[UPDATED] Devs' Corner: March 2026

Have you checked your pass history? I often manage to not click the Onyx ufo but it gives it anyway as far as I recall.

That was a diffrent 75 minuts then i had learned

So the page was down for 4h and 15 minutes, instead of the 75 minutes, and nothing was done for the lag? Great job, wow, amazing.

I am going to guess that this maintenance went on longer than planned based on the time of the last Twitter post, but it would have been nice to get an update through Twitter as well that it was taking longer than expected. I wasn't on until a couple of hours ago, but I have seen several people mention that it started at update, making it 4+ hours.

my game is super speedy atm

So maintenance lasted 4 times longer than we were told, just for us to come back to lag again? The game is barely functioning here all over again, as if nothing ever changed. You spent 4 hours changing super minor things that 99% of us didn't even notice but you still can't address the big issue that is making hundreds of players across all servers to quit the game altogether.

I have to say, usually I'm ticked off that the game is becoming more pay-to-play, we lost the advertising board, the events are repetitive, etc etc...but I can understand this one at least.

I bet right when Covid started a lot of sometimes-users became everyday-users, and now they have a lot more load on the game than they had before. It may take awhile for them to even find all of the causes of the lag. If they need more servers or AWS compting power or whatever, well, maybe they already tried that and now they've found another pain point. Maybe they need to redesign some of the processes to actually make them more efficient.

I would also bet, judging by the age of the game, that there is a lot of inefficient B*S stored away in the algorithms or even the products & languages that this game is running on, and redesigning it from scratch is going to take a lot of time and effort (and money) if that's what really needs to happen. Probably no one wants to refactor the whole care mechanism, for example, even if some parts of it are still written in PHP (and thus require a server response each time an action is completed).

So it's been a couple of months, and that's super annoying, but large chunks of the logic behind the game could be struggling. A fast solution is great, but I would really prefer to give them the time to think it through properly and come up with a solution that is actually a major long-term improvement and reduces the chances of this happening again, as well as making it easier for them to add new features.

I was very much hoping for a decrease in lag after the maintenance. This is disappointing for sure. The new features are only minor at best. It lasted way longer that 75 minutes, and for what? Not even a slight fix for lag. I know these developers can do better than that

It's actually been closer to a year at this point, people in the VIP forum started reporting massive amounts of lag at the end of may, but were simply told to clear their caches and cookies, it was only when that topic in the Game Play forum was posted that it was acknowledged to be on the game's end. I understand their tech might be out of date, but a year is more than enough time to replace it if needed.

Does anyone else notice that new "cookies bar" at the bottom of the page upon loading howrse? Or is it just me? It now says "set cookies, refuse cookies, or accept cookies". Before it was only accept and had to manually go into cookie settings every single time.
I'm guessing this change happened with the maintenance. I wonder what else they changed without listing it...