There are no two ways two ways about it - last week was a terrible week for games.com and AOL Games.
We had two separated outages and issues with log in status over the weekend. This is unacceptable and on behalf of the games team I apologize for the trouble.

In fact there were two entirely separate issues at work here. The first issue affected games on Wednesday and Thursday nights and the second started late Friday running through the Sunday morning. They were not related strangely enough!

Technology can be a tricky thing and quite often in the rush to repair one issue another can come up to compound the problems. In this case the two items were unrelated but equally frustrating to repair. As soon as we were able to lock down the problems we set about repairing them. While these issues did last several hours our team work as hard and as fast as they could to get them repaired.

We are glad to say the the biggest problems (Stars, playing as a guest and stamps) were repaired by Sunday morning (Eastern Time) The second big and annoying issue was the messages of Tripeaks Solitaire being broadcast across games - was repaired this morning.

That's about all the problems we had to sort out this weekend. I want to take this time to say how sorry we are for all the issues. We know you have a choice in your game play destination and know that you are the most passionate and caring community on the web. It´s the games teams job to give you all a fun, easy and stable gaming home and this weekend we didn´t hold up our end of the bargain. Please rest assured that all the the necessary steps are being taken to prevent these problems for happening again.

Thank you all for your patience and continued support of games.com and AOL Games.
If you have any questions comments or just want to chat, drop me a line.
Larry
laurent.courtines@corp.aol.com
AIM:lcourtines
http://twitter.com/gamesdotcom

You may have noticed some changes to our site in the last week. We did a slight color change and rebuilt our games pages. The goal of these changes was as follows:
1. Make the site better looking.
2. Make getting help for a game easier.
3. Clean up the site overall.


Here is a quick visual rundown:
We've made the buttons on our launch pages bigger and with more descriptive icons.
You can see that some of our games now have 'single player' and 'multi-player' options.
Single player games you will play by yourself or against computer opponents.





Our game pages now check your computer to make sure you meet top level system requirements like JavaScript, Java, your browser type or whether you need Flash. If any of those items are not compatible the check mark will be a red x rather than a green check.
If you don't meet the requirements there are links to help you install the necessary software.

Folks, sorry for the late addition. We'll be doing approximately two hours of site maintenance starting at 5.30 AM Eastern Time tomorrow morning. During the downtime we'll be doing some needed repairs to the chat and stars system that the games run inside of. We apologize for the trouble and hope too many peoples' game play are not effected.

Additionally, we'll be launching three games from our beta program; Gin Rummy, Oklahoma Gin and Whist are expected to come out tomorrow. They have been out in beta for a while but will officially roll out tomorrow morning. Lastly, we going to bring out our WSOP Poker improvements that I mentions two weeks ago. You can read the full list of improvements here: Improvements Coming to WSOP Poker Games

For those concerned about the poker tournaments please be aware that these changes will not affect tournament play.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to drop me a line.

Folks, it's come to my attention that there was an issue with the opening rounds of the WSOP 2008 qualifier tournaments. Unfortunately, I was not made aware earlier and I was unable to let the right people know so the issues could be repaired.
On behalf of the games team we apologize for the inconvenience and we are working towards a solution. We expect to have everything up and running for the 3PM Eastern qualifiers.

If you have any issues at all please do not hesitate to email me at laurent.courtines@corp.aol.com

As many people have noticed our site has had some trouble. Yesterday we had a hard ware issue that caused the games to go down. We battled and worked to get the games back up. The games were up and down most of the day.

When the games were finally stabilized we were all excited. However, we then found out that our star rated games (Bingo, Solitaire Classic, Tri-peaks Solitaire and Slots Lounge) were having issues. Stars were simply not being awarded in those games. Once we found out about that, we had to ACTUALLY take the games down again and restart them.

Finally, at around 10 PM everything was back to normal. It was a very trying day and we thank everyone for hanging in there with us. We know you have a choice in playing games and appreciate that you have chosen to play with us.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns you may have.

This morning we made a change to our sites code that seems to have caused a problem. We're in the process of rolling back the last update and hope to have the site and games stabilized in the next couple of hours.

This is effecting specifically, Bingo, Slots Lounge, Solitaire Race and our star rated Solitaire suite

We apologize for all the trouble and appreciate your patience.

Don't be alarmed. I took down the comments on Poker just a way of letting everyone cool off on that comments board. Having comments on the games is something we think is good for the community but we have to make sure that it is not some place of abuse or malice. We just want to make sure everyone knows that if there is abuse on our comments boards, we can simply remove them all together.
The comments will be put back tomorrow.