Game Center is really acting up today.
iOS players have been taking to Twitter to voice concerns about Game Center breaking when attempting to play games, specifically Letterpress
Letterpress is a fairly new word game for iOS devices. It relies on Game Center’s connectivity that allows you to play against your friends, sending notifications as to whose turn is next while tracking leading scores. Letterpress may very well not be the only culprit in Game Center’s bugginess, but it’s certainly the focal point for some of Twitter’s most vocal gaming crowd. One player even mentioned it on the app’s official page:
Great game killed by Game Center
by Gavin McKeown
This is a great game with a simple concept and endless gameplay. Unfortunately the playing experience is completely ruined by Game Center (which my phone insists on capitalizing). Here’s a hint Apple: put more money into having Game Center cope with high load rather than capitalizing your trademark.
A lot of waiting for GC to update games. A lot of “Error -1001” failures. Badges on the app icon that don’t relate to the game content. The list goes on. I never used GC before (as I suspect a lot of users didn’t) and now it will go back to the last screen of baked in un-deletable apps and my $0.99, unlocked version of Letterpress will join it.
5 stars for the gameplay and concept
Negative stars for the Game Center back end.
Some players have specifically noted an error message (Error 1001) suggesting that Game Center is to blame:
https://twitter.com/embed/status/261885100952793090
https://twitter.com/embed/status/261901764570267648
#Letterpress Know someone at Game Center? Please wake them up and get server 2 on. THANKS! Maybe it should be renamed Waiting Game Center
— Carl Grainger (@cgrainger) October 26, 2012
https://twitter.com/embed/status/261893238963707904
The fact that @letterpressapp has such beautiful game center error dialogs tells me that they were quite frequent in development
— Jonathan Baker (@cocoahero) October 26, 2012
And some suggest that it’s Letterpress that’s actually the cause of the error messages and the lag between notifications:
Serious question: has Letterpress broken Game Center?
— John Gruber (@gruber) October 25, 2012
https://twitter.com/embed/status/261337316268859392
@atebits Love Letterpress but there's lag between notifications and game updates. Get Game Center notice but game takes time to refresh. {?}
— Ryan (@ressler) October 26, 2012
It seems @letterpressapp is single-handedly bringing Game Center to its knees on a consistent basis.
— Jesse Hart (@jthart) October 26, 2012
Others don’t care, they’re going to keep playing!
It’s probably a testament to how awesome @letterpressapp is that I keep playing it even though half my moves result in Game Center errors.
— Bertrand Fan (@bertrandom) October 26, 2012
But the problem may not be restricted to just one game, which suggest it’s a Game Center issue:
Game Center is totally flaky today. And not just for Letterpress. Angry Birds too.
— Ted Landau (@tedlandau) October 26, 2012
And our own Owen Good noted that, “GameCenter was jamming up Totem Runner today. Extremely chunky and lagging.”
I’ve been playing around with Letterpress and Game Center today, and while I haven’t seen any error messages or crashes, I have experienced some lag between notifications for friend requests, turns (though not always), etc. Let us know if you’ve been experiencing anything similar.
I’ve reached out to Letterpress‘ developers—atebits—and will update should they respond.
