Recently there's been a lot of buzz around the community feature that Jason and I implemented in Aurora Feint. We want everyone to know that we are just trying to make a great MMO game for the iPhone. There's no super secret motive here. Sure we'd like to make it big one day, and we're kind of hoping this might take us there. But Aurora Feint is just us being passionate about games and the iPhone.
Sadly, Aurora Feint has been removed from the app store as of 6pm PST. We think this is due to the publicity that has been around the community feature.
We'd like to
a. explain why we implemented the community feature the way we did,
b. ask for your thoughts on how you'd like it to be implemented, and
c. ask for your support in bringing the product back on the app store
When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don't we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren't trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.
In the 1.0 version of the game we just didn't get around to doing everything we wanted to do in time for the launch: remember we tried to do a high quality game in 10 weeks flat. So, if you opt-in to the community feature, when you refresh your friends, the data is sent unencrypted to our web servers. Before you freak out though, let me explain why this was done. We just thought that it was a cool feature and that we'd implement security stuff if we became popular. To that end, the web server we launched with was a teeny box with almost no power. We spent the first few days scrambling to scale our servers. We really had no idea how popular we were going to be. We added this feature in near the end of our development cycle and simply decided that we didn't have enough time to spend to make it secure in advance of knowing if it was even going to be a hit.
As for the iMmoAccountData file, that is where we store the details of your account. Like all video games, we need to save information about what you are doing so that you don't start from scratch every time. Some of this data includes a unique identifier that your phone has which we use in our database for tracking your progress. We also store the e-mails and phone-numbers in your contact list so we can keep track of who has the game and optimize finding them again. This file is always written to your hard drive, but it is not sent over the wire unless you explicitly use the community feature. Remember, the data on your phone's hard drive is pretty much as secure as the contact list in your phone. The only way to access it is to break your EULA with Apple and Jailbreak your phone – or potentially from a backup of your entire device on your desktop or laptop computer.
We want you to be comfortable using and playing AF with your friends. So now I am asking you, as a member of our community, how would you like this feature to work in Aurora Feint? We want to make everyone feel comfortable so we intend to change the community feature in another update very soon. We'll take the idea that most people like here, and that seems to make the most sense, and change the community feature accordingly.
In the mean time, we have submitted an update to apple that uses HTTPS to send your data over the wire encrypted. Our update is in the queue marked as In Review. We are also preparing another update with the community feature completely removed. We are trying to get in touch with Apple to work with them on how to move forward so that everyone can continue to enjoy our game and feel comfortable about applications on their phone. If you work at Apple or know anyone who does, please contact me and Jason directly via PM on this forum.
Thanks for all your support and help,
Jason and Danielle
