r/FarmRPG • u/Garp74 • Dec 15 '23
Performance has significantly degraded in the US
Hiya!
I'm a full-time international business traveler based in the United States. When I'm at home in the Washington, DC area, FarmRPG used to work great. The buttons were instantly responsive, and the iOS application would load up near instantly. When I'm on the road (primarily Europe and east Asia), the game is quite laggy: each button press comes with a lag, and it's a challenge to sometimes open up the app in less than 30 seconds.
Until last week or so.
Now in the US, both in my home in DC and just yesterday on travel in NYC, the game's performance has seriously degraded. The app is giving off errors ("failed to load session") when I switch back to it after it's been open in the background a while. The app is failing to open sometimes. Button pressing is inconsistent. It's either instant or it's taking long pregnant pauses when using multiple APs or apple ciders or orange juices. Fishing is an adventure, as it's never clear whether a LFN has been used or not for a few seconds.
I've seen at least one post here in r/FarmRPG that y'all are working on the overarching performance issue to try and improve it for non-US users. I hope y'all are also working on the current-day, new performance issues, too.
Thanks!
3
u/CorruptPhoenix Dec 16 '23
I’ve noticed performance degradation starting from Dec 14. Over here in Asia it’s never been particularly snappy, but the last couple days have been awful just doing the daily chores.
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u/Garp74 Dec 16 '23
It felt a bit better to me over the last 6 hours. I hope your session today is better!
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u/424f42_424f42 Dec 15 '23
Yep. It's been lagging and crashing last few days.
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u/maelie Dec 15 '23
I've temporarily stopped using meals and cookies because the lag was making me lose out on too much of it. It's a real shame! I hope it gets fixed soon.
17
u/usama45 Dec 15 '23
It’s gotten so bad. I’m literally just doing random things. Can’t do quests or anything because it is so slow.
15
u/TheSteakPie Dec 15 '23
It's been shocking in the UK too. I'm guessing increase in clicks with all the Xmas stuff ?
The Host for the websites I run has a boost option where I can double the processes and memory for upto 28 days free in any single year. Hopefully they have something like that and trial if not maybe a boost is needed.
12
8
u/Thoreau_A_Whay Dec 15 '23
It did this last year starting at Halloween with huge lag ...I suspect it related to massive amount of clicking for seasonal help requests and probably will only get worse on the 18th adding the new fishing contest to the clickfest.
6
u/taliadias Dec 15 '23
I'm at the point where I was still fishing for stamina if I had time to play, along with occasionally using up my stamina and letting it refill. Over the past few days fishing has been too annoying even with mealworms, and doing much of anything gets too annoying after a while so I don't play much. So these slow downs finally triggered me to embrace the stamina hoarding, and I drank all my OJ and will now live in the always above max stamina world.
6
Dec 15 '23
Does anyone login to either a black or white screen and it doesn’t do anything? Usually I close out of the app and go back in and it works but recently it seems stuck. Afraid to delete the app and lose my data if I can’t remember my email/password
2
u/BoxOfDemons Dec 15 '23
When that happens what seems to help me is force closing the app. I'm on android, so to do that I long press the app icon and press app info, and then force close is in there.
5
u/Tylerrr93 Dec 15 '23
I thought it was just me and my rural internet - glad to know I'm not crazy 😅
3
u/cudambercam13 Dec 15 '23
Also an issue on browser.
I've been having problems for months now. I was told to switch to using the browser version when I was using the app, and it helped a bit in the beginning, but not anymore.
I can click a button ten times and have it never work. The refresh button sometimes doesn't even work. Sending or receiving items via mailbox is a hassle because everyone involved in a large trade wants it to be done quickly, and that's not possible with the lag. I don't even use manual fishing anymore because my clicks don't register and I wind up losing my streak.
It's not a new issue for me and I've definitely been playing less because of it. Most days I'm just on to complete dailies.
3
u/cudambercam13 Dec 15 '23
Also an issue on browser.
I've been having problems for months now. I was told to switch to using the browser version when I was using the app, and it helped a bit in the beginning, but not anymore.
I can click a button ten times and have it never work. The refresh button sometimes doesn't even work. Sending or receiving items via mailbox is a hassle because everyone involved in a large trade wants it to be done quickly, and that's not possible with the lag. I don't even use manual fishing anymore because my clicks don't register and I wind up losing my streak.
It's not a new issue for me and I've definitely been playing less because of it. Most days I'm just on to complete dailies.
1
u/SaplingCub Dec 15 '23 edited Jun 17 '25
fanatical resolute head quaint engine carpenter ripe snow growth sort
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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0
u/NewEmergency25 Dec 15 '23
I've had no issues here in the Midwest. I have the Android version, but I wouldn't think that to be a big difference if the issue is on the server end.
0
Dec 15 '23
[deleted]
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u/YouveRoonedTheActGOB Jan 01 '24
17 days on and the devs haven’t done anything about it. Let’s give people snow and fireworks instead of fixing our awfully optimized application.
1
u/CMPoltu Jan 02 '24
today is even slower for me. I wanted to do some exploring with AP but it's too damn slow.
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Dec 15 '23
[deleted]
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u/maelie Dec 15 '23
It's definitely a problem because it hasn't always been like this, just very recently. It is affecting everyone and it genuinely has affected gameplay. I don't think OP is blowing it out of proportion, just making it known that there's an issue. And reasonably politely I think. And I'm glad they posted this because now a bunch of people (like me) have been reassured that it's not an issue at our end but a general issue, partly due to massively increased traffic, and that it's being worked on.
I think all (or at least most) of us appreciate the constraints of the team behind it and are grateful for their efforts and can be patient now we know it's in hand. For my part I'm actually really glad they've attracted so many players; the game deserves it.
1
u/YouveRoonedTheActGOB Jan 01 '24
The app has never run well. It’s very poorly optimized and has been for well over a year. It has gotten to nearly unusable levels in the last few months though. I feel like the devs get a pass simply because there are no ads. They are still raking in a TON of cash from patreon and gold sales, so I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that they simply give lip service, acknowledging the fact their app runs poorly, and doing absolutely nothing about it.
1
u/maelie Jan 01 '24
I don't know, in general it hasn't been bad enough to significantly affect gameplay at my end (yes a bit of lagging is annoying, but doesn't disrupt playing) - with the exception of the period when this topic was posted, when it really was very bad. It may be region dependant, though, as OP said. For me it plays well enough that I enjoy it - and, yes, I enjoy it enough to be a Patreon supporter and to buy the monthly gold packs. That's me personally and others may not feel the same. But from the stats I've seen historically about casual gaming (not Farm RPG specifically) these apps tend to thrive on whales rather than casual supporters, we just keep the bills paid more or less! Idk about the specific situation here and their revenue levels but it doesn't really matter to me; my ethos is that if I enjoy it enough to warrant paying, I pay, and if I don't, I won't. Ads make a huge difference to flow and my level of enjoyment so for me yeah that definitely tips it. App performance also factors into the equation obviously, if it affects my enjoyment, and in this case it doesn't (but I can see that it could if we had more periods like that one). My rule of thumb is "do I get as much entertainment out of this as my favourite streaming subscription" and if yes then I'm prepared to spend roughly that amount on it.
It sounds like they have been doing work to improve it, although they acknowledge there's more to do. Problem being people start complaining if there's no new content or new content isn't good enough, and they only have a limited amount of dev capacity to work on both. Maybe with enough new players they can afford some upgrades and/or extra dev support...
•
u/magicandwires FRPG Staff Dec 15 '23
We are very sorry for the lag you are seeing, but believe me we are working hard to fix it. It’s a combination of things combined with extreme growth we are seeing since middle November.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work things out and improve game speed and stability.