So far I'm back up & GC working. I went on a iPhone & logged in to GC. Changed my GC profile name & logged out of GC on iPhone. I connected my iPad to iMac. Did a backup to iMac. Then a restore as a new iPad. At which point I checked & GC was working & I wifi downloaded Gunbrick and it loaded which meant so far so good. Then I restored from the backup I had created a few minutes ago. At this point I've got all my games & game progress and GC is working. I have no idea if it was just the restore as new iPad or just the changing of GC profile name or the combo. Nor do I know how long it'll continue to work for me. And who knows if this would work for most people. My thought was the restore would probably just copy the bug to my iPad but I've tried a few games that would not open in the past & I've been able to play & enjoy them. Fingers crossed GC stays working. Currently at 1 day in a row #
Just one account here. I was trying to clean my iPad a bit this weekend by deleting some games (I'm now down to ~350) and suddenly I saw in one of them appear the GC "Welcome" notification. But (of course) it lasted a few minutes only. My iPad has 64 GB.
Yesterday I got the white screen of death again, so I did a full factory reset for the third time, it will last for three weeks everytime.
Thanks for the replies regarding accounts. I'm just trying to cross things off the list and get ammo for subsequent chats with Apple. Multiple accounts clearly aren't the problem, then, in the same way back-up restores are also not the problem.
And you only have a couple of games at a given time on your iPad! (but with high rotation of which games, as you try a lot of games)
Normally I have not more than three games on my Ipad, and I download 3 to 4 games a week, but most get deleted within one day Ha ha that's right.
I have been dealing with this bug for a few months.. Tried this today and it worked.. 1-Tap Settings > Game Center > Your Apple ID and Tap Sign Out then Sign back in. 2-Restart your device 3-Force restart your device (iPhone or iPad) by pressing the Sleep/Wake (on/off) and Home buttons until you see the Apple logo. 4-Tap Settings > General > Date & Time and turn on ” Set Automatically” Edited to say that this fix was VERY short lived.
This has nothing to do with signing in or out, using airplane mode, changing your ID, etc. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is how it works. Assuming you have the bug: If you accidentally hit the purchased button, GC will break. You need to turn automatic downloads OFF. You need to to do a back up directly to the computer, once a week should do it. Through experimentation, here is the kicker: If you play a game on your device that uses Game Center, and the game was *originally released before November of 2013 when the new GC was implemented, your device will eventually break in terms of GC usage. Take a wonderful game, World of Goo for instance...If you haven't beaten it, too late until there is a fix. Even an update won't fix it. However, I noticed FDG just re-released Tentacle Wars. This version will work just fine, whereas the original version will eventually break down GC. Apple is full of *shit when you are being told, "Oh, okay! We are now aware of this." They've been quite aware for months. Take it from me. Once again, for people who are prone to the bug, any game on your device released before November 2013 will break it. When you back it up to your computer, it takes perhaps 2 minutes if that. If you have a problem, hook up your iPad to your computer. Back up your data. Factory reset. Restore your iPad but don't create a new one. While your games are being restored, which could take hours, take a walk, go to the gym, play another handheld device, take a drive, etc. when you come back, all should work. After this you must delete games that have the 'old' Game Center. To to this, open GC, remove the games from the app, and manually delete them on your device. Sometimes it takes longer for certain games to load up the GC logo. Be patient but people who love both GC and the older games are temporarily screwed.
Decent theory but I don't believe it is entirely based on playing old GC games from before 2013 as there are many folk getting hit by this with only a handful of games bought over the last few months. With this said my nearly 4 week run without issues might be coming to an end. It actually stopped working this afternoon, and although I've managed to jump start it again with a quick logout in Airplane mode before logging back in, I know that fix isn't likely to last long. Will do another backup/restore tonight to be safe.
Definitely do the backup/restore and let us know how it goes. To quote the late Leslie Nielsen, "I'd just want to tell you good luck, we're all counting on you." Edit: Some games need to be manually removed from GC. Also my Air 1 has broken GC and I'm not going to chance screwing up Air 2. Works on phone but I don't need it on there. So sad yet so cool how we are all trying to solve this problem. Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.
I think my biggest case against your "Old GC Games are the cause" as my iPhone 6+ has oodles of ancient games but has NEVER had this issue whereas 2 of my iPads have crapped out from this virus (iPad Air and iPad Pro), all using the latest beta iOS and tied to the same GC account.
Game Center is broken for me, now, and it's preventing some games from being playable. How is this still a problem a half a year later? Unacceptable. Ipad Air 2 is my first and last Apple product. I love the device but I hate the way Apple does things (or doesn't).
Some interesting ideas and thoughts there from DonnyDJ76, although I have auto downloads off. On the older games, it's hard to tell for me whether this could be the case. I have many dozens of games on all devices (given that I spend a big chunk of my life writing about the things). So I can't really comment one way or the other whether older games are screwing up Game Center. How would you isolate such titles anyway? And can games that have been updated since Nov 2013 still have old code inside them? (In all honesty, this does feel a bit voodoo, like all the reset/airplane shenanigans, but we all know old code can break things ) To clarify, my point earlier was that Apple is now officially stating it is aware of the problem. Its support team has been briefed (last week). That's a shift from Apple's sometimes-taken stance with tech issues, which is a general 'this is the first we have heard of this, and you should just set up your device from scratch' approach. (Data loss is never acceptable as a solution.)
It really blows to throw down $ for a new 126 gig iPad mini 4 and have broken Game Center on it. It worked for about 2 weeks. So tired of this bug but at this point I'm starting to think it's here to stay and there is nothing Apple can do to resolve the issues.
Thanks for letting me know. I've been keeping mine at 9.2.1 and have no plans on installing future versions until changes specify that GC has been fixed. I don't think Lord Shadowz has had a problem yet and I'm assuming he is running 9.2.1. I'm hoping that if I back up once a week I'll be good.
The latest is 9.3 release 7. These new beta releases to 9.3 have been coming in hot and heavy the last couple of weeks so maybe they're about to release 9.3 officially soon. It's gone from one beta update every several weeks to multiple updates in a week.
