BuzzerBeater Forums

Our apologies to all users who have been adversely affected by all this. Indeed, had we had days instead of hours to notice and fix this bug, we would have been able to switch home and away properly. Unfortunately, this would have been impossible without affecting orders already set under the incorrect premise that a team would be at home when it should be away, or vice versa, and there is of course no guarantee that the users that had submitted orders already would be around to submit new ones. We simply couldn't make that switch.

As far as numbers affected, there are 47 finals matchups with at least one human-controlled team affected, and the bug only occurred on leagues with matches that start before 2:00PM EDT (8:00PM in continental Europe).

How come you did not send a message about this before the first game? Now you have done it for the reamining series, but frankly I cannot understand why you did not do it right away...

Right now I feel that it really sucks that I have payed supporter (it will probably go ower though), and that's something I never felt in all the time I have played Hattrick.

I guess you've never had Clubhouse in HT then. :-)

I think they had some campaign, so I had it for free a couple of weeks, but I didn't really like it, so I didn't use it.

But I have been through the famous dcember 2002 or 2003 when the servers where dowbn for days or was it even weeks?

Furthermore, as they knew it a couple of days in advance the least they could have made an announcement (in red of course) where they notified about this problem.

I agree that an announcement was called for.

It was not known a couple of days in advance. Taking the posts above at face value, it looks like the time was at least as short as 14 hours, and probably less in some countries. That's not enough time to expect affected users to reset their lineups, IMO.

It's not true!
I posted my message on Apr 27th 11PM which is 43 hours before the match.
Nobody answered until one of the managers in my league replied my message 24 hours later and revived the post. I agree that at that time it was too late but almost two days before it's wasn't.

B.T.W. the schedule isn't fixed yet. I still don't have home court advantage in game 3 (I hope it would still be relevant since I lost badly on game 1...)

I have never claimed that I posted anything about this. However the first post in this thread, (26731.1) mentioned the problem well in advance. Of course I can't expect you to read every post in the conferences, and I have never claimed that either. However, if you have a bug forum then I expect you to read it frequently (and the bug forum is defintely not flooded with new threads so new threads should be hard to miss), especially during the playoffs.

To put an announcement was just an example of the need for communicating fast and BB-mail is of course an alternative.

In this particular case it was an easy call. Apparently you where alerted too late to know if you would be able to solve it in time, then you should imidiately have communicated this to the involved coaches. If your knew which teams where invoved you could hav sent us a BB-mail, otherwise you should have setup a warning on the news page as the playoff is the most important games of the season.

I'm very sorry that this was the best we were able to do, because perfect is always our goal, bug-free is always our goal, and this obviously was neither. Unfortunately, doing things in real-time is very, very hard, and I'm open to all suggestions on how we can do better.

I do not agree at all that this was the best thing you could have done. There are at least a couple of lessons to learn imo:

* Follow the bug forum on a daily basis on normal season, and several times a day during playoff. Probably you should fix an automated email to the developers when a new thread is opened in the bug forum (if you do not have this already)

* As soon as you learn that there is an important bug inform about this, and take a quick decision on how to handle it (just hoping that you will be able to solve it in time is not a good solution). If you know who it affects then you can use this infromation to send a BB-mail, otherwise you should put up a general warning until you know. Of course not everyone will be online and not everyone will understand, but at least then you have made what you can to inform.

I know it is too late in this case, but I hope it is a lesson learned for next time something like this happens.

Finally, all in all I think you are doing a great job, even though it was a little bit "amateurish" in this particular case.

I do not agree at all that this was the best thing you could have done.

So what would be the best thing that could have been done, AND be realistic?

I already pointed that out in the post your answering to.