KANO/APPS players, we recognize the past couple months have been rather bumpy with outages that have been out of our control along with some oversights. We are starting to put process in place to ensure the quality that players have come to expect from KANO/APPS. As we grow our team we must change the way we have pushed code in the past. We are putting process into place that allows us to directly hear from our players (Ideas board for example) and have been steadily working on producing fixes and changes that directly result from Ideas suggestions. I also wanted to take this opportunity to let the community know we'll be making changes to the forum structure that will benefit you more (dedicated support area) and a community blog. The blog will be for developer updates so you can see exactly what we at KANO/APPS are doing on a weekly basis to improve the games you love. This is an exciting time! Thanks for your patience and continued support.
To that end, here are some changes made by development this week...
- Misc back-end changes made for efficiency and game speed.
- hi5 Transfer plan and development in preparation for release next week.
- Informational email sent to all hi5 players we have emails for.
- New home page limited item display (increased height by 95px).
- Moved bounty cost increase from cache to persistent storage, next cache failure will not reset bounty cost.
- [PC] Load balancer failure February 22, some issues may have continued up until 23rd.
- Cache server failure Feb 23, we are investigating cause, we may have to perform an upgrade to servers but are hoping that we can do that after we get rival list info over to persistent storage as to not impact players.
- New Social Feed filters for (Top Squad / Inner Circle / Familia) Yours and Theirs
- Inbox - long links/text were pushing the [reply] [delete] buttons off screen. These links/text now
Today, we have rolled out a change that was a long time in the making, partially aimed at improving stability but also to stabilize game balance and achieve feature parity with other games in the space.
We have removed the ability to “sell all” on their rule. There are a few reasons for this change, selling properties can dramatically drop a players’ bounty and have many negative effects including…
- Intentional, rapid over bountying situations which was brought to light in VC this week. A player may be killed and placed on the bounty list again but players still attack using an expired bounty attack link from the previous bounty. This brought out a race condition that we have not seen before that auto-froze some players.
- Reducing bounty cost intentional to help other players get the “hitlist xxx “ achievements.
- Should a situation arise where there is malicious, unauthorized access to another players’ account, there have been cases where some players have had mass sell-offs due to this. This is a top support issue, difficult to deal with and resolve.
- This feature was slated to be removed in 2010 but due to the complexities involved it had been tabled as it’s not a feature used very often. We have since picked it up and finished this removal.
Selling properties is by far the least recurring action in the game today, but as always, if players have feedback on this change, please post in the Ideas board. If someone else posts it first please do not duplicate efforts. Vote up in support or comment on the idea.
It was important that we get this feature in before the weekend to avoid anymore mass sell-offs causing auto-freezing on players that try to pick up the large bounty. In light of recent stability issues we hope this will be welcome news for all.
Last edited: Feb 25, 2012
