A couple of days ago I started sharing early access codes and some reported crashes and lag to my horror. They called it the "dreaded GC bug", and googling for it I found that many apps misbehave when facing 100s of GC friends. Topping up my friend count I started seeing some lag at 50 and could eliminate at least one source of it. It all comes down to scalability - as it turned out all of our testers had less than 10 friends. So I recommend to all devs to have at least one sandbox account with like 300 friends (thats the lowest for what we receive crash reports). Please add "Invictus Akos" on GC! I'll be happy to add you as well!
Wow no one added me. OK I realized it's not gonna work this way. I decided to send a prerelease build to one of the external testers with lots of friend but guess what, prerelease builds only allow you to test with sandbox account. No-go. I'm falling back to spamming the players of our released games with friend requests asking for adding me to help fixing a GC bug. To get 300 friends about 10000 requests need to be sent out as one request is accepted out of 30. A boring day for QA :/
If you ever need to have such a boosted up account, here's how we achieved 300+ GC friends really quick: 1, log in with sandbox account 2, make sure you display name is somewhat descriptive (eg. yourcompany QA) 3, download and start a very popular app (eg. subway surfers) that got leaderboards 4, start gamecenter, select the leaderboard of that popular app 5, change 'all time' to 'today' 6, start sending friend request, add a message like Hi I'm a developer, I need your help to fix a bug that occurs with high GC friend count. TY! 7, Keep repeating sending requests - obviously copy-paste the message 8, boost it with multi-threading assuming a big QA staff so that everyone works on a different slice of the leaderboard There are lots of other friendly dev sandbox accounts so they are willing to accept requests. When sending the request you'll see how many hours ago the other person played. Find the time of the day when it's usually low - that means the fellow QA member is still working so your request is more likely instantly responded to! Cheers, Ákos
