Now that it’s been live for more than 36 hours, we can say with confidence that the patch has greatly improved the connection and lag issues.  We’ve gotten virtual heaps of emails and read hundreds of forum comments from players letting us know that they’re getting into games, lag is back to nominal levels, and host migration is working.  That’s been our experience, too.  Phew.  I’ve said it elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating:  thanks for your patience during this last week!

Celebratory vacation honeymoon over, and down to business.  We’re now moving on with other critical bug fixes and refinement to the game.  We’ll keep you posted as this effort becomes better defined over the next week.

Losing (Loser) Hosts Leaving Games

If you’re the host, please see out the game.  Certain hosts, if they are about to lose a game, are dropping the game in effort to maximize their rank.  This is weak, unsportsmanlike behavior, and disrespects everyone else.  We’ll be reworking the rank system anyway, and total points will probably matter more than average, so you’re only hurting yourselves in the long run.  For the rest of you, sorry about that.  It’s a risk in any peer to peer game, but made worse by the current rank system.  We also don’t have a means of discouraging it, such as a negative impact on reputation, or a chicken icon in front of names.  We’ll look into that.  Host migration takes care of this more (most?) of the time, post patch, but still…

Team Balance

Since I’m posting about good sportsmanship, here’s another trend in the wrong direction – players are switching teams to be on the winning team.  This results in more than a few games where teams are imbalanced.  One side will have 15 humans, and the other side 6.  Go figure – the humans win.  Not so fun.  We’ll be looking at this one in the near future, too.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print, this Sunday morning.  Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

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