BuzzerBeater Forums

i totally agree and understand what you are saying Ryan.

this is quite a new game and i have no doubt that you and the rest off the staff do everything that is possible to repair the problems when they occure, what myself and i have read other people saying the same thing is, that the amount of communication, the wording off the communication and more importantly the timing off the communication is what makes me raise questions and i would say others too...

i will try to explain to you in huge detail what it is that bothers me and i do hope you will give another answer than we cant work 24h a day and that you do all you can. this is quite clear and i really appreciate that. noone expects the BB staff to do this, but i wonder whether you guys have a proper plan to proactively tackle the problems.

I will give the example what I would have expected to happen today and not only today but already should have happened weeks ago.

training is late, this is a fact and something is causing this. fair enough.

country 1 (in the training list) resports at 0900 CET that training is 15 minutes late. at 0945 several countries report that training is late and the country at nr 1 reports at 0945 that training is late. at 1030 CET even more people mentioned training is late and the usual debates about whether you can mention this or not because if you do you are a complaining start appearing on the bugs forum. at the same time country 1 reports that training is just done and the next few countries still report training is late. at 1045 CET the first GM acknowledges the problem and says it will be looked at into due time. at 1130 CET a BB comes online and mentions that the BB staff is aware off the problem, they will try and resolve the issue and do their best to solve it. at 1145 there is finally a MOTD mentioning the problem.

Like I said, I do understand you guys have a life, this isnt a business that makes you rich, more something that started out off a hobby, and i do understand you guys never worked in Customer support cause else you would have dealt with certain things very differently. But what I do not understand is, why there is NO BB watching the process (this is the only explanation I have for MOTD and messages on forum to appear hours after the first delay was mentioned by users) at the time when the first training should be processed and the first 30 min or hour after that. If you BB staff are all in the states and this is not possible, than is it too much to as for to have a GM watch the forums and call a BB staff when training is for example delayed 30 min or 45 min or whatever? This is for me very difficult and to be honest impossible to understand... You do all you can to resolve issues, i totally believe that, but I do not believe you do all you can to proactively monitor them and start fixing them as soon as the delays occur. The same goes for game reports going AWOL after games, or financial updates going haywire.

I would like to know why you guys cant get this sorted out?

ps the training in england is almost 6 hours late and the MOTD is still indicating 2-3 hours....

Last edited by Astragoth at 10/28/2011 10:50:00 AM

You guys do a great job, no doubt, especially when contrasted with competitors. Apologies if you interpreted my post as a complaint about laziness or lack of effort; it's not that at all. Just wondering (as someone who knows nothing about tech) whether the frequent delays and outages hint at a need to upgrade servers - possibly to something more expensive, which I'd hope my Supporter dollars would help fund. I know you've had these kind of sagas in the past, and that you moved everything recently, and that it's almost always out of your control, so I'm not being critical. And of course I used to play GLB so I'm eternally cynical.

Last edited by RiseandFire at 10/28/2011 11:07:58 AM

It may not be as easy as buying some new servers. If it's a software problem, it;s much harder. I mean, it;s hard enough writing 10.000 lines of code, but it's 10.000 times harder to debug it. Hope they work things out, and with Monday's update things will start going back to normal, at least for a little while. In Romania, if I;m not mistaking training has been delayed to about 3-4 hours.

yeah

for the last few seasons it seems the delays gets worse how later it gets into the season....

any delays today?

Not me... right on time... and 6 pops on 5 players!

30 minutes late already here...

Last edited by Dodor at 11/11/2011 5:17:26 AM

All right... Release training NOW before the world falls apart ! ;)

I wonder why training delay isn't reported in the "known issues" thread -.-"

Your concern is definitely a legitimate one. There's no denying that all of the recent issues with training and site delays has been a bane to BB as of late. This may come off as a surprise to some, but these recent problems with the site have been very troubling for the staff. We are just as frustrated with these bugs as anyone is, and probably more so.

Now this is the part where I spew out the same repetitive garbage urging everyone to bear with us and please be patient. The fact is, there's not really much more that I can write. You've probably read it over and over again by now, but maximum effort really is being put into trying to solve these issues. A lot of people are under the impression that when training fails to execute properly, the solution is simply for a developer to press one or two buttons, and voilà, problem solved. If only it were that easy.

BuzzerBeater has an immense code base that features several schedulers processing different information at all times. When one of these schedulers hits a snag it's not uncommon for the site to experience more than one problem since there's overlap between them. For example, when the economy update on Sunday nights struggles to run properly, you've probably noticed that certain pages are inaccessible. These pages are "locked" until the economy update gets back on track. If this didn't happen, then the problems BB experiences would be multiplied. The code for training to run trumps all other processes (except maybe games), so when it breaks, it's usually the only thing that does break. The thing is, it takes a lot of time for training to complete in all of the countries. Even if the problem with training is caught and corrected quickly, training is still going to take longer than usual to complete because it has to get caught up to the point where it broke, and then continue at a normal pace (hopefully). Also, believe it or not, but each week training has failed to run properly in the past month has been a unique issue each time. It's not the same problem that no one bothers to fix week after week.

I'm not sure my explanation here is completely lucid and not all of the information may be accurate, but that's the best way I can describe the current state of affairs as a non-developer. I hope this qualifies as a fair reply to your post. Furthermore, I'm always around to try to answer questions and respond to complaints as long as they're worded appropriately.

To All:
I know it's hard to stay positive when the site is experiencing continuous problems, but negativity isn't going to help make matters improve.

agreed!!! +100!