New Release Today!

Today is the day. New QONQR apps and servers. New Sync Lock rules announced in the previous blog post go into effect. Here is the common questions we’ve heard so far.



Q: What if I was Sync-Locked or Inoculated when this change went into effect?

A: All Sync-Locks and Inoculations were removed when the server was updated. Those who had purchased Inoculation were refunded their cubes for the purchase.





Q: When I go back from the new Sync-Lock mini game, my map is blank. What happened?

A: Yep, a bug got through testing. A new patch will be submitted by Friday to fix this. Just hit the zoom in or zoom out buttons to reset the map and get your zones back.





Q: Can I play the mini-game before I get infected to get the protection?

A: Yes you can play the mini-game any time, before or after Sync Lock infection. Protection will last for 24 hours after you pass the game requirements. If you are already protected, the end of your infection will be changed to be 24 hours from the time the last time you passed the mini-game.





Q: It says my friend and I were not far enough apart. How far apart do we need to be?

A: In the patch update coming in the next few days, the display will tell you how much further apart you need to be in meters (yards). You will need to be a minimum of 250 meters apart if both player have “Excellent” GPS for both accuracy and latency. If you have poor GPS, it could be more than a few kilometers.





Q: My friend and I failed the distance check but we aren’t even in the same city. How can that be?

A: We have discovered that some Android phones are not sending a valid GPS timestamp. None of the 30-40 android phones we used in testing exhibited this behavior. We think this may be related to WiFi. We are investigating.

Q: How is the distance we need to be apart determined?

A: All GPS coordinates your phone reports to QONQR tell us your location and what level of accuracy the phone believes it has. For example, the phone may say you are here, but you could be anywhere within 300 meters of this spot. Typically this ranges anywhere from 10 meters to 2 kilometers. For the sync lock mini game, you must be 200 meters apart, plus whatever the accuracy values are. So if one player has an accuracy of 20 meters and the other 700 meters. You must be 200 + 20 + 700 = 920 meters apart to pass the accuracy check in the mini-game. GPS latency (how old your reading is) also adds similar padding to your distance.





Q: Is there a way I can get the GPS to be Excellent for both accuracy and latency in the mini game?

A: This is dependent on your phone. iPhones are particularly bad at this. iPhones don’t always feel like it is necessary to give immediate up-to-date readings. It is as if they are saying, “I just gave you your GPS, you haven’t moved, you don’t need a new one, just use the one I gave you a minute ago.” QONQR doesn’t know if you haven’t really moved, or you are trying to trick the system by turning off your GPS and running back to your other phone to start the game. We always have to deal with cheaters who will try to find a way around the system. If your GPS is bad, try opening a different app, then return to QONQR. We can usually get a new GPS with the app resumes. We will add this tip to the start screen in the coming patch update.





Q: What if we don’t pass the mini-game? Do we get infected automatically? How long before we can try again?

A: You don’t get infected. You can play again immediately. Infecting someone with Sync Lock works the same as before. Players must play together to be infected. The previous blog post expands on this, if you want more information.





Q: How do I start a mini-game?

A: Right now we assume you know the people you are Sync-Locked with, since you had to be together to get locked. Call, text or message that player to coordinate a mini-game. Each player must view the other player’s profile in the game, and click the “Sync Lock Protection” link on that profile. That will give you option to start a mini-game with that player. Both players must do this at the same time (within 2 minutes). In a future release you will get a push notification that someone wants to start a game.





Q: How do I know how much longer my sync lock protection with someone will last?

A: You can view the status of all our locks and protections on the web portal.





Q: Whoa, that web portal is different. What’s up with that?

A: Yes! We are moving the WWW web site to be the same as the web portal. Hit the “Login” link at the top of the page to get to the portal login. We did this move for two reasons. This allows us to localized the WWW site into other languages for our non-English speakers. Second. We are creating new help website, which will also need to be localized into other languages. The help site is a work in progress. It will get better over time.





Q: Was there anything else in this update?

A: If you have been reading back in the blog to November, you’ll have learned this was a rough year for me. This was our primary focus for the time I was able to work on QONQR. However this update does have many changes under the covers. The new release includes updates to support the Android Oreo and iPhone X platforms. Those were not small efforts. Hopefully they will be invisible to you, but there are bound to be problem with new platforms and we will patch them as quickly as possible.





Q: Why isn’t the new version 2.15 available for my phone?

A: Update 2.15 will only run on Android 5.0 and up, and iOS 10 and up. It was necessary to pull forward the minimum versions. Some aspects of the new phone platforms made it difficult or impossible to support the old phones. There are major memory, security and stability issues with Android 4.4 and below. On iPhone, any iPhone 5 and newer will run iOS 10. Unfortunately we will leave some of our players behind with this change, but we also anticipate leaving behind many multi-scoping phones. Given the focus of this release, we felt like now was the perfect time to make this necessary change.





Q: The app shows the status bar now. Why did you add that instead of staying full screen?

A: Largely this was because of iPhone X. We are supposed to show the status bar on iPhone X. Apple has a bug that makes it very hard to reliably hide the status bar if you are not on an X. in fact, on iOS 10, the status bar covers up the top of the player HUD as a result of the bug. It took many hours to work around the issues with status bars on both iOS and Android. I hope not to change it again.





Q: Will this new Sync Lock system affect Atlantis?

A: We are still evaluating how we want to change the Atlantis rules. Stay tuned for updates to Atlantis Rules.





More Q&A will be added to this blog post as the questions come up.

-Scott (aka Silver)