I haven’t been playing much recently but I went to login to the Full Tilt software on my Mac and I received the normal “Yo, we need to upgrade your software, dude” (I might be paraphrasing there) message. Nothing too much of note there since I had read that Tilt had made some major upgrades. I hit OK and went about my work since I tend to be a little ADD I eventually forgot about it.
Sometime later I remembered that I had done an upgrade and clicked on my Full Tilt icon. It tells me that I have to do an update. WTF?!? Okay, maybe something screwed up and it wasn’t installed correctly. So I go through the motions again and again no update to my software.
Okay, maybe the updater is broken. That’s happened at Tilt a few times and you eventually have to go to the site and re-download so that’s what I did. Except it wouldn’t download. WTF?!?!
I had an appointment that afternoon so I forgot about it and went on with my life.
A few days later I give it another whack and now the software downloads but my Mac is telling me it doesn’t recognize the .dmg image file.
Wash, rinse, repeat another few days later. Again, unrecognized file type.
I start looking around for information and stumble across several threads on 2+2 (somebody should really clean up those threads before someone trips and breaks their neck) and it looks like this update has been a total disaster. Everything from timeout issues to flickering and even some unconfirmed reports of 8 card flops.
Maybe being unable to download the software might be a good thing.
But rather than taking a dig at my former compatriots I just wanted to say that having been on the other side of some disaster releases I’m sure people are doing everything they can. Unfortunately, the people who are the public interface typically are as stressed and freaked out as the players. Nobody walks into the office and says “I would like the next several days of my life to turn into a living hell with people abusing me in public forums.” Except for me. I love abuse but I’m sick like that.
From the player’s perspective it all seems so easy to fix. But sometimes a major release is an even more major pain to unwind. I think someone was on one of the 2+2 threads suggesting that Tilt simply go back to the pre-broken version and that sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution.
I don’t know what happened. I haven’t spoken to anybody at Tilt regarding this. But my guess would be that they made major changes on the server side that would take just as long to unwind to a previous version as it would be to fix them. Sometimes there is a point of no return. That’s especially true when an upgrade involves any sort of change to what data is collected, how it’s stored, or a change to the data schema.
Going back means taking all of the newly collected data and porting it back to the old system. And guess who would be writing all the scripts and such to port the data back? The same guys who could be working on fixing the problem.
I’m not sure if that’s an answer anyone wants to hear but it’s not always as easy as it sounds.
Photocred to alemaxale
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Hi, my name is Bill Rini and this is my poker blog. I've been blogging about poker and the poker industry since around 2003-ish. Like most people I started out playing poker as entertainment in home games whenever we wanted to sit around and smoke cigars, drink beer, and eat pizza, and needed a good excuse. I started playing online shortly after the first online card rooms opened and it wasn't long before I was playing 20, 30, or even 40 hours a week or more. One day I received a phone call about a program manager position at Tiltware which was the company that consulted to Full Tilt Poker on software development and marketing. After Tiltware I spent about 2.5 years working at Party Poker where I was the poker room manager.
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I’m amazed that in this day and age any site regardless of it being poker or not, launches a beta without testing it first.
Madness
Well that assumes:
1. That testing reveals every problem.
2. That there weren’t some outside pressures that forced it to be released without being fully baked.