix on our live servers on Thursday but that didn't give us or you the results we wanted.
We believe we now have the solution, and are working as quick as humanly possible to resolve the server connection issues and resulting from that the disappearing coins that so many users have been reporting. We are desperate to get the problems fixed. The programmers are continuing their work throughout the weekend to resolve this. We are not a big company and the amount of people is starting to rack up a massive (for us) server bill. We are doing everything we can with the resources we have.
We are learning to build experiences that connect millions of people together in real time, this experiment is only the first one of many. In fact, we hope to make a big announcement early next week but our priority right now is Curiosity.
The team recorded a video message for everyone out there who wants to know what we are doing to resolve the problems http://youtu.be/EQyjRhumDy8
Thank you for your patience,
22cans
