Hey everyone, this is going to be long... you can skip to the end if you want.
I know the events of the past weekend caused a lot of ire from you are players. Understandably so. I don’t blame you. It happened at the most inopportune time. It was the middle of the weekend and Turf and all of us were not in the office.
So I wanted to give you a breakdown of what occurred, in order to dispel any untrue theories.
On Saturday, starting around 1pm PST we started having memory issues. Our IT team did respond to the alerts and fixed it as per usual. Unfortunately this caused another issue that was not detected. This in turn caused the alert system to not catch it, thus the new issue went unanswered. Basically it caused our data to not be updated to client data, thus causing a mismatch and a 500 error.
We did not catch this until Admin Sage checked the forums on Sunday and alerted everyone. When I say everyone, I mean everyone in the studio. Minutes after the email I received I checked and went onto the forums and Social Media to alert everyone that yes, we know there is an issue and we were on it.
After that our IT team worked on the issue which took awhile. After the incident, our IT and Dev teams worked on ways to both prevent this and to give us a proper alert should it happen again. It is a bit technical and I’m not comfortable discussing the nitty gritty when I don’t understand it myself. (Lots of numbers and weirdly named things) However that is the basic of it all.
I do apologize for the lack of information over the weekend, however, it wasn’t until Monday morning when we had a rundown of what happened. Our priority at the time was to make sure the issue was fixed and to discuss a means of compensation.
I’m going to be pretty honest here. I know you all would like for us to give out cars. We have done so before. Unfortunately, that is actually a really difficult thing to get done. Why? Because in order to do that we must work out a deal with the car manufacturer. Most of them probably wouldn’t want to see their cars just “given away” so we cannot just give out a car, it has to be worked out into each car’s license deal. So we decided on gems. We gave everyone 200 gems.
We know this doesn’t seem like enough to some players, but that is the amount we came up with. We are still looking at how everyone was affected on a Race level and hope to be able to do something about that as well, but it’s not as easy as giving out gems so until we get that locked down I can only offer a vague “We’re working on something.”
I would like to assure you all that we care. We don’t want to “screw over” our players. We want to keep you playing, we want to see you all happy. Yes, we are a business that wants to make money, so our decisions will be based a lot on that as well as player happiness. I promise to do better to voice the concerns of the players to our dev team. I’ve spent a lot of my time defending us here on the forums, it is time I really start also representing you to us. We will also try and do better at fixing and preventing these issues. We will also try and be better at offering some sort of compensation quicker and more often when these things happen.
Now, I want to hit upon the “Account Hacks” that have been reported. I’ve investigated a number of these and currently still am. I have banned accounts that look like they were the accounts receiving cars and cash. While it’s never a guarantee, you can contact customer service to see about getting anything back.
So what’s going on? Well, from what I can see, players are somehow getting Facebook account info and passwords. How they are doing that? I don’t know. We’re not Facebook. What I can and have been saying is that we’re not hacked. They haven’t accessed your account fraudulently through us. How can I be sure? Simple, there is no login for Racing Rivals. When you launch Rivals it looks for Racer info on your device, the information that gets deleted when you delete the app. We also check to see if you are logged into Game Center/ Google and/or Facebook or your device. If it is, we check to see if there is a Racer linked to your Apple Nickname, Google Nickname or Facebook account. At no time do we use info to log you in, you would already have to be logged into the Apple/Google or Facebook account when Rivals launches. We also would never have need to access your login info, those companies do not supply them. For Apple and Google, we don’t even have access to your actual account login names, only your nicknames.
So, we must stress the importance of your internet/account security. That is wholly in your hands. Here are some tips to helping you stay safe :
http://tinyurl.com/kr98rp6
So to sum up (too late!)
- The Error was not a portal to hacks – was a memory issue (not the lack of)
- Sorry about not responding quick enough (We were on our weekend)
- We gave everyone 200 gems
- We’re looking at doing something regarding the races that took place during that time
- We will try and do better
- Keep your info secret and safe
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
~ Ryyst
More Rivals related n3ws coming soon.....
Comments
Thanx