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Players are aware of a large number of problems that they are dealing with with CoA.
It has taken us a few days of checking, testing and talking to find out what is going on.
Over a few days last week, there was windows updates, flash player update and also maintenance. This has caused a number of headaches for us so I will give a breakdown on what is going on so players can understand better and what the developers face.
1) Flash player: Flash player is a program that renders SWF files on a players device. It is maintained by adobe and there is a big push to end flash player and move on to HTML5 which is more stable and user friendly.
Some browsers have indicated they are dropping Flash player in 2017 and going to HTML5.
How that affects COA is simple. CoA uses a Stage 3D open source game engine. CoA was designed using firefox 32 bit. Some players use Chrome or firefox 32 and 64 bit. Some use other types of browsers. Adobe has changed the runtime for chrome. This means that the developers are going to have to change COA files to run on flash player again. .
This is not the first time adobe has done this. Last time they removed windowed mode for browsers. This meant that games like COA would not load because COA requires windowed mode. Abode stated they did not view this as a serious matter, tho they changed flash player a few weeks later to re enable windowed mode. They have indicated that they intend to remove windowed mode completely in the future
2) Chrome: Its recommended that players use firefox to play COA, but yes for some players they find that chrome works better.
Chrome uses a secure connection and they are pushing ahead with plans to have a very secure browser connection system. Many games use secure and non secure data. This means that the games load faster as secure connections are slower loading.
Its something the devs can not fix because its the browser settings and outside of the devs control.
3) Windows Updates : oh microsoft.... creator of operating systems that you either love or hate, updates that cause your programs not to work cos they are incompatible and cause devices to have constant issues.
While they generally do not cause many issues for games, windows updates can have software updates that cause issues with the running of the computer and programs, that lead to issues with online gaming.
4) Stuck on loading screen: The players may see one issue, we see 4. Some of the players are going to need to use a VPN to access the game. This is simply a bypass and appears to be affecting europe players yet again.
A VPN simply reroutes the direction of dataflow. Normally the devs can fix that issue by changing the network and connection parameters for COA... Its trial and error when they do that as they can not test to see why players can not load the game or are stuck on the loading screen, so they make changes that should bypass the issues.
A VPN is basically doing the same thing from the players side.
5) 32 bit and 64 bit browsers. Once again it appears that some of the changes made to flash player are affecting the game running on 64bit browsers, the temp fix is to use a 32 bit version of the browser.
6) FB and Gameroom. FB and gameroom are seperate to AMZ. The Servers that players access on FB are AMZ servers but the technical issues that are happening at FB and with game room are not AMZ created issues, they have to be fixed by the FB techs because the problems are at FBs end and gameroom is their creation.
Part of the issue with can not find the game, is happening at the servers so yes the developers need to change that.... its also part of the issue that is requiring some players to use a VPN.
Yes we understand that players get to the point that they just want to walk off from CoA....trust me, the developers sometimes feel the same way.... they create a game and have to constantly deal with having to change the game so it will work again because outfits like adobe and chrome make changes to their software, regardless of the knowledge that it will cause major problems for gaming companies.
I think we can all agree that a working game is a enjoyable game and a non working game is simply a bloody annoying thing to deal with..... so we ask the players to bear with us while we work through the issues and try to get things working again. We can not fix some issues without the help of FB techs, and without a debug version of the new flash player from Adobe and also multiple browsers
Unfortunately yes it means tying up more resources so some issues have to take a back seat which is again frustrating for the players and annoying for the staff as we do want to clear the backlog of issues without the extra work load from the current issues....... for the delays, we are extremely sorry and ask the players to bear with us
