Four reasons I dislike Dragonvale

Just now there was an "internal server error" which reset my game and I lost my most recent progress. This made me think about the upsides and downsides about having a game that lives on the Internet.

Rather than have the game data saved locally, Backflip Studios decided to save it on their servers. One good thing about this is that if you have an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, you can pick up whichever device you want and continue your game where you left off (rather than have separate games on each device). However, the negative outweighs the positive with online game data storage.

These are four reasons I dislike the strategy Backflip Studios took with data management:

1, The game loads slow as it tries to contact the servers.
2, If you don't have an Internet connection, you can't play.
3, If there is a server error, you may lose some progress.
4, There is no guarantee that your data won't be lost in the future (like if Backflip goes out of business), thus voiding all your hard earned progress over the years.

Though there are good reasons to have online data storage, there are many more headaches with it than there are joys.

Overall, I enjoy playing Dragonvale, but I hate the fact that it requires an Internet connection and there is no guarantee that your game is safe. Play at your own risk. Dragonvale is free in the App Store.