Tapped Out is broken, and there are three important things EA needs to do if they wish to continue supporting this game. Getting a better understanding of these issues may help us understand the current lull in new content. Hopefully the reason for it all is that they are addressing some of the issues listed below.

#1 – Fix Game Crashes / Increase Overall Stablity

Depending on the device you’re using this game can run smoothly, or be a complete disaster. Many people have reported slow load times, and consistent crashes. In this state the game is basically unplayable, so something needs to be done to fix it.

End Support for Legacy Devices

At some point EA is going to have to increase the minimum system requirements, which will lock out players with outdated devices. Now it definitely shouldn’t be as drastic as requiring the latest “iDevice” or the Android equivalent of that, but it’s time to at least lockout players using devices that were first released four-to-five years ago.

Clean Up the Code

The base version of the game is ver. 3.0, and this includes the first twenty levels. Now there are more than double the amount of levels that there were at launch. Since then the game has received over 66 patches. Inside each of these patches are bits of new content, and updated versions of older ones. Trust me, from digging inside the files there are a lot of redundancies.

Everything needs to be consolidated into a new base version of the game, and ver. 5.0 seems the best time to do that. Doing this alone could squash a lot of bugs as well.

#2 – More Land

This is a pretty common request, and it is something that needs to be addressed. You can’t keep adding new content to a game if the players have no place to put said new content. The technical side to this request is nothing to scoff at though.

Imagine that the maximum file size of a town is, let’s say 4 squiggly bites (very technical, I know). Now by increasing the land size, it also increases the maximum file size, which means that data needs to be stored on a server somewhere. So if 4 increases to even something as small as 4.2 squiggly bites, multiple that by millions of players and you’re going to need more servers to handle all of that new data.

#3 – Better Content Updates / Dealing with the Competition