Harpies theory....thoughts? Let's figure this out!

Mine happened as I was trying to enter app first thing in the morning. I play of an iPhone 4 and read somewhere on this forum to let the harp ring itself out. I did this and it worked after 15-20 minutes of hearing the most annoying sound in the world.

Hmmm I did the exact same things seconds ago and tada!!!! Harp of Death... got my money from jobs and houses, leveled up, sent my characters for 8 hour jobs and after the ticket of 500 my game froze and kissed me out. Now you all know what I have... :lol:

I just hope I'll be back for the Easter's update

Oh and I've spend some money in this game as well...

Spallan wrote:
From all the harps i have fixed and it must be getting close to 100 now they have all had the same thing.

They have all built the last buildings Wiggum and El Chemistri, people have the frozen after completing a task or after competion of building them. Some people have frozen after sendig people on random tasks but they still had these buildings.

I have been playing all week on an iPhone 4 to test if i can freeze mine. So far it has not frozen, i am level 26 but i have only just finished building Hibburts building. I have levelled up since then and had the bonus donut but still did not get the freeze.

What i hope is that the "fix" if they are working on one will come with level 27.

I concur. All have been level 26 with these two buildings and XP usually looks like its half way through the level up bar. I have also been playing on a iPhone 4 when close to getting a level up and I have these buildings already but no HOD.

My husband got the harp yesterday. He had leveled up and picked his prize box (3 donuts on first try AGAIN but I digress) he finished his tasks, and closed the game. About 45 minutes later he came back and tried to get into the game and that was when he said he couldn't get in. I asked him if any "harp music" was playing... Sure enough it was!

After trying to fix ourselves with some suggestion, he was ready to quit the game all together. After reading on the forum about the success others were having with the members helping we gave it a try too.

We are so Thankful for the help we received from danakscully. Glad I joined this forum.

As for my game, so far so good. (Knock wood). I have leveled up faster then my husband 3x to his 2, but the one difference between us is the premium items. He has several more then I do, including the escalator (I don't feel the need to get EVERYTHING).

Hope a common thread can be found and this issue can be solved. I only have 32000 more xp to go before I level up again. Keeping my fingers crossed!!

We both play on ipad2s.

I have not finished the two buildings. I was on the tasks leading up to building the hospital, when I was harped.

I was about 10 xp from leveling up for the third time on level 26, so I decided to collect a little $$ and XP from the brown houses and the Simpson's house. I hit the exact xp number of 120,000, got the bonus game, collected my three donuts - and my game froze. I noticed, however, that instead of the xp resetting to 0/120,000 (which it should have, since I hit the number of 120,000 exactly), it said 111,120/111,120.

Thanks to Dana I got my game back, and the xp was then more than 53,000 which does not make any sense, unless I got a lot of xps from all the donuts, Dana got me when getting into my game.

Seems VERY random how/when people are hit by the HOD.

I was thinking about a theroy that perhaps it had to do with levelling up fast? I used to progress quite slowly as I had only very few premium items, but last Friday I finally caved, got myself a boatload of donuts and bought all the big items as well as all the characters + a few minor items. All these purchases made me level up Friday around noon with a huge amount of xp after levelling up. Saturday morning I levelled up again - and BAM! harp crash.

I am now only 15,000 xp from levelling up again and I am actually going forward, because I want to see - quite stupidly perhaps - if there is anything to that theory (hoping, of course, that someone will be kind enough to bail me out, should I be harped again).

Oh, by the way, I play on an iPad2 (and within the next two weeks we'll be getting an iPad 3/4 (the newest anyway), so hopefully I'll be able to solve my own problems by then as well as helping out others, should the harp glitch persist).

bette3900 wrote:
I have not finished the two buildings. I was on the tasks leading up to building the hospital, when I was harped.

I was about 10 xp from leveling up for the third time on level 26, so I decided to collect a little $$ and XP from the brown houses and the Simpson's house. I hit the exact xp number of 120,000, got the bonus game, collected my three donuts - and my game froze. I noticed, however, that instead of the xp resetting to 0/120,000 (which it should have, since I hit the number of 120,000 exactly), it said 111,120/111,120.

Thanks to Dana I got my game back, and the xp was then more than 53,000 which does not make any sense, unless I got a lot of xps from all the donuts, Dana got me when getting into my game.

Seems VERY random how/when people are hit by the HOD.

I was thinking about a theroy that perhaps it had to do with levelling up fast? I used to progress quite slowly as I had only very few premium items, but last Friday I finally caved, got myself a boatload of donuts and bought all the big items as well as all the characters + a few minor items. All these purchases made me level up Friday around noon with a huge amount of xp after levelling up. Saturday morning I levelled up again - and BAM! harp crash.

I am now only 15,000 xp from levelling up again and I am actually going forward, because I want to see - quite stupidly perhaps - if there is anything to that theory (hoping, of course, that someone will be kind enough to bail me out, should I be harped again).

Oh, by the way, I play on an iPad2 (and within the next two weeks we'll be getting an iPad 3/4 (the newest anyway), so hopefully I'll be able to solve my own problems by then as well as helping out others, should the harp glitch persist).

I don't think the buildings have anything to do with it, it's just a coincidence that many of those with the harpies have these buildings. You have just shown that. I thought it was leveling up too many times but again, you've shown that's not it either.

I am seeing a common thread though. It appears that those getting the harp are the kind playing a fast game of collection and that when they get back in? Their game has way more XPs then it should have for having just leveled up. That leads me to believe that something is happening where the game gets more XPs then the level up and it causes it to snag.

Does that make sense?

Remember before they started this donuts for level up that we would just collect XPs and the next level up we would get the "credit" for them.

I'm thinking that what is happening is that we hit the 120K for the next XP level BUT we are also going past it because we are still collecting XPs. This is causing a problem because the game gets stuck.

I don't think I'm explaining that right, lol, I hope somebody can figure out what I mean and help me say it better.

From the "possible solution" to harpies thread:



From user krakenit who helped other players
and who believes, I think, its a server problem related to the
bonus levels themselves.

I am 2000 away from leveling up. Leveled up on Friday and got
harped.

bsampieri wrote:
I'm not convinced it's server related. Posted this on another thread, but thought I'd copy it over here (yes, x-post, evil, blah, blah). Just a guess, but...

Got the 2/15 update, started building Wiggum House on Saturday (knowing that people had the glitch, but I haven't really had any of these major issues except occasional crashing since I started playing in September). Wiggum House completed fine yesterday, but I noticed that I was only 2/3rds the way to the next XP bonus level before "accepting" the house, and then I got the next bonus level immediately (only got 1 donut from it, d'oh). I don't think building this house was worth that much XP.

So after reading some other stuff, I'm guessing that there is more an issue around XP handling for the bonus levels than anything else, probably an incorrect amount due to multiplier issues and some bad coding. Then I think there is some sort of race condition or something stuck in a loop. My guess is that if you are below a certain threshold of XP when it happens, you get bumped up to the next XP bonus level and are okay. If you are above that threshold, you get shot past the XP bonus level and then you have the harp issue. That is probably happening because there is a loop in the code, and the loop counter is not being checked properly to know when to stop, so it keeps going forever. Now there's only so many bytes used for the number values, and they will go up until the number rolls over to 0 or a negative number (if it's signed or unsigned values). So that is probably where people get back in after 15 minutes or so, cuz that's how long it's taking to loop around. Again, this might have something to do with the amount the loop counter counts each time, because you could get into the same zone where you get back out of bounds and loop thru again. Or you don't, and you get in okay, and in some cases, get a lot of donuts, cuz it's effectively looped you around thru hundreds of levels.

I understand your statement about a race condition and for those that don't its a buffer overflow caused by bad coding and the wrong data getting written into memory meaning you are saying its A client side issue. However if it were bad coding the issue would have hit a majority of the users rather than the small amount it has. I completely agree with you on the issue being the xp bug (as I posted two posts before this one) however that happens on the server associated with your account. This is why you have to have Internet to play as your data (your town) lives on the server and not on the device. While you connect to the server you are sending instructions to the server and the server applies those instructions to your town.

Ea has servers spread out in data centers all over and our accounts are spread out. Obviously not all servers are effected as most people continue to work without issue.

Apple does not push out different version of the program randomly. They have one single version at a time that they push out. Thus if were coding on the client side everyone would have this issue. I have gone through everything including doing a secure erase on an iPad and fresh install but still had the issue once I communicated with the server. If I signed out and played as anon without contacting the server I had no issue at all. Many others have proven it not to be client side as well which I also summarized in my post two posts ago.

Not to sound like a broken harp but this is server side issue with ea and If the 15 minute wait doesn't work we others have to wait for ea to fix it. Nothing that can be changed on the client side to force it to work again
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/195/9300602.page#27235388

Only I was not collecting a lot of $$ and xp when I was harped. I hit the EXACT number of 120,000 xp - how I came to have a huge amount of xp after getting back in is beyond me (then again, so many things about this game and the glitches are beyond me :wink:

briannielson wrote:
I haven't build Wiggum and El Chemistri yet, but got the harp about a week ago.

Btw: The donut glitch is that a one time deal, og do people who get the harp more than once also get a bunch of donuts more than once?

I've read that the donut glitch seems mainly to occur the first
time you get the harp.

I got harped on several of my towns all at different times (some after the hospital build some after hibberts practice) but all after bonus levels Also once harped it will re-harp after another level or 2 up. One town has had 3 cases of harpies but each time no bonus donuts. On 3 other towns I did the bonus and got allot of donuts. It seems each time you get harped on the same town the longer it takes to clear. On the first episode it cleared in 12-15 the second episode took 30 and the last time it took 45.

I tend to agree with the consensus that level 27 will cure it temporarily. If they keep offering the bonus level we may have to deal with harpies a long time :cry: Personally I don't think these extra donuts are worth this hassle. I would prefer to go back to level up and XP stops accumulating. Every time they come out with a new building in the story line it comes with almost leveling up amounts of XP and it is ridiculous. If you have everything and all the characters you will earn enough XP to level up soon enough.

I dont want to level up that fast.