Game Center Integration Bug

[fil512]

Hey guys, I love your games. Bought everyone and it's my favourite game to play on the iPad. Great work!

There is clearly a bug in how your software is integrating into the Game Center.

Common symptoms of this integration bug are as follows:

1) Game Center says it's my turn. I click "play my turn." It opens up the game and shows my opponent's turn. Displays on the top-right corner it's my move. But when I click anywhere it says "Waiting for the other player to move." [This is the state my current game is in.]

2) Game Center says it's my turn. I click on "play my turn." It opens up the game and shows my last move, and indicates it's my opponent's turn. So GC says it's my move, but the game thinks it's my opponent's move.

These errors happen regardless of whether I open the game from withing GC or from opening the game directly from the game icon on the "Desktop".

These errors happen regardless of whether "restore state" is on or off.

These errors persist for days, when there are clearly no network issues.

These two errors happen at least once every couple of days. Sometimes uninstalling and reinstalling the app fixes it. Sometimes it doesn't. But asking your users to reinstall your app every couple of days isn't the answer.

What it looks like to me is happening is that the game is trying to guess whose turn it is and guessing wrong.

It also looks to me like the game is trying to get the latest move from Game Center, but sometimes gets the second-last move instead by mistake. Or another possibility is that it's only getting part of the last move, but not the whole thing. E.g. It might successfully get the battle results message, but not the turn over message. The game needs to have a mechanism to ensure that it can't get into this state.

I don't know anything about how your software is designed, but one possible interpretation of what's going on is that a turn consists of a number of messages, and not all of them are successfully getting transmitted, so the game can easily get into an inconsistent state. Perhaps the messages are getting transmitted out of order? Or some messages are getting missed somehow? A potential fix would be to change the messages so that one turn equals one message, with all the battles inside that single message, so you either get the entire turn or you get nothing, rather than only getting half a turn now and your game getting stuck. As I said, this is just a guess--you'll know better than me what the cause of the bug is, but YOU NEED TO FIX THIS BUG.

Our last two games ended prematurely because they got into a state where neither play could move. We're going to give up on this game if this bug doesn't get fixed. Please take these bug reports seriously--it's been going on for far too long.

Sincerely,
Enthusiastic Gamer

[Sourdust]

yeah, what he said

[VPaulus]

Hello Guys,

We've been made aware that a recent update to Game centre has created some issues most specifically related to ELO rankings. We're currently in a bit of a transition mode at the moment but once we have the team settle back in we'll see what can be done. Thanks for you patience and sorry for the delay with this, but we are aware of the issues and hope to get this fixed as soon as possible.

[Radix_]

I concur with the first poster.

It is so frustrating to see a game get stuck after 55 turns ...

[knulle]

i have this game center problem with all games from this series, BoB, DoM and DF.
the online game allwasy stucks/freezes and tells me waiting for other players turn...my friends sees the same.
so its unplayable in multiplayer.
this sucks...