When My Little Pony for iOS and Android launched earlier this month I could count my Gameloft Live friends on two hands. Now I have 500. They say you can never have too many friends. In my case, too many friends destroyed Ponyville.
In the screenshot above you'll notice entirely too many chests. When players send gifts to their friends in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, they show up as these chests, dropping from the sky onto the unsuspecting town below. When I started playing I was lucky if I got one or two per session. Lately I've been getting several hundred a day. All at once.
There are so many there than tapping on them to reveal the hearts inside has become a chore, so I left the batch here alone, figuring I could get back to them later.
The next day I logged in to the same screen, and another flock of a hundred chests dropped on top of the existing one. Before the game finished loading, it died. There were too many objects attempting to load at once.
I tried reloading; it died. I restarted the iPod Touch, ensuring all other programs were terminated; still the game died.
So I deleted the app and reinstalled it. This deleted everything I had built over the past three weeks completely.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic doesn't save your progress online. Everything is local to your device, so when I downloaded the game on my iPad, for instance, I had to start over again from scratch. So when I deleted the app and restored it, everything went poof. All of my progress. $30 worth of in-game purchases. Gone.
But hey, at least I've still got my friends, right?