Mark, how brilliant! lol. I thought perhaps any date before 11/24 would also work, but no go with 11/1/2009, either…. What an odd bug.
Thanks again for your post and bringing even a popcap developer into the discussion. This has been great!

We are absolutely slammed trying to make this game better for millions of people. I don’t know if you guys realize how truly tiny a slice 64-bit Linux is for our product. It’s way less than a tenth of one percent. To give a sense of perspective, we generally don’t support browsers with less than 3% usage because we need to focus on moving the game forward for the extreme majority.

I totally understand you guys wanting this problem fixed. I do too. But again, this is not a problem with our codebase. This is a problem with the Adobe Flash player on 64-bit Linux. If you guys have an investment in seeing this bug fixed, Adobe seems like the right place to lean on.

I’m sorry I’m not able to help further. I wish you all the best.

I wonder Scott, if PopCap would consider it worth it to issue a “bug bounty” for this particular bug?

I’m sorry to hear that. Though I have to admit I don’t understand why you would discourage people you care about from playing games they would most likely like, all because one of our free web games doesn’t run on a corner-case environment because of a bug in Adobe’s Flash implementation on that platform.

But I guess that’s your choice to make. I wish you the best.

-Scott

Hi Scott,

thanks for the honest reply, I do appreciate it. I definitely agree with you on the technical part. Waving off a “tiny slice of your user base” is PopCap’s decision to make, and I see your reasons. My decision is whether to ever buy anything from PopCap, or recommend to any friends either on Facebook or outside of it. This way the answer is an easy and obvious no.

I can’t tell you why it would juggle between working and not working, other than the reason does *not* lie with us. We did not update the code to the game in the specific timeframes mentioned, and we have certainly not touched the randomization code in any way since we launched the new Blitz.

My best guess: Since the randomization seed inside of Flash is tied to the timer, it seems plausable to me that something about the time values could be conditionially triggering the bug. That could explain why it works at some times and not others. But that’s purely speculation, of course.

It’s overwhelmingly clear from the feedback in this thread that this problem is isolated to 64-bit Linux. We have yet to have a single report from any of our millions of players that they suffer this problem on another OS.

And I hate to say it, but we both can’t provide a fix (because the problem isn’t in our code) and we can’t justify spending any more time investigating this issue on this platform. I hope you understand it’s hard enough to find the time to make the improvements we want for our millions of players that we can’t afford to get bogged down in any such tiny slice of our user base.

Sorry I don’t have anything better to tell you…

Hi Scott,

thanks for following these comments. Please note that I am trying to help here, not trying to bash PopCap, or anything like that. Of course, I would love it if BB worked.

Anyway, I looked at my emerge history. I had the same flash version (10.0.32.18) from Aug 4 to Dec 14. During this time, you launched the new version, which worked for a while, then stopped working near the end of October, then started to work again sometime in the middle of November. I am 100% certain nobody touched the adobe flash player on my computers during this time. The problem manifested on all 64-bit Linux computers, and there was no problem at all on 32-bit Linux machines and on Windows (which I don’t use unless I have to). So it is entirely possible that the flash player is at fault here, especially since the 64-bit Linux version is a bigger pile of junk than usual. But then please tell me what might be the reason for it continuously working for a month, then continuously not working for another?

If there is any way I can help you guys debug this problem, please tell me. (Also, if you don’t want to bother with 64-bit Linux users, that’s OK, too. Tell me, and I won’t bother either.)