Thread:Neo34/@comment-29954643-20170214024426/@comment-27642721-20170214112317

The server glitch: When FL data is requested by the game, rather than an extract of the full profile data for each friend being retrieved (the normal behaviour), for the majority of those who last accessed their game within the last 30 minutes (active players), the entire profile is downloaded instead. This greatly increases the amount of data retrieved for each FL refresh; all players experience this, it is just that if you have less than 20 "active players" in your FL at any one time the download  succeeds. It's if you have a large number of players (350+) that the trouble starts; once the number of active friends gets near 30 the amount of data to be retrieved must reach some limit and the FL refresh just fails...no data is returned by the server. The larger the number of friends you have the more likely that over 30 of them will have been active in the last 30 minutes, but it's also a problem for those who have honed their FL to consist of very active players (during quiet periods they may have success in getting a FL update). So that's the glitch, but what of the effects? Effect 1:  FL remains static, WL never changes Effect 2:  In addition to Effect 1, it's not possible to access the giftbox. Reason for this is unknown but some "local" state is preventing this in conjunction with the failed FL download. Not everybody experiences this but I've heard of no cases where giftbox access is not possible yet FL refresh is, so they seem connected. Access to the giftbox can be restored by backing up the player.prf and the Social folder contents, reinstalling the game and then restoring the player.prf & Social folder. This leaves the player with just effect 1. Effect 3: For those with access to the files in their Social folder you'll see the Friends_list.xml grow slightly in size as friends for whom the entire profile has been downloaded have extra achievements added to the file that are not normally requested. This is direct evidence of the full profile downloads into memory, though not all data downloaded makes it into the xml file. The added data in the xml appears to have no effect on game play. Effect 4: From my own experience with about 11 full profiles downloaded for each FL refresh (140+ friends), I've noticed some "stuttering" in the giftbox if I rapidly accept gifts; there's a display refresh issue. I suspect this is caused by the giftbox interacting with the much larger than normal FL data in memory. So why are G5/Mytona taking so long? Well, they're probably getting lots of reports about friend refresh issues for players with large numbers of friends and so have fired up their test system with a very large friendlist...only trouble being if it's an artificial FL then they wont get the necessary 30+ active players to trigger the refusal to download the data! Also, the giftbox access issue is related to some local state and so transferring the game to a test environment also isn't likely to recreate the problem. Now if only someone from G5/Mytona would read this post...