I’ve written about my [tag]Knighthood[/tag] story and its continuing saga before. If you haven’t played it, Knighthood is a [tag]Facebook[/tag] application that seems to have taken Facebook by storm. In order to be successful at it, at least in the beginning, it is no more than a pyramid scheme. You have to recruit your friends to play. We’ve seen games like this before, but something about Facebook providing a willing audience seems to have helped Knighthood obtain a large audience very quickly.
Of course, the developers might not have expected so much population growth on the servers so quickly, so the game has been plagued with plenty of planned and unplanned downtime. It was common on the game forums to read about how a player couldn’t access his/her account while other people reported being able to play just fine. Load times would be in the minutes, which was painful when you were trying to heal your vassals while under attack from someone who seems to be able to load pages an order of magnitude faster than you.
Couple all of these issues with the usual bugs a game in Beta should be weeding out, and you had a lot of unhappy people playing a free game that they couldn’t get enough of.
And then a couple of days ago, I logged into Facebook to see that Knighthood was missing in my Applications list on the left side. My first thought: “Was I banned from Knighthood?” I couldn’t think of anything that I would have done wrong. When I checked the forums, I found that a lot of people were logging in to find Knighthood missing.
It turns out that Facebook had disabled Knighthood because it was actually causing problems with Facebook’s database. From the application’s home page:
Update 10:00pm: Knighthood was causing problems for Facebook own infrastructure and crashing their own DB (wow) We disabled most of profile updates to work with FB concerns. it will take much longer for your gold and vassal changes to be updated on profile right now.
Server temporary down message is unfortunately caused by Facebook due to abrupt shutdown of knighthood. It seems some of FB server know about app being back online, yet some servers reject knighthood requests with error message. We can only wait for all FB servers to get refreshed. If you see “temp down” message try to refresh (F5) a few times, you may get lucky and go to working FB server next time.
Update 4:30pm FB seems to be bringing it back online! We missing some of our settings and our developer list is partially erased. I’m going over settings and trying to restore the game.
Today 2/26 around 2pm PST Facebook disabled our game. We are working with Facebook to find out what happened and why application is disabled.
Wacky.
In any case, Knighthood is back online, which is bad news for me. I count myself among those who can’t seem to get enough of this game. I don’t even have to actively play it. Most of the time I’m waiting for buildings to expand or upgrade, and then I might capture vassals in some downtime in the evening.
Downtime in which I could be productive doing something else. Who am I kidding? One of the first places I go when I get access to a computer is to Facebook, specifically so I could check on my kingdom. I may give up on Knighthood eventually, but so far I’m kind of proud that I’ve only lost a vassal once and I was able to rescue him soon after. Soon the developers are going to release changes to the game which might make it compelling enough to continue wanting to play.
Also, since I last wrote about it, I’ve been promoted to Viscount. B-)