DNS and other problems - some more detail for those interested

Last 4 days, especially the last 24 hours have been extremely frustrating to us here at Realm of Empires, and even more so for the players being effected by the problems we are experiencing!

Summary of Problems

For the last few days, facebook reports problem with session keys and some players are unable to login. No updates from facebook for the last 3 days...

To add to the fun, Friday morning, our DNS provider, Register.com has been experiencing intermittent issues with DNS - Domain Name System/Server. This morning (Saturday) they officially confirmed what was speculated by many on twitter and else where, that register.com got hit with distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).

Purpose of this post - more detail

At the end, players don't care what and who is to blame, at the end, everyone just want so to play the game. All we can do is stay on top of the situation as it develops.

My purpose in writing this is to give you guys some more background if you are interested.

Facebook session problems
Basically facebook send us a key that says that you are you. Ie, the reason you don't need to register with an email, username and password to player Realm Of Empires, is because facebook handles the authentication.

You try to acces the game, we ask facebook who you are, and facebook authoritatively confirms your identify. This is part that is currently broken. We can't find out who you are, so we can't log you in.

DNS Issues
Domain Name System/Server is what allows you to type in 'www.RealmOfEmpires.com' in your browser address bar and access the game. The browser asks a Domain Name Server for the IP number for the name you entered, the server returns it, and your browser then makes a connection to us. Sort of like phone book - you have a name 'Bill Smith', look up his number in the phone book, then dial the number on your phone and off you go.

Our provider, the main server that all other servers ask for information is under a hacker attack. Basically, when your browsers ask 'What is the number to http://www.realmofempires.com'/, it gets a 'I don't know this name' response

It is the second time in the last 2 years that register.com was hit with a distributed denial of service attack...

What are we doing about this?There is not much we can do about the facebook session issue but hope they will fix it soon.

DNS issue we got temporarily resolved, partly... we still have issues such as images not loading, stories not posting, and stewardship account access.

Realm of Empires Official Blog: The Realm of Empires Roadmap

Realm of Empires Official Blog: The Realm of Empires Roadmap: "Many times we’ve been asked by our players to tell them what is going on at Realm of Empires, what direction RoE is going in and what featur..."

Just recently, we've post the above blog laying out the roadmap for Realm of Empires for the balance of the year.

I just wanted to add a couple of personal comments.

First of all, I will do my very best, as a certified slave driver ;), to whip my team into completing the ROE and ROE' separation as quick as possible

By the way, ROE' stands for ROE PRIME ( See for more geeky info! )... I am not the coolest member of the ROE team! :)

I want to get back to improving Realm of Empires as soon as possible. Its a great feeling to release a long awaited improvment that is well received. Love the debates I have with you guys on the board - after a release, I always find a bit more time to participate in discussions.

For the specific features for Realm of Empires, I will try to keep the focus on features that will make running a clan, fighting a big war and managing a large kingdom easier. We got lots of feedback from you guys, and althought we've made significant improments with mass recruit and alike, we got a lot of opportunities to cut out more mindless tasks still.

We are looking for a tool that would allow you guys to vote on suggested features to help us plan future work - suggestions for such a tool are most welcome! Please post in comments.

Also a note about ROE and ROE' - some of you may worry that we will give one game more attention then the other. Note that this will be the same code base. So changes and additions we make in one application will be made in both at the same time - there will be no need to port the changes from one app to another - both of the apps are essentially the same application.

Hope to wow you guys with new features shortly!!

Realm of Empires Official Blog: Interview Series - Greg (Part 1)

Realm of Empires Official Blog: Interview Series - Greg (Part 1): "With the re-launch of the official Realm of Empires blog, we thought it’d be a great idea to give our readers, an inside look at the member..."

Inviting players to realms close to new players

The recent release of Realm 9 and 10 prompted us to close Realm 6, 7 and 8 to new players.

We've also reminded everyone that you can still invite a NEW Realm of Empires player to any of the close realms.

We got a number of questions related to do that so let me take a moment to explain what is the reason behind this, which will helpfully address your questions.

When you invite a new Facebook friend, they automatically start as close to you as possible, in the realm from which you invited them from. Reason being is to allow you to play close with your friends, and make it easier for you to mentor and guide them.

This is why we allow new players to start even in realms close to new players if invited. An existing player already understands the game play does not quality for this offer.

Do you find this 'start close to your friend when invited' a useful feature? Have you taken advantage of this? Would love to hear from you guys!

Realm of Empires reaches 10 realms!

We've just released realm 10 in Realm of Empires! Wow, who would think!
Rewind back 2.5 years. June 13th 2008, Realm of Empires launched Realm 1 Beta. At that time, we were not ready nor even thinking about Realm 2; Realm 10 was fantasy! But even Realm 1 was a great success ... or perhaps a lucky turn of events!

Rewind another 6 months. Christmas 2007 - An unproven strategy game, designed on and off for a year, then quickly put together in about 3 weeks of intense design, almost did not make it into development. Estimates showed a much longer development cycle then originally anticipated, and the future of Realm of Empires seemed far from certain. But fortunately, some believed I made inaccurate estimates or was being overly pessimistic and we got the go ahead to move forward. Good that no one trusted me then! :) I was not being pessimistic but I was wrong - I was being optimistic... after all, I, more than anyone, wanted to get my baby project off the ground!

We launched our first realm in June 13th 2008 and it was a great success! 50 players had a heck of a lot of fun for the first couple of weeks! :)

Sometime later 350 players were picked on by the original 50 in the fast moving realm :) Every entrepreneur dream indeed!

But as soon as we've felt that the game will not crash past 100 players, we let the game grow faster and soon thousands of players were settling their differences with hordes of Knights and battling rams!

We are very proud to say that many of those players from 2 years back are still with us.

Salute to both vets and new players alike! It is YOU who make Realm of Empires what it is today. Thank you for making Realm of Empires such an awesome project! In the near months to come, Realm of Empires will continue to grow and evolve.

Welcome to Bubaribaman on realms!

Welcome Realm of Empires fans!

Since my old blog was turned into an official Realm of Empires blog, I have decided to start a new blog where I can share some of my more personal experiences making Realm of Empires.

See ya soon amigos!

PS, when I told some of my colleagues about this blog, I got a "oh, so this is a ROE developer went rogue blog'... I liked that!