A while back, we mentioned that we were making Async play for all of our games. We released it along with Reversi. Made a bunch of fixes & new features (such as allowing starting of games asynchronously) and then released it on Khet 2.0... more fixes & features (including re-doing the connect-to-cloud process), and now it's coming to Hive. It's done, it's tested, and we're just waiting due to timing-reasons. In the meantime, we're doing small housecleaning-type stuff to make it shine around the edges. We've made a bunch of fixes to async since it first launched with Reversi, so hopefully the Hive version will be pretty stable even at launch. It's been months since we've pushed a release of Hive, so much has changed in our engine. We've update the rendering engine, made performance improvements (so it can run fast even on slow computers), and more. Async play seems to have finally stirred up a bigger online community for Khet 2.0, and I'm hoping it does even better for Hive. I'm really sorry that it's taken so long for async to come to Hive (I really thought it would be a couple of weeks, not a couple of months). Hive is our "crown-jewel" so to speak (our largest community), so we wanted to make sure the async was really good by the time we released it. We might only get one chance at this. Multiplayer communities are tricky because you always have to stay above a certain threshold of users... if you drop below, then users stop checking for games (ever!) and it just gets desolate quickly. With this update, we plan to FINALLY turn the tide and get the online Hive community to critical mass. After the release, please contact us with any bugs you find... and please have fun finding other people online to play with! :-) We will try to drive a bunch of people to the online play, right around the time of the release... and if we get enough games going, hopefully there will always be some action in the online community.
Talk to you in about a week!