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[DavidTheDavid]

Hi, all. I'm David (Admin) on the Making Fun forums. I do player support for Dominion Online and another game in the Making Fun stable. Dominion Online traffic had been pretty steady for a long time and the servers handled that fine as long as we rebooted the servers a couple of times a week. Around Christmas time, we saw a spike in traffic that stayed pretty steady. Myself, I speculate that people were getting boxed sets of the game and looking for it online. Anyhow, that's beside the point. That increased traffic overloaded the servers, and the lead engineer for the project, along with others involved in server issues, have been focused on repairing that. A deployment was attempted, Friday or Saturday, I can't remember which, but that failed. Plans were discussed about what to do next, and I just asked for an update that I can share with people. The problem is indeed the team's priority, and lot of people are working on it. That last thing we want is for the game to be down. Thanks for your continued patience and apologies for the ongoing problems.

[Polk5440]

Hi, all. I'm David (Admin) on the Making Fun forums. I do player support for Dominion Online and another game in the Making Fun stable.

Thank you for responding in this thread.

Dominion Online traffic had been pretty steady for a long time and the servers handled that fine as long as we rebooted the servers a couple of times a week. Around Christmas time, we saw a spike in traffic that stayed pretty steady. Myself, I speculate that people were getting boxed sets of the game and looking for it online. Anyhow, that's beside the point. That increased traffic overloaded the servers, and the lead engineer for the project, along with others involved in server issues, have been focused on repairing that. A deployment was attempted, Friday or Saturday, I can't remember which, but that failed. Plans were discussed about what to do next, and I just asked for an update that I can share with people. The problem is indeed the team's priority, and lot of people are working on it. That last thing we want is for the game to be down. Thanks for your continued patience and apologies for the ongoing problems.

I have to say I am disappointed that you are saying  traffic is the reason. It's not like it was totally unexpected: it happened last year, too.



Old customers that become disenchanted with Online Dominion are almost certainly never coming back. What Online Dominion needs to be successful long term is more more new buyers unaware of the problems of the past. That's what Christmas delivers each and every year. Not many online products get a second, third,... chance at life. Yet, here you go. You get that chance. Blank slate customers discovering the wonders of Dominion and then wondering if they can play it online. And for the second year in a row, you missed that chance.

[pacovf]

The main thing I take from that plot is that American dates are confusing to read.

Also, I am looking forward to Goko fixing stuff up. Everybody and their mother are hanging around in this forum. It's sloooooooooooooowiiiiiiiiiiiiiing thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnn.

[DavidTheDavid]

I wasn't around last year. I can't really speak to that, Polk5440. I'm also not involved with marketing or planning or UI design or QA. I do player support, of the "Yes, I can find out what happened with that purchase" or "King's Court actually works this way" or "Yes, I can enable your account for you" variety. As such, I know that I become the most visible target, but I really can't respond to those things, Polk5440, as it's just not what I'm involved with.

[Donald X.]

Hi, all. I'm David (Admin) on the Making Fun forums. I do player support for Dominion Online and another game in the Making Fun stable. Dominion Online traffic had been pretty steady for a long time and the servers handled that fine as long as we rebooted the servers a couple of times a week. Around Christmas time, we saw a spike in traffic that stayed pretty steady. Myself, I speculate that people were getting boxed sets of the game and looking for it online. Anyhow, that's beside the point. That increased traffic overloaded the servers, and the lead engineer for the project, along with others involved in server issues, have been focused on repairing that. A deployment was attempted, Friday or Saturday, I can't remember which, but that failed. Plans were discussed about what to do next, and I just asked for an update that I can share with people. The problem is indeed the team's priority, and lot of people are working on it. That last thing we want is for the game to be down. Thanks for your continued patience and apologies for the ongoing problems.

You could block people from registering for now, and not let people play who aren't registered. Give a message, we will have some awesome version of this game up soon. That way you don't make a never-come-back first impression on more new people, while improving performance for the people you've got.

[Witherweaver]

Goko: Games That Someone Can Play

[Joseph2302]

Seems it's working now for everyone. Also, this is different, a message from the CEO:

The system had been working pretty well for the past several months, with twice-weekly reboots to keep it that way. We started seeing increased traffic in late December / early January. Initially, that increased traffic did not have an effect on stability. However, in the past week we started to see some danger signs and had to do more frequent system reboots. We started the major surgery late last week to attempt to fix what we were seeing and increase capacity in the system. On Thursday a login bug surfaced that was affecting at least those people logging in with Facebook (including me). We have been taking the servers up and down to do releases over the past several days. We had a few hours of downtime today, but it is back up now and performing better. I am happy that I can once again log in and play. The team continues to work to address the error messages we are seeing in the logs in the hopes of keeping the system up as much as possible.

It is a balancing act for us. We prefer to spend our time working on the new Unity-based web & mobile version of Dominion Online so we can launch it and take down the troublesome version live now. It is unfortunate we had to interrupt the momentum with the new version to work on the live version, but stuff happens. The new version is almost a completely new code base that is streamlined to be Dominion-specific -- not a generic platform on top of which Dominion was implemented. We expect it to be far more stable and scalable once the usual initial kinks are worked out.

OK, so before everyone writes back to say, "When will it be available!?!?!".... we aren't ready to give a date yet. Instead, I will tell you where we are. We have a Unity client version that I play daily on iPad. The only gameplay mode implemented currently is 2-player Bots, but that code is getting fairly robust and when complete it is largely reused for Multiplayer and Adventure matches. We are starting to work on the platform-specific work (authentication and in-app purchases). We need that to be complete to get through Apple approval, and we need Apple approval in order to distribute beta versions via their new TestFlight service.

We want to get the new app out to many people in the community ASAP so we can start getting feedback and so you can finally see some progress out of the team and appreciate the work that we have been doing. I know it has taken a long time - believe me, it is killing us to have to run/fix the live version while we are also building the new version - and we share your yearning to see the new version live so we can all play on our devices of choice.

-John Welch
CEO, Making Fun

Honestly, to me this seems positive.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

I wasn't around last year. I can't really speak to that, Polk5440.....

So many categories to file this under.
"Wasn't here when that happened"
"Can't read history"
"Wouldn't make use of history if we read it"
"I'm player support, not customer service"
"Not my job"

If that seems unfair David, then I say to you this: You have our thanks for posting, and providing a legitimate update.  You get additional bonus points for coming back to the thread a second time, and some additional respect (not the upvote kind) for acknowledging that you're a visible target.  You did that gracefully too.  You are likely not PR, and not everyone thinks in PR terms, but a much more appropriate response to Polk would have been something like "Wow, I understand that we should have seen this one coming, and I'll make sure I pass this info on to the appropriate folks so it doesn't happen again." 

The folks in QA should understand the difference between fixing a bug and making a corrective action. Lack of server capacity could have (see the data) caused this customer experience before.  A root cause analysis, followed by design and implementation of the appropriate corrective action, followed by monitoring of that corrective action to evaluate and document its efficacy, is what is needed.  As opposed to sending out a player support person to explain why and how the ball got dropped.

The folks at Blizzard might be willing to give you some pointers on scaling up server capacity as # of games increases.  I really worry that you guys are trying to re-invent the wheel on every facet of this attempted implementation.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Seems it's working now for everyone. Also, this is different, a message from the CEO:

The system had been working pretty well for the past several months, with twice-weekly reboots to keep it that way. We started seeing increased traffic in late December / early January. Initially, that increased traffic did not have an effect on stability. However, in the past week we started to see some danger signs and had to do more frequent system reboots. We started the major surgery late last week to attempt to fix what we were seeing and increase capacity in the system. On Thursday a login bug surfaced that was affecting at least those people logging in with Facebook (including me). We have been taking the servers up and down to do releases over the past several days. We had a few hours of downtime today, but it is back up now and performing better. I am happy that I can once again log in and play. The team continues to work to address the error messages we are seeing in the logs in the hopes of keeping the system up as much as possible.

It is a balancing act for us. We prefer to spend our time working on the new Unity-based web & mobile version of Dominion Online so we can launch it and take down the troublesome version live now. It is unfortunate we had to interrupt the momentum with the new version to work on the live version, but stuff happens. The new version is almost a completely new code base that is streamlined to be Dominion-specific -- not a generic platform on top of which Dominion was implemented. We expect it to be far more stable and scalable once the usual initial kinks are worked out.

OK, so before everyone writes back to say, "When will it be available!?!?!".... we aren't ready to give a date yet. Instead, I will tell you where we are. We have a Unity client version that I play daily on iPad. The only gameplay mode implemented currently is 2-player Bots, but that code is getting fairly robust and when complete it is largely reused for Multiplayer and Adventure matches. We are starting to work on the platform-specific work (authentication and in-app purchases). We need that to be complete to get through Apple approval, and we need Apple approval in order to distribute beta versions via their new TestFlight service.

We want to get the new app out to many people in the community ASAP so we can start getting feedback and so you can finally see some progress out of the team and appreciate the work that we have been doing. I know it has taken a long time - believe me, it is killing us to have to run/fix the live version while we are also building the new version - and we share your yearning to see the new version live so we can all play on our devices of choice.

-John Welch
CEO, Making Fun

Honestly, to me this seems positive.

I can't see how.  They couldn't get one version working before they began working on another product.  'It's killing them that they have to divert attention/resources to run/fix the product that they are already collecting money for but that doesn't work correctly, because they really want to be working on what they are certain is what we REALLY want - to be able to play on something other than a computer'. Well, no, what we want is to get what we paid for, which is to play the game.  I don't know why that is such a troubling concept. 

Will the next version be free?  'Cause based on a lot of history, I can't see "the community" wanting to pay MORE money to this company to take a chance that the code will be something beyond "fairly robust" and that a (hopeful) player will actually be able to log in when they want.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Do we know how the transition from Goko to Making Fun happened?

Did Goko want out, and sold their rights to implement the game to Making Fun?  Did their contract run out?  Did Jay fire them?  Or is all that stuff top secret?

[Awaclus]

I can't see how.  They couldn't get one version working before they began working on another product.  'It's killing them that they have to divert attention/resources to run/fix the product that they are already collecting money for but that doesn't work correctly, because they really want to be working on what they are certain is what we REALLY want - to be able to play on something other than a computer'. Well, no, what we want is to get what we paid for, which is to play the game.  I don't know why that is such a troubling concept.

The current version that doesn't work and sucks when it works was not made by Making Fun.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

So they are (re)using Goko code?  Did they buy Goko?

[jsh357]

We don't know all the details, but yes, the game is legacy code essentially. 

Supposedly this new version they're working on is a completely different product.  At this point all bets are off.

[Donald X.]

Do we know how the transition from Goko to Making Fun happened?

Did Goko want out, and sold their rights to implement the game to Making Fun?  Did their contract run out?  Did Jay fire them?  Or is all that stuff top secret?

I don't think it's anything to do with Jay, and beyond that I don't really know. Goko stopped being an entity that did anything in the late summer or early fall of 2013 (Making Fun took over in late fall or early winter). I don't know what their legal role is. As long as their logo still appears somewhere, I guess they still have some kind of role. They couldn't be getting much of a cut, or the project wouldn't be attractive to anyone.

The current version of the program is the Goko version, as tampered with by Making Fun. Making Fun are making a new version, my estimate is that they started this fall. As they announced, it's in Unity instead of HTML5. This of course goes back to wanting a lot of the same code to work on multiple platforms.

The example that has stayed with me as to how bad the Goko version is, is, when you do something with a card, it sends the card image from the server. Play a Silver - it sends the image. Over and over.

[SCSN]

The example that has stayed with me as to how bad the Goko version is, is, when you do something with a card, it sends the card image from the server. Play a Silver - it sends the image. Over and over.

Equally hilarious:

It's really painful to have to find where Goko does X, understand its horrible undocumented code, and then figure out how to modify it to do Y instead.

Actually, it's even worse than that because chunks of code are reused in totally unexpected places, so you're never safe to assume that you're only making a local change. For example, when Goko wants to check which expansion sets you own (for the store or something), it runs its code to generate a random kingdom (!) and then looks at the list of sets that gets cached along the way. That means you can't replace the kingdom generating code without breaking all sorts of other stuff.

[SwitchedFromStarcraft]

Do we know how the transition from Goko to Making Fun happened?

Did Goko want out, and sold their rights to implement the game to Making Fun?  Did their contract run out?  Did Jay fire them?  Or is all that stuff top secret?

...
The current version of the program is the Goko version, as tampered with by Making Fun. Making Fun are making a new version, my estimate is that they started this fall. As they announced, it's in Unity instead of HTML5. This of course goes back to wanting a lot of the same code to work on multiple platforms.
...

Thanks so much for this. I will quit beating on MF for the things Nogo did, and focus entirely on their complete incompetence in allocating resources (perhaps most notably investing any time at all trying to fix bad code).

It would have been so much better (for them, not just us) to just shut it down, put up a message about a new version yet to come, playable on multiple devices.  Then standup Isotropic while we wait.

Note to Making Fun:  It's not too late to implement that plan.

[SCSN]

Do we know how the transition from Goko to Making Fun happened?

Did Goko want out, and sold their rights to implement the game to Making Fun?  Did their contract run out?  Did Jay fire them?  Or is all that stuff top secret?

...
The current version of the program is the Goko version, as tampered with by Making Fun. Making Fun are making a new version, my estimate is that they started this fall. As they announced, it's in Unity instead of HTML5. This of course goes back to wanting a lot of the same code to work on multiple platforms.
...

Thanks so much for this. I will quit beating on MF for the things Nogo did, and focus entirely on their complete incompetence in allocating resources (perhaps most notably investing any time at all trying to fix bad code).

It would have been so much better (for them, not just us) to just shut it down, put up a message about a new version yet to come, playable on multiple devices.  Then standup Isotropic while we wait.

Note to Making Fun:  It's not too late to implement that plan.

While I agree with everything you say, I think it's better to be friendly and open to any sign of a positive direction. In the long run we prefer the company running Dominion Online to be represented on this forum and share with us as much as reasonable. So if a representative of MF comes on here with a humble attitude there's really no point to beating him with stuff he may not even have been involved with. He could easily have stayed away without doing any further harm to the brand's image (which, granted, is pretty much impossible).

Had he come here with an arrogant attitude of "wtf are you guys whining about, the site is perfectly fine, it has an uptime of over 50%!" I'd have been the absolute first to burn him into the ground so completely as to make him regret he'd ever been born, but seeing that he seems to have good intentions and provides useful information, let's at least try to withold judgment until he proves us wrong.

[Beyond Awesome]

Exactly. It's good to get someone from MF coming in here and tell us what's going on.

On the bright side, it does seem like the new version will be much better. I just hope I can also play it on my laptop. I don't want to buy a tablet just to play Dominion.

[Kirian]

Exactly. It's good to get someone from MF coming in here and tell us what's going on.

On the bright side, it does seem like the new version will be much better. I just hope I can also play it on my laptop. I don't want to buy a tablet just to play Dominion.

All of my experience with stuff done in Unity is that it works most easily on non-mobile OS, then gets ported to mobile (see: Hearthstone).

[jaketheyak]

Exactly. It's good to get someone from MF coming in here and tell us what's going on.

On the bright side, it does seem like the new version will be much better. I just hope I can also play it on my laptop. I don't want to buy a tablet just to play Dominion.

All of my experience with stuff done in Unity is that it works most easily on non-mobile OS, then gets ported to mobile (see: Hearthstone).

If they had started with a mobile app, then mobile-only might have been a viable marketing strategy.
But you can't start with (essentially) a desktop-based implementation, then dump support for desktops to focus on mobile-only.
At least not without losing a huge chunk of whatever market you've already established.

Personally, if they can make a version that works well on Android, I will play online a whole lot more than I currently do.

[Donald X.]

Exactly. It's good to get someone from MF coming in here and tell us what's going on.

On the bright side, it does seem like the new version will be much better. I just hope I can also play it on my laptop. I don't want to buy a tablet just to play Dominion.

All of my experience with stuff done in Unity is that it works most easily on non-mobile OS, then gets ported to mobile (see: Hearthstone).

If they had started with a mobile app, then mobile-only might have been a viable marketing strategy.
But you can't start with (essentially) a desktop-based implementation, then dump support for desktops to focus on mobile-only.
At least not without losing a huge chunk of whatever market you've already established.

Personally, if they can make a version that works well on Android, I will play online a whole lot more than I currently do.

There is zero talk of not supporting computers.

[popsofctown]

If they flipped isotropic on, they could keep all their resources on their cool new thing, yeah.  They can ban the f2ps like me from it too, I don't care, I'll go play some other game and be glad that people are happy

[Witherweaver]

In their defense, the company is Making Fun.  It gives no promise of when said fun will be made.

[jaketheyak]

Exactly. It's good to get someone from MF coming in here and tell us what's going on.

On the bright side, it does seem like the new version will be much better. I just hope I can also play it on my laptop. I don't want to buy a tablet just to play Dominion.

All of my experience with stuff done in Unity is that it works most easily on non-mobile OS, then gets ported to mobile (see: Hearthstone).

If they had started with a mobile app, then mobile-only might have been a viable marketing strategy.
But you can't start with (essentially) a desktop-based implementation, then dump support for desktops to focus on mobile-only.
At least not without losing a huge chunk of whatever market you've already established.

Personally, if they can make a version that works well on Android, I will play online a whole lot more than I currently do.

There is zero talk of not supporting computers.

Sorry, I didn't mean for that comment to sound like a complaint.
I was trying to reiterate that there's no way they would dump support for desktop, because it would be suicidal.
On the other hand, a native mobile app would be a huge win, IMO.