Spore Galactic Adventures No Longer Downloading Adventure Creations

[insomniac_95]

Spore Galactic Adventures is no longer automatically downloading the assets used in adventures, essentially breaking the adventures and rendering them unplayable. This is not an isolated issue and is occurring across all games.

Our theory is that the specific API used for pairing the IDs with pngs, the "http://www.spore.com/static/model/<subId1>/<subId2>/<subId3>/<AssetId>.xml" API has stopped working, as all the other APIs appear to still be working.
The Spore API docs are all listed here: http://www.spore.com/comm/samples (The problem is under the Static Data section)
and here is the URL to test if it's working, as provided by the documentation: http://www.spore.com/static/model/500/226/147/500226147573.xml

If you and your team could look into fixing this or could forward the information to someone who can, the Spore community would greatly appreciate it.

[MaxisJoe · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the information guys. We're digging into the problem and expect a fix shortly.

[Kyle_Necrowolf]

Additionally info...

All API methods that explicitly end in ".xml" will return a 403 Forbidden error.

Any API methods that do not have an extension (such as all REST APIs), or have a ".png" extension (such as the static PNG data APIs) work fine. It is worth noting that adding ".xml" onto these URLs will cause the 403 error.

This Spore API is used by the actual game client, as well as a number of third-party applications that read data from the Spore servers.

[MaxisJoe · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the information guys. We're digging into the problem and expect a fix shortly.

[Rebecca1208]

Thank you very much for looking into it!

While we're at it, there has been another issue with the Sporepedia for quite a few years now that has been reported in the past.
Quite simply, the Plays Counter on adventures has ceased documenting information since 2013, this manifests in adventures not displaying how many times they've been played, and therefore has broken how it calculates difficulty, reward, ratings, and thus also disables related features such as earning trophies and leaderboard scores on player profiles. It's made levelling new characters near enough impossible without third party assets, and has killed the speed running scene entirely.

I can provide an example in one of my own adventures, where it clearly shows on the leaderboard and comments that players have played the adventure, but due to the "Number of Plays" being zero, it's restricted the difficulty rating and the rewards given for completion. This issue has also effected all older adventures before 2013, where their scores have been frozen.

While I understand this isn't the same issue as the original specified in this thread, it is indeed related and has become another crutch on the Sporepedia and the community. I feel confident in speaking for many of us that we would really love to see this problem addressed! Thank you

[MaxisJoe]

@Rebecca1208 Thanks for the note. Is there some other thread where you (or others) have been tracking that issue? I'd like to keep this thread focused on one problem.

[Rebecca1208]

@MaxisJoeTo my knowledge, this is the most comprehensive thread in regards to the issue, with more information posted in the replies (page 2); https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bugs-Technical-Issues/Adventure-0-Play-Bug/m-p/2515516/highlight/true#M304...

Thanks again for the response! I'll set aside this topic for that thread now as requested

[MaxisJoe]

@Rebecca1208 Should work now. Please try again.

[stilesak]

@MaxisJoe Are you referring to the issue with adventure content not downloading? Or the 0-plays bug? The adventure content not downloading bug has been fixed and works as intended now (thank you btw), but the 0-plays bug still seems to be in effect. I played through an adventure and the counter did not increment like it is supposed to

[MaxisJoe]

@stilesak This thread is about the Adventures content not downloading. That is fixed. If/when we're able to do something about the 0-plays issue I'll update that thread.

[stilesak]

Ah right sorry, thank you for the clarification!