Q1 and Development
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Hi Everyone!
The holiday season is done and for most of us, it’s back to work with a fresh year ahead. I enjoyed the time off and feel ready to take on the many challenges 2019 represents!
But first, I think it’s important to look back at Q4 2018 and examine how we performed. Unlike last year, the huge spike in traffic the 2018 release represents did not melt our servers. However, we were not without problems revealed by the increase in traffic. Many of you reported deteriorating game-play performance on several occasions which immediately sparked an investigation on our end.
We identified a memory leak that would randomly shut down one of the three server nodes periodically and got to work on a fix. Unfortunately, the fix involved the refactoring of one of our key technology components, and ate up a lot of the working time in December. And other than the site not crashing, there was no user-facing payoff for that work. Plans to begin Tournaments V 2.0, and game engine fixes were postponed until the work was completed. The holidays set us further back and we are not starting 2019 where I thought we would be.
Today, we’re investigating the outage that occurred on New Year’s Day, which we suspect to be another memory leak on our game servers, and when that’s done, we will be focusing on refactoring another key back-end system. We managed to fix a couple of Custom Teams card-related issues, and will be releasing them soon.
Next up, we’ll dig into Tournaments V 2.0 as planned. While the dev team chews on that, I will be working on specifications for custom card functionality. Custom cards (name TBD) will provide another foundation piece for League Play by making players entities that can exist outside teams and seasons. I expect to dive into the spec some time in February.
In other 2019 news, I will be running monthly marketing campaigns to continue to attract new players to GO. The existing community continues to be spectacular welcoming new players and helping to get them up to speed. I will do my part by working on new introductory videos, complete with my made-for-newsprint voice-overs to introduce the functionality added since the last round of videos were created.
As always, thank you for your continued interest and participation in APBA GO as we work to make it the game you want to play in 2019, one step at a time.
All the best,
Jeremy -
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@apba-go-jeremy Jeremy, I’ve never played the master rules so I can’t give you any input from that aspect. The Basic game (board and dice) is designed to be highly playable and therefore some what simple in design concept. But here is the MLB 2018 stats on Home Runs allowed. The league average was 186 home runs allowed per team. However, the fewest Home Runs allowed was by St. Louis only 144 allowed, and Baltimore allowed the most with 234. (numbers are from baseball-reference). The difference between St.Louis and Baltimore is 90 home runs which is approximately a half of a home run per game( in a 162 game season) . This might be to difficult to program. But if an A pitcher is on a team that is equal to or greater than the league average for home runs then every home run result remains unchanged. However, if the team is below the league average in homers allowed then any homer by a double column card is a double. This is an idea and I don’t know how the stats would work out. Thanks again.
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Thanks for everything you do to make and keep APBA the best game out there!
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Really appreciate the review of the issues you have had to tackle. Much appreciated from our end. It gives some insight into how complex the site is and how troubleshooting is always a part of the job. As a “consumer” I really like the transparency. Married to a programmer, I can understand the glitches that can happen. Rest assured we are with you in this. Great job!
