Hi,

Thanks for all the positive feedback regarding the improved performance. The steps we achieved yesterday certainly helped things a lot, but we still have work to do. Today we got roughly another 10% speed improvement, and made a lot of progress towards a much more significant improvement, which we hope to deploy early next week.

Now that speed is coming back under control, many of you have begun to ask for updates regarding various outstanding bugs. Although we expect to continue to work on improving performance for a few more days, I can comment on the top few issues that people have raised:

1. Will the hourly ticking mechanic stay in place forever?
We don't feel we're in a position to make a call on this yet. This tick mechanic may be irritating, but it helps performance hugely. If we make signifant enough gains in site performance in other areas we might consider rolling this back. Alternatively, we could work on making the kingdom forum remain available during ticking, so that there's something constructive to do while you're waiting. Personally, I believe that the hourly ticking mechanic is likely to remain in place for the immediate future at least, while we work on more pressing issues.

2. Bug to do with people receiving other peoples op results.
We believe that this was related to the speed issues, but would like to hear more about it from players should it happen again. The more detailed information provided, the better.

3. Professors.
Many people have found that the limits on how many research items you can have at any one time are too restrictive.
These are documented here.
To address people's concerns, we have just doubled the number from 50 professors to 100. The underlying bug to do with randomization of schedules will be one of the next ones to be fixed.

4. Topup reactivation
We are very glad to hear that some people would like to use the account topup feature, which is currently deactivated. Seeing as money is handled via this part of the site, we are being especially careful to fully test it before making it available. We still need to complete testing it, which we don't expect to take very long. We can't say right now when it will be ready, but we are very keen to make it possible for people to spend money on the site, so it won't be too long!

Thanks,
Sean and Brian