[buro9]

My girl and I stopped playing because of that. It went from playable to unplayable literally within a week or two.

It would lose our moves (returning to "Your move" when you'd submitted something hours before).

It would give strange errors "You're using this on more than once device"... erm, no I'm not.

And once it forgot who I was and showed no active games once I logged in again... effectively losing the games I was involved in from my account perspective, but my girl could still see the game and when she nudged it re-appeared on my phone.

And then there is just the non-responsiveness of the server. The start-up splash used to show for less than a second, but now it takes 5-10 seconds if it works at all.

For such a simple app and game it went from being a pleasant distraction to a chore very quickly. As such, our use has plummeted in turn.

[femngi]

One horrendous bug me and my friends came across with infuriating frequency was that the game would randomly change the word with another one of the same length when asking you to guess it. Effectively making it impossible to win unless you went through every possible word in the dictionary.

Needless to say I don't play any more.

[brendangregg]

Anyone have technical insight into the issues? Non-responsiveness sounds like performance scaling issues.

[Jare]

They posted about their infrastructure and mad dash to scale during the launch weeks. http://code.zynga.com/2012/04/scale-something-how-draw-somet...

It doesn't talk about current problems, but it may be possible to extrapolate. Still, with user counts going down, scaling problems should be a thing of the past.

[rhizome]

You know, I hear these stories about startups these days and all I can think of is the cloud and how there is so little sysadmin skill in the VC ecosystem. Where are the sysadmins working these days, large companies, or are there just more software producers than sysadmins? I know I pivoted from sysadmin to Rails, but did a lot of others, too? Makes me think I should dip my toes back in the water, COBOL style.