BuzzerBeater Forums

Everybody knows the servers are unstable during offseason processing.

We're seven games into the season. Off-season processing isn't a valid excuse for server issues.

So, looks like I have to repeat the same points again and again:

1. Server downtime is almost never planned. In cases when it is planned, we delay the transfers, in other cases we cannot do so because we don't know when they will happen. Unplanned means unpredictable. Are there any websites as complex as this one on the internet that don't experience crashes? It's possible, but I doubt they have our kind of resources to deal with it.

2. If you're asking why so many crashes this season? We had a lot of problems with the offseason calculation. They have, luckily, completed and the crashes related to them have gone away too. This crash was not related to the offseason. It is a random crash explained by out top expert (Charles) as "some problem from within the ASP design" that can happen at any time during the season. What can we do to prevent it? Not much.

3. When placing a player on the TL, we advise you put the lowest acceptable value (in this case 3M) as a starting price. This will insure that the player is never sold for less. Since crashes are unpredictable and virtually unpreventable, setting a lower value is considered risky. In these cases, the seller is accepting a small possibility of a server crash with hopes of getting buyers into a bid war and selling the player for much more than the lowest acceptable value, however the responsibility for the risk lies with the seller. So you see, as with everything in this game, this is a tradeoff. What you do is up to you and when things don't turn out as expected, you have to live with the consequences.

4. The sales finished during server downtime are never retroactively undone. This is because, as explained before, the responsibility lies with the seller.

Maybe we should put this in the rules and settle it once and for all. Actually, that is exactly what I will do.

All current transfers should be frozen and extended for amount of time lost no matter when the actual deadline is.

That would be problematic too.

As I like to go with the flow, I will jump the bandwagon of managers ridiculing the OP and finish with a famous quote: HA! HA!

Problematic? How so? All transfers should have been extended by at least an hour. Now that's going with the flow. With only 2 people able to freeze the market if the sever goes down within a 24 hour period, is nowhere near enough. You can jump on as many bandwagons as you like and use 'the famous quote HA! HA!', but the fact is, that the transfers was not frozen in time. No manager would be happy about that imo.

Even if just 10 minutes were added to all auctions that were due to finish whilst the server was down, from the time that the server comes up.

Thank you for your belated reply.

I feel that in your effort to deflect the fact that system instability has adversly affected a Manager (being myself) that have used the approach (whether intentional or not) of blaming the victim (which is again me).

Even if i had of set the minimum price at 3 mill who is to say that in this crazy market that currently exists, that the player may not have made 4 million in a bidding war.

Trainerman is keen on autobid, but in an environment where auto bid dont exist the current norm is for managers to hide their interest in players and attempt to get the player for the cheapest possible price by bidding near the end of the auction.

Again i am dissapointed by your response which IMO masks the real issue that being that the systems instability will on occassions and has in this instance, seriously affected multiple individuals and that no "cure" exists for this injustice.

I.e. Myself, the multiple bidders who were trying to log in with the intention of buying the player and also all the other Managers who are in the league competing against the lucky manager who managed to get this player for somewhere between 1 and 2 and a half mill under current market value. (Have all been wrongly adversely affected)

The other (imo) silly aspect of your "actions" is that it will encourage more people to put high minimun values on players that they put on the transfer list.

This i believe clogs up the market and reduces the enjoyment for managers.

If anything you should impose a listing fee on managers who list players for high prices and that dont sell, so as to discourage this practise.

Please fix the problem rather than masking the problems that the sites instabilty causes and the lack of fairness that exists, when it does

Last edited by Sid Vicious at 9/1/2015 5:01:51 AM

It's your fault you did not set the desired amount. If you are too lazy to type 7 digits it's your fault and you are a fool too.

You didnt listen to or understand the logic of why Managers start auction prices low

Everybody knows the servers are unstable during offseason processing.

Wake up, We are almost 1/3 of the way through the season

Not gonna join your dick-measuring contest tho.

And I believe you are right not to do this

Any person who follows the mob and kicks someone who has suffered a miss justice, should avoid at all costs any activity that measures their manliness.








Last edited by Sid Vicious at 9/1/2015 5:06:37 AM

It's your fault you did not set the desired amount. If you are too lazy to type 7 digits it's your fault and you are a fool too.

You didnt listen to or understand the logic of why Managers start auction prices low

Everybody knows the servers are unstable during offseason processing.

Wake up, We are almost 1/3 of the way through the season

Not gonna join your dick-measuring contest tho.

And I believe you are right not to do this

Any person who follows the mob and kicks someone who has suffered a miss justice, should avoid at all costs any activity that measures their manliness.

I understand the logic why starting low makes sense - I did start auctions for $1 myself in the past and still do when I am selling certain players. However you are wrong when you want to blame someone else for your own mistake. If you are such a great manager - Top 10 - you should know about the rules, what happens when the server takes a break and so on.

We all have been screwed by server downtimes many times, but just because we were too ignorant and dumb to protect ourselves. If you had that many managers interested and even had a promise for more than 3 mil, just start at that point and see what happens.

Buying back your own player if the amount does not meet your expectations is just as bad as selling for less. You should know that too.

If anything you should impose a listing fee on managers who list players for high prices and that dont sell, so as to discourage this practise.

Please fix the problem rather than masking the problems that the sites instabilty causes and the lack of fairness that exists, when it does

At the risk of being more on the line of suggestions, I'd personally lean more toward charging fees for teams that list players at high prices without selling after a certain number of attempts (which will be greater for own draft picks and players who a team has owned for longer). I'd personally prefer to see high minimums be set rather than having this thread come up two or three times a season.

On the main issue, server / game outages suck. And when they can be prevented, obviously that's ideal. When they can't be and auctions can be extended, that's nice. When they can't, they can't. If a player is listed for a value that the owner finds appropriate and which is not over market, he'll never sell for less than that - any price set below that in the hopes of gaining even more money runs the small but non-zero chance of having this happen. It's unfortunate, and obviously Marin would rather not see the servers go down at all rather than see this happen, but until it stops happening it will happen again, so make decisions accordingly.

At the risk of being more on the line of suggestions, I'd personally lean more toward charging fees for teams that list players at high prices without selling after a certain number of attempts (which will be greater for own draft picks and players who a team has owned for longer).

Suggested that many times - but obviously there are no ressources to get it coded. I think it is good enough as it is right now - in the meanwhile we should just list for high amounts of money.

This "system instability" has adversely affected many managers that were online at the time or had player auctions ending at that time. This is not something that happened intentionally nor it is something aimed at you specifically or our users in general. The situation is that "system instabilities" are unavoidable, unintentional parts of BB life. Now, we are not hiding from the fact that this is a longstanding problem and that there is no "cure" at the moment. If we could do something to avoid it, believe me, we would.

Another approach is to "fix" this retroactively. Your suggestion to relist all of the affected sales is practically impossible to implement in all cases and therefore cannot be implemented as a rule. The reasons why that is are as follows:

1. we cannot relist all of the sales in the affected period because we cannot determine the exact start and end time of the crash which means that we cannot determine which sales were affected with certainty.
2. because such crashes can happen on match days and the relisting can't happen automatically (as there is no reliable way to trigger it) it has to be done manually, and some of the players sold may be used in matches in their new teams before being "returned" to their original teams and relisted. This alone could cause chaos with training minutes and match results!
3. because the relisting would have to be done by a human estimating the crash start and end time, not all of the affected sales may be "fixed". In other cases, some sales that weren't affected by the crash may be redone by mistake. This too would lead to great user dissatisfaction.

Implementation of the autobid function is not an option at the moment and is therefore disqualified as a partial solution. This is due to policy reasons and may change in the future but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also, if you think about it, autobid is not really a good enough solution for this issue, but I will not go there now.

Since it is beyond our control to avoid the crashes and "fix" them retroactively, autobid being inadequate and unimplementable at the moment, the responsibility of prevention in cases like yours lies elsewhere - i.e. with the seller, as he is the only one with the power of prevention. Therefore, our advice still stands, users who decide not to heed it do so at their own risk.

Your opinion about "clogging up" the market has been noted and we will monitor the situation in the future. However, I am personally very sceptical that this policy will have any susceptible effect on the market.

The suggestion for another TL rule punishing relistings and managers that do so would have the negative effect of discouraging player listings and is as such, at least at the moment, not accepted. Further discussion about the suggestions mentioned here should be continued in the appropriate forum.

I understand that you feel wronged but repeating the same complaint again will not change our mind. My arguments and the official policy about the issue have been clearly stated and set, so repetition or long discussions which have a tendency to go off topic will result in thread closure and/or post deletions, as per Bugs forum's rules.