BuzzerBeater Forums

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.

In genera a good answer, and it definetly sounds like you should consieder rescheduling. A couple of comments though:

For example, I wouldn't consider this game fully complete until we have been able to add in a better staff system, more advanced tactical options, a youth national team system, and some of the supporter features such as federations, a jersey designer, a hall of fame, etc. that people expect from a game but that couldn't happen until things were more stable.

I hope that you will feel this way all this time as this is one of the best ways to secure continue development. I know that in in the beginning of our company we though that with th next release we will be at a level where it is just about "starting to fix" (what you call getting the game "fully complete"), but now we realized that as soon as we are out with a new version we always see room for new and big improvements. It is a moving target.

The truth is, the correct solution in this case is for it not to happen.

Yes, of course, but the truth is, that things like this will alway happen (hopefully very seldom though). In this cas I guess you havenow added a proper test case to your test suite, so for this thing it should not happen again.

Do you even realise how big this game already is?

You talk about it as a game which has 10 users "just fix the problem, easy" "check all the bug forum posts many times a day, easy" "in this case it's an easy call"
Everything here is easy in your opinion, they should all have done this and that to please you.

This problem affected only about 0.1% of all the teams out here, unlucky you are one of them, but you make a huge problem out of this which isn't fair imo. Ok it's unlucky for you, but do you even realise that the BB staff just can't fix every problem in 2 seconds? There are 5 BBs here, and 30k active teams and 90k games every week.

There has been apologies to those 47 teams already and great explanations from the BBs in this topic. Just accept it and temper you emotions, you can still win those playoffs. A change in 1 home and away maybe shouldn't be such a problem, in the long run you still have 2 home matches and 1 away, the best manager will still win it.