We Rule still suffering from server issues, popularity partly blamed

Things are still looking rocky in the short term when it comes to ngmoco's online Farmville-for-iPhone kingdom builder We Rule.

Monday saw a total outage of the whole Plus+ network when the power failed at its server facility. Then on Wednesday, the We Rule servers went down as the development team tried to push out new content.

And there are five ongoing issues ngmoco is tracking, and attempting to fix, including logging in and connection problems, and incorrect open business.

Interestingly though, another of these is due to the amount of players.

"3.5m+ sessions x ~10 push alarms per user = more pushes than we were anticipating," explained CEO Neil Young on the ngmoco blog, about push notification problems.

"We're working to build a better prioritising and queuing system to ensures that your pushes (especially your crop alarms) arrive on time. We will have a fix to this deployed very soon."

More positively the company is also looking to set up a system where users can get free mojo when they download other ngmoco apps; something that already happens in terms of games (and appropriate in-game currencies) such as Eliminate Pro and Epic War Pets.

It all goes to show that deploying online games for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is a lot more difficult than for Facebook.

Still, this is experience ngmoco needs as it looks to expand, with the combined release schedule for it and owned publisher Freeverse planned at around 40 games over the next 12 months.