Hi, I'm one of the dev and I'm the one responsible for this. I'm sorry that people are feeling spammed by the app. What we did is add a button in the end of game screen to challenge your Game Center friends. There's nothing automatic going on, and people are prompted to make sure that's what they want to do. We don't award anything when people do it. We honestly think people really want their Game Center friends to play, because when your friends play you see them inside the game (both as ghosts and their profile pic is on a sign you can crash into at their record distance). It's actually pretty cool as a feature and requires a somewhat involved backend to pull off. Anyway, the game is really, really popular right now, and we didn't expect people to get swamped with challenges (or the game to be that popular!). We've received a single complaint email about it, and we're reading online that it might be an issue for the first time here. I'm not really sure what to say or to do. It sucks that there's no "mute challenge from this game" feature in Game Center and I hope Apple will add something like this. Also, my understanding is that you can only send a challenge once, so hopefully this will pass soon. So once again, sorry about that.
Definitely not the case as I'm only unfriending after multiple challenges, one guy sent me 5 in the space of 40 minutes.
It is going to make me unfriend people too. Super spammy. If this became a trend, it will be the downfall of Game Center. I'm frankly surprised that it's permitted.
I got several challenges from the same user. The thing that really gets on my nerves is that I don't even own the game. Usually I like the challenges via Gamecenter, but only for games that I actually have. So please, you as a dev bring this to Apple's attention, otherwise people will delete friends galore and Apple's use of GC as a marketing tool for other apps will tank completely.
I'll stay on 5.1.1. I have nearly 1700 games listed on my Gamecenter account and have seemingly random people sending me friend requests everyday. To be honest, unless you have an iPhone 5/iPad 4/iPad mini, I see no reason to update whatsoever. "Over 200 new features"...like what? asking Siri for restaurant suggestions? Siri kills your battery anyway. OTOH, it would be nice if imessaging was incorporated into GC.
Are they all distance challenges or varied challenges? Because in our testing, the challenge we send from inside the game could only be used once. Otherwise, the guy might be sending them from inside Game Center itself, and we have absolutely no control over that.
^This. If we assume this was an unintended consequence, and I have no reason to disbelieve Yome's post above, then devs need to make sure Apple realizes their "feature" is getting people's attention in the wrong way. However, let me also say that I've been running iOS v6 for about 3 weeks now and this game is the very first game that I've been receiving unsolicited challenges from even though I don't have the game. I would suggest yome and the other devs make sure you implemented the GC challenge function correctly. It looks like the game is somehow invoking a giant "spam all" function that I cannot believe is the intent or the only way challenges work under iOS 6, otherwise I would think I'd be seeing this from more than just ERT2.
Quite a nice game and a pleasant surprise! But I agree with the criticism - games may go for too long and spamming all your friends with challenges is just not on.
I'm getting multiple distance challenges from the same people too. And the most annoying part is that they aren't even as high as my highscore. Challenges are kind of pointless if you've already beaten them. Great game anyways. My only issues is that you start experiencing slowdown around 20-30k, and by 40k the whole game slows to a crawl graphically. This is on an iPad 3.
I've had to log out of GC because of this... over 200 challenges from people in the last 18 hours. Annoying as hell and there's no way I'm going to log back into GC just to spend 20 minutes declining everybody. Apologies to the developers but I don't even have an interest in this game and there are more important messages & notifications from clients I need to deal with through my iDevice, not this...
Thanks for the response but it does feel like spam. I don't have your game and I have absolutely no desire to get or play your game at this point (and I'm unfriending people who have sent me these challenges). I, for one, would appreciate it if you would remove this "feature" entirely so that the spam stops.
What is the best way to bring this to Apple's attention? With thousands of games in the store, it is likely that this happens with other games at some point, too.
Ok, I think this game is really fun. Very addicting, but I really, really hope you change the challenges so that they only go to friends who have the game. It is spam, and it annoys my friends who don't wish to play. So end result is I am not using the Challenge option any more, and that sucks because I'd like to. So please change this. Otherwise this is a great game.
I totally agree with this. I have received over 100 "challenges" the last two days and I don't even have the game. Please fix this as soon as possible.
But to talk about the game itself, one question I have is how exactly to get Overdrive? I have gotten it a number of times, but I still am not sure exactly what triggers it.
I'm pretty sure there's at least a couple of ways to get it. Try these: - Getting multiple "Perfect Slam"'s in a row (at least 3 I think) - Performing multiple flips in a single jump (around 5+ I think)
I normally wouldn't be thiis irritated about something so trivial, but these challenges that go to all GC friends automatically are INCREDIBLY annoying. When is this going to get corrected? I will never consider buying this game until this is fixed.
This is bullshit. Why the F is this turd sending out invitees to every freakin person in someone's GC friend list? This is nothing but intentional spam. I dont mind it when someone challenges me on GC as long as they did it specifically for me. It means the GC friend of mine really liked the game enough to remember about me and bug me to try this game out. But sending challenges to everyone in the friends list is nothing but obvious spam from the developers. Please don't act like it wasn't your fault and you didn't know. That's a lie. Just remove it ASAP. I don't want to unfriend people because of this stupid app. I haven't played the game yet but I did download it, reviewed it one star for the spam and deleted it off my device. I don't care how good a game it might have been.
I happen to really like this game, but I can confirm that challenges really are being sent out without actual player initiation. I have received messages stating that somebody "beat my challenge" without me ever sending one out. I can also confirm that this is only occurring on iOS 6, as I've not received anything at all on my pre-iOS 6 devices. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the issue here is actually apple's fault and has little to do with the dev.
