Monster Cache reviews

We finally made it to the point of having a somewhat significant number of reviews for Monster Cache.  A few are from people we know. of course, but most of them aren't.  After 21 Google Play reviews, here are the results:

# of Ratings
21

★★★★★48% of ratings are for 5 stars10

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 4 stars3

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 3 stars3

★★★★★10% of ratings are for 2 stars2

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 1 stars3

 Average Rating

3.71

On Apple we've only had 4 reviews.  I don't know why so many less than Android.  Of those 4, we only know one person.  All 4 are 5 star reviews.

An average of 3.71 on Android is okay, but I would have liked it to be over 4.  3.71 is kinda like a B+, I guess.  It's great to see when people love the application, and of course its a bummer to see the bad reviews.  As I mentioned when I posted about Hawaii, one of the 1-star reviews was because someone from Hawaii installed it and I never generated monsters there. I only recently discovered that I could reply to the reviews if they had a comment. When I generated monsters in Hawaii and responded to that review, the person increased their rating to 3 star, that was good to see.  I just replied to the other 1-star reviews today.  Here are all the reviews I've replied to:

★★★★★ ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fierce (Rav4)

Maddie Linsacum on Apr 5, 2014 at 10:46 AM They make u pay!!!!!! Got the app so exited left it on while in the car I have no friends= no money= no nets=no more monsters :'( You replied on Jun 8, 2014 at 2:59 PM Hi Maddie, Many free applications rely on advertising and/or In-App Purchasing to generate revenue. We chose not to use advertising in Monster Cache, so once you've used all your free nets, you can get more through In App Purchasing or by referring friends. We're sorry that neither of those options will work for you.

★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 Galaxy S5 (klteatt)	steven mills on Jun 7, 2014 at 9:31 PM This sucks All of the "monsters" are on private property, behind gates, and places you don't need to be. And when you do use all of you nets, you have to buy more? It's free to geocache, munzee, ingress, I'm not paying to drive around just to look at all the monsters you can't get. You replied on Jun 8, 2014 at 2:54 PM Hi Steven. Although some of the randomly placed monsters end up on private property, certainly not all do. Also, the net's long range often allows a monster that is in a residential or commercial lot to be caught from the sidewalk. We're sorry that you didn't find any yet that were accessible, but there are millions out there so please try again. Edit your reply
★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 Nexus 4 (mako)	Lance Shimabukuro on Jun 6, 2014 at 10:09 PM Ok, no monsters in Hi fixed, will try later. Got the apology email within a day, tried briefly but @ work, so will look again later. Revised rating up already and will adjust again after I give it a real tryout. You replied on Jun 5, 2014 at 8:10 PM We are sorry for the inconvenience. You are correct that monsters had not made their way to Hawaii...until now! Now there are thousands of monsters all over the islands, so we hope you will try the app again, catch many monsters, and reconsider your rating. No need to re-register, the account you had made before will still work. Thank you!
★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 htc one (M8) (htc_m8)	Kelli Deems on Jun 1, 2014 at 3:14 PM Love the idea! Caught one monster. So many more are out of reach. I seriously cannot go walking into a freshly planted corn field, and that seems to be where they like to hide. There is no way to reset the map, so that is where they stay. I haven't seen new, more accessible ones appear. Nice idea, but not working out very well. You replied on Jun 3, 2014 at 5:30 PM Sorry that many monsters in your area were out of reach. We agree that you shouldn't try to catch monsters on private land without permission. If you can find more Level 1 monsters in a more urban or suburban area, then you'll gain access to the Level 2 monsters, and hopefully more of those will be in accessible areas near you. Good luck!

Azure osFamily="1" discontinued

As I mentioned in my last post, we had one technical issue to overcome last week.  The server for Monster Cache is hosted on a Windows Azure server.  I set that up when we first started testing, around 2 years ago. At that time, I had a 6 month free trial, or something like that.

It was probably a couple months ago that I got my first email form Microsoft warning that Guest OS 1 was being retired.  That was totally meaningless to me.  I've never heard of "Guest OS" of any version.  Later, they sent more emails saying things like "You *may* be affected by the retirement of Guest OS 1".  So I kept the emails in my inbox and thought I'd look into it more later.  The day I looked into it happened to be Sunday June 1st.  I opened the email again, and noticed that coincidentally the OS was being retired that day,Sunday June 1st.  I followed the instructions to determine if my server was affected or not.  Sure enough, it was.   Uh oh.  The site hadn't stopped working yet, but it was time to get to work.

I had no idea I was using Guest OS 1.  What determined that was a simple attribute in one of the configuration files that said osFamily="1".  It seemed it might be as simple as changing that to osFamily="4" to sue the latest version, but not quite.  The different osFamily version required a different version of the Azure SDK, so I would have to download that.  The new SDK required that I use Visual Studio 2013 instead of the Visual Studio 2010 I had always used for my Azure project.  Thank goodness I had only recently purchased Visual Studio 2013 for the sake of a different project.  So I installed the new SDK, opened the project in Visual Studio 2013, let it perform a migration, then tried to run it locally.  It failed.

When I tried to run the project locally with the debugger, the emulator would just hang.  So I started doing some research for the status messages I was seeing.  Found lots of posts of people saying that happened with the debugger, but not if you ran without debugger.  I found that was true for me too, but it didn't make me confident to release it that way.  I eventually found it was an emulator setting.  More details are in an answer I posted on Stack Overflow.  Then I got another error on my static pages after that, which required more research and another change to one of my configuration files.... so 3.5 hours later, I finally had everything running again with the debugger in Visual Studio 2013.

As it turned out, Microsoft extended the cutoff date for Guest OS 1 to September 1st.  So the server never went down, and I released the changes with plenty of time.  But just one more example of hours of work needed for a Google or Apple or Microsoft upgrade.

Monsters in Hawaii!

With all the activity these past 3 weeks, we had one technical issue (with Azure) that I'll describe in another post, and one non-technical issue.  The non-technical was that someone  in Hawaii posted a one-star review on the Play store, saying they installed the app, saw no monsters, then uninstalled.  Its true, I never generated any monsters in Hawaii.  The reason I never generated any there is because I had to do separate boundaries and generating for that area, and I wasn't sure the small area and population were worth it.  I told Kathleen this, and she said she'd sent emails to geocachers in Hawaii too.

So I quickly started generating monsters in Hawaii.  Using my new monster viewer, I could see the ones I was generating.  Of course, I'm bounding the islands with rectangles, so many are ending up in the water.  And many more end up in huge areas of forest, since that's what most of Hawaii is.  I started focusing on Honolulu then.  My initial numbers weren't making as many there as I hoped so I kept increasing it.  After a couple hours of testing and generating, I had the islands pretty well covered.  I then replied to the one-star review with:

"We are sorry for the inconvenience. You are correct that monsters had not made their way to Hawaii...until now! Now there are thousands of monsters all over the islands, so we hope you will try the app again, catch many monsters, and reconsider your rating. No need to re-register, the account you had made before will still work. Thank you!"

No adjustment to the review yet though.  But I also emailed all users in the database with home state of Hawaii to apologize and tell them the monsters were there now.  The good news is someone found one the next day and posted a message on the Facebook page!  That was good to see.