The current hot game on the Internet is Monopoly City Streets. So hot that it crashed on day one. So hot that it had to be reset. So hot that on the day it as reincarnated, it ran into trouble again. If you’ve not yet heard, Hashbro, the company behind the popular Monopoly board game, has teamed up with Google to bring Monopoly City Streets online using the entire world through Google Maps as your virtual board.
This is not the traditional Monopoly game. It’s actually based on Monopoly City, which is yet another variant of the famed Monopoly game that Hashbro launched this year at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. Still, for all the fans of Monopoly, this will be an interesting game.
They had so many fans that the game servers crashed on day one of launch. Apart from the usual bugs, there were many problems due to overloading of servers. Many users simply could not play the game at all because the servers were too slow to respond or did not respond at all.
So with all the bugs, problems and complaints, Hashbro decided to restart the game. It came up again in its 2nd life at 6:23AM (GMT time) today. In a couple of 10s of minutes, the game servers started to act up again. Many people complained about registration problems. But so far, at least as I write this now, the problems of overloading are nowhere as serious as they were the first time around.
If you’re wondering how I know the time it came back online: Well, I made use of a little URL monitoring script I already had running at work, and I got it to check on the Monopoly City Streets. Yeah, ahem, for the benefit of colleagues who want to know when to “get in”…
The first time around, there were many non-technical problems with the game play too. For example, streets were too cheap. Everyone easily bought up all the streets so that late entrants to the game had nothing to buy and were disadvantaged.
Building a large online multiuser game is really a big challenge. This is particularly so when it is really difficult to estimate user load and conduct realistic load test. In a game like Monopoly City Streets, it may even be difficult to work out the right game rules, have some reasonable protection against cheating, and figure out the right numbers (e.g. price of street, number of streets) for the game to work.
Let’s hope Monopoly City Streets works right this second time around.
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