Yesterday we experienced technical difficulties with some people not being able to access the website and others getting errors in the game. Those were growing pains, as the problems all stemmed from the server upgrade. So now that things are back to normal let's celebrate with some good news!
Server upgrade
We've added a second webserver and a load balancer to split traffic between the two of them. This should really boost performance during peak hours and give us much more capacity to handle growth in membership. Furthermore, we will soon upgrade the original webserver by installing a second dual-core CPU to make both servers equally powerful. In other words, the hardware running this website is dope!
Speed game speedup
To take advantage of this server power we're speeding up the auto-refresh to occur ever 10 seconds in a speed game. Auto-refresh will no longer reset your card selections when cashing in a set.
Credit card payments
Now you can purchase Peremium Membership without PayPal. We take Visa and MasterCard directly and securely, with American Express to follow. You can still use PayPal as an alternative.
Missed turns & deferred armies
It's no secret that some people intentionally miss turns to get their armies multiplied, making the game much slower than necessary. Multiplied armies may give turn-missers an unfair advantage due to the element of surprise. So, the formula has been changed: when you miss a turn, you'll be compensated with deferred armies equal to the normal amount of armies received (or double if you missed 2 consecutive turns). Deferred armies must be deployed in one shot after the attack phase. Thanks to Brahms for suggesting this and everyone else who gave their input over the months.
8-player games
Now you can battle it out with an even larger assemblage of casual online world domination junkies! Naturally, this means you can also play 7-player games, 8-player doubles and 8-player quadruples.
Colour codes
At times it can be hard to tell which armies belong to which player, even for those of us who are not colourblind. Now that we can have up to 8 army colours on the map, this could become even more of an issue. The colourblind setting is now something you can toggle on and off in-game (just like map size) and we've renamed it "colour codes" to reflect this. We've also enhanced colour codes to prefix player names and card names.
sweet job lack
Thanks lack for another great update.
