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
