BuzzerBeater Forums

Just wanted to paste an update based on BB-Forrest's comments in the IRC chat:

<oeuftete> BB-Charles, BB-Forrest: once you get the new supporter feature stable... um, could you fix the last one? Saved TL search has never worked even slightly
<BB-Forrest> oeufette.. that's not true
<BB-Forrest> "even slightly"
<BB-Forrest> is totally offbase
<oeuftete> BB-Forrest: it works 0% for me
<BB-Forrest> yes, it has one small bug we should fix
<BB-Forrest> about the display terms not matching up.. or some off by one error somewhere i need to solve
<BB-Forrest> but don't exagerate like that
<BB-Forrest> its annoying
<oeuftete> I can't speak for everyone. It does not work for me. At all. I have never got a player shown who resembles at all my saved search. And the search itself can't be saved reliably.

I'm dismayed by this response. Being completely honest, it has never worked for me, and it's clear that other posters in this thread have the same problem.

I just played around with it some more. It appears to work iff I specify all four skills. If I leave any blank, then I just get an apparent default result (I'd guess it's the player with the highest actual bid that's <= what I can afford). That's more than one small bug.

This also looks like a symptom I see over and over in BB, whether it's in the handling of TL forms, the parsing of BB forum markup, the display of skill levels... it looks like there's a different implementation in every different place, instead of the use of one piece of library code. So bugs happen more frequently.

---

Finally, I've spent a lot of time giving free quality testing and bug reports to BB over the years. This is the last.

Hi Oeuftete,

Thanks for the post. I wasn't that up-to-date with the situation and didn't know it was still a problem, as it wasn't a system I was part of designing.

I'm sorry you feel that this wasn't approached in an acceptable manner. I'll add it to my own list (which, admittedly, is pretty long right now), but I'll see what I can do.

Take care, and Merry Christmas.

i apologize for being inappropriately short with you on IRC chat.. i honestly thought i understood the problem with the TL search (namely that the reloading of the saved search data had an off by one error in one of the skills so that it would seem to progressively get lower as you reloaded it.. though the data itself was being stored correctly and being used correctly in the transfer list filter).

However, it seems you feel there is a larger bug at play here that i was not aware of.

I don't know why it would only be working when you specify all 4 skills, as i definitely developed and tested it working on one skill at a time, then one all 4... so i'm surprised to hear that.

I did think that some people were getting confused because sometimes they would put in criteria for which there was no player that was coming up for sale under that criteria, and in those cases we show something else... and people interpreted that as it not working, and maybe we should have some sort of flag to indicate whether or not there was a saved search player found.. like color the box different or something based upon that and this would make it clearer when the saved search was getting used to find a player or not, but I saw these as minor issues compared to the feature just not working at all... and so was frustrated by your characterization that it simply didn't work at all when i put a lot of time into it.

I've found the bug. It was a fairly tricky thing to track down. We have some complicated logic in there to reduce the load on the page, since you can imagine how intensive it can be to search millions of players for one who meets some search criteria every time someone loads a page as common as the Manage My Team overview page.

In any case, I think I now have it fixed. Please let me know if you or anyone still has problems with the system.

Last edited by BB-Mark at 12/27/2009 3:50:29 PM

Right now:

My current saved search: min salary $20K, nationality Canada
On the t/l: 9 matching players, some of which I have sufficient bids to bid on
On MMT: A ~$50K salary Spanish center with a $2.7M bid

So, yes, I still have problems with the system.

Edit: Logged out and in just in case. It's now a $15K salary Turkish SG.

Last edited by Mod-oeuftete at 12/27/2009 5:16:04 PM

Are those the only criteria you have set?

Yes. (http://www.oeuftete.com/images/static/bb/tmp/saved_search...)

Those give me the following player (2805590), who is Canadian and has a 30k salary.

So, the problem isn't a bug, it's the intended (but perhaps incorrectly so) behavior. The search looks for players whose current bid is between 60% and 80% of your available funds (money - bids). So, it's not that there are no players in the desired range -- rather, unless you specify a bid price range it's going to look only within the 60-80%, and there didn't happen to be any players *there*.

I've run a check, and there happen to be 0 players with those criteria in your 60% - 80% range.

So, the problem isn't a bug, it's the intended (but perhaps incorrectly so) behavior. The search looks for players whose current bid is between 60% and 80% of your available funds (money - bids).

If you keep it that way, then I think it would be wise to present this information clearly somewhere to the end user. There's no way I would have expected it to only consider that range by default... from the outside, it appears badly broken.

I personally don't think you should keep it that way. Anything up to 100% sounds reasonable to me, with the nearest expiring auction being presented when there are multiple matches. Actually, maybe any match at all regardless of cost, perhaps with a toggle in the preferences for suppressing players you can't currently afford. But I'm not your Product Manager.

Thanks for the advice. I think I may have a potential solution, but I'll need to test it out first to make sure it scales.