So this was an interesting development, right after the launch of the game! It seems there was a "minor" App Engine outage a little while ago that affected the War Worlds server. Here's a graph of the "milliseconds per request" as reported by App Engine:

That big spike in the middle is the outage. We jumped from an average of about 600ms per request to over 12 seconds! It was reported on the App Engine status dashboard, too:

I guess these things happen, but it was a bit annoying that it was right after the app was launched! For the most part, App Engine has been rock solid during my testing (thanks Murphey's Law), so I'm going to stick with it for now, but apologies to anyone who was affected by this!