GET YOUR SERVERS FIXED

[Lord Wombat]

I pay money every month! I expect servers to eb working. They are not! Every day there is lagging and crashing!

[paiganism]

I literally joined the forum to talk about this too. First of all, the new timeouts are insanely quick if they're working properly, my partner and I love playing Dominion daily on the site and sometimes will get kicked in the time it takes someone to quickly run to the restroom. Anyone with any amount of distraction in their life (pets, kids, being a human who occasionally has to pick up the phone, eat a snack, etc) just can't play the game unless they're 100% locked in, which seems overly intense, especially considering this is a strategy game and we just got a big set of new cards that we're not experienced with.

Today we've been extremely diligent about taking our turns almost instantly and not leaving to go do something (no matter how small) mid-game and have been kicked before even getting the "Make opponent resign" dialogue box, it's almost like it's gotten worse. The game we just were in started giving the "Warning: possibly lost connection with gameserver" error literally 8 times in the middle of us taking our turns and lags horribly even after a single card is played.

Are there any public announcements about this? When can we expect it to be fixed? Because in its current incarnation the game is basically unplayable...

[Ingix]

All I can say (because I don't know more) is that this is being worked on, but as with any software problem that isn't instantaneous but creeps up over time (e.g. its not that it doesn't work at all, it works and after some time it becomes worse and worse) it will take time to figure out what actually happens (a memory leak is suspected at the moment).

The server is better than the previous ones, so it is apparently not the case that simply too many players are a problem (as I initially assumed). The developer knows that the current state is frustrating to players, but if he knew how to fix this, he'd done it already.

[tdellaringa]

Logged in for the first in ages to say the same thing. I can't even play right now. I'm a paying subscriber, but I won't continue to pay if this continues. It's ridiculous.

[christineellin]

Timeout - first time in the many years of playing that I get kicked off regularly after a "few" minutes of not playing with bots only. It use to be once a day. Hopefully this is a problem being worked on, not the new norm. It's unpleasant trying to play a game. Dominion is a daily game for me, but only if it's playable.
Otherwise I love the game
Please fix soon

[tdellaringa]

Another day, it's still broken. What's up. Time to cancel?

[jkommelb]

The server is better than the previous ones, so it is apparently not the case that simply too many players are a problem (as I initially assumed). The developer knows that the current state is frustrating to players, but if he knew how to fix this, he'd done it already.

It sounds like it's time to hire some outside help for a developer who can't keep up.  This is consistently an issue, and the developer needs to recognize that he is providing a service for a fee; that requires keeping up with demand and shifts in the software platform.  We all obviously love Dominion or we wouldn't be paying for this, but it's becoming harder and harder to justify it when there are daily issues preventing us from using the service as intended.

[gruffmeister]

Seems to have got worse with the latest server updates. Whatever they have done in the last few days, they've made the whole thing waaay more laggy, the session cookies expire randomly booting you out, and quite often there's a server error so you need to refresh to continue.

There were bugs before, but this is 1000 times worse, whatever ethos you've gone with.

[Ingix]

The servers are exchanged and the inactive one is rebooted every hour, to prevent the accumulating problems with servers getting laggier over time. The continuation from one server to the next works generally, so all you see is a short message that you are changing servers.

But you are right that sometimes the session cookies expires or otherwise don't continue to work, then you need to login again. :-(

[Panoptikus]

Dear team,

The situation has become truly unbearable. Sometimes the login works, sometimes it doesn't. The problems have escalated significantly after "Rising Sun." In addition, there's the long-standing issue on iOS devices where one has to reconnect twice to rejoin a game after being kicked out (which always happens when switching apps). Overall, your site increasingly comes across as unprofessional. I mean, how can THIS be the welcome message when you visit the site: "I'm happy to announce we signed a new contract with the Dominion publisher Rio Grande Games. As a consequence you can now buy subscriptions for 2020 and 2021." It gives the impression that the site is only being maintained superficially instead of being actively supported and developed. Your site is a great product, but I will not renew my account unless some things change.

[suet63]

The servers are exchanged and the inactive one is rebooted every hour, to prevent the accumulating problems with servers getting laggier over time. The continuation from one server to the next works generally, so all you see is a short message that you are changing servers.

But you are right that sometimes the session cookies expires or otherwise don't continue to work, then you need to login again. :-(

are there two separate queues for 'normal server' and 'other server'? which server has more players, so i can find an opponent faster?

[Ingix]

Which is the 'active server' and which is the 'other server' is changing every hour.

Games running on one server continue until they are over, and if server on which it ran is still the active server, the queues from this server will be used for matchmaking. If the server is however now the inactive server, it will transfer everything to the other server, which is now the active one and matchmaking will happen there.

So in theory matchmaking should immediately switch from one server to the other. But in practice, communications between servers and client take time. Matchmaking takes time, so if a player is waiting for matchmaking while the server switch happens, I think it continues on that server, with less and less people joining that queue because all players that start matchmaking after the switch will use the other server (which is now the active one).