Hey penguins!

Over the past six months, we have been polishing up the game, making things more consistent, squashing bugs, etc., and we are now down to our two final big issues!

1. Performance - FPS Drops, Freezes, Crashes.

2. Igloo Displacement - When your igloo gets all jumbled up!

Igloo displacement is still being investigated at the moment, so today, inline with our previous post promising more transparency and communication, I am here to talk to all of you about New Club Penguin's framerate issues. Back in December we released a performance update that was successful, though since that update it has become clear that this has not been enough and something needs to be done.

The cause of these issues stems from, as we are all well aware, Advertisement banners. Let's start off with:

Why do we have Advertisements in the first place?

At the beginning of New Club Penguin (almost FOUR years ago now! Time flies.) we had a couple of banner advertisements on the left and right of the game to help cover server costs. The refresh rate (the amount of times the adverts change to new ones) was extremely low on these, meaning that players didn't mind them being there. However, that was when we had less than 100,000 users. As times have gone on, both as we've grown internally and externally, and as the world has changed, prices have risen dramatically, which led to us adding a third advert on the top and bumping up the amount of times they refreshed.

With this change, came sloppy performance, especially for those on weaker computers. The worst part being, we didn't even earn much more! Currently about half of our total costs are paid for out of our own pockets.

NOW! Before you run down the comments and start shouting at us for the next section of this post, please read what we have to say. We've thought long, hard and have had hours of conversation regarding this topic and believe this will be the best way forward.

What is our current plan to solve these issues?

So, we are going to trial something new. We will phase out banner ads over a 3-4 week period while things stabilize and replace them fully with a one-time 30second (no longer - 30 seconds will be the maximum length) video ad during the LOGIN PROCESS.

This means the advert will occur before you choose what server you would like to join.

We believe this is a better alternative to refreshing banner ads, because once you are into the game, you are into the game and won't have any interruptions, no freezing, stutters or pop-ups. All that happens is you will have a 30 second delay while logging in. We have been working diligently to patch up and smooth out bugs that cause you to need to reload/re-login frequently, so if all is working correctly you'll only experience this once per day/however many times you log in.

We will also be increasing the AFK Timeout so you don't get kicked off as quickly for not interacting.

If this doesn't work as intended, our last resort will be to remove ads and open donations from the community. The reasoning for this being a last resort is because we think asking people for 30 seconds of their time is much more favourable compared to asking them for money during the current global economic crisis.

These changes will be coming into effect later this month.

We know this will be a jarring change \u0026 we want to work with the community as much as possible to ensure everyone can keep enjoying the game to the fullest extent possible. We hope that 30 seconds of your time isn't a deal breaker and that you will continue to join us on New Club Penguin for the foreseeable future.

To stay up to date with these changes and more, be sure to join our Discord server and follow us on our socials.

- NewCP Team