You overloaded our servers

I was talking about this less than a week ago. The question raised was "Should we consider expanding our server?" At the time our original server was more than sufficient. It could handle hundreds of clients without issue and in peak demand could shut off high-intensity features. At the time that feature had only been used once during an attempt to intentionally overload the server that the system handled successfully.

This time the issue was larger. Our server in Finland, aptly named Arto, had to shut off games for over 6 hours due to high demand. Imagine our surprise when we found the traffic was valid! We had to expand. We could have simply upgraded our server, but we wanted to also reduce latency for users outside the EU, so we have now rented a server in the US, which we nicknamed Brandon. To integrate a second server, we had to rewrite a large share of the code, and after undertaking testing, we are confident the feature is mostly functional. We expect some minor bugs to continue to show up, and we hope users will keep pointing them out in our Discord.

When a user first logs in, they are assigned a server based of where they are in the world. Once they login, their information is stored there, but backups exist across the network and in the cloud, compliant with our privacy policy. A user cannot transfer servers themselves yet. If we see a user often accessing the platform from a location that is closer to a server they aren't assigned, we may re-assign said user.

You can see more about which server you are on by selecting your profile and "Edit Profile", then scrolling to the bottom of the page.

Data between servers is transmitted securely, and your data remains encrypted. Read more about how we handle your data in our privacy policy.