Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

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Outlaw
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Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Outlaw » Mon Apr 02, 2018 7:13 am

Just wanted to say thanks to the NFBC/SportsHub Crew and their efforts to Fix yesterdays problems and the improvements made over the past few weeks. They have promised to continue making improvements over the next few weeks and that is all that matters.

Even I jumped on the product sucks bandwagon a little yesterday and I apologize!!!

FAAB worked fine in the end, lineups going smooth this morning, Stats all showing up, let shave a Fun season and acknowledge this is the best Fantasy game/product for the best fantasy players, Bar None!!

Thanks Greg, Tom, Darick and all the IT Folks!!!

Have a fun week All!

Bjs2025
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Bjs2025 » Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:18 am

Agree on this. People generally want to hate and some of it is certainly understood but there is literally no product on earth offered like what the NFBC does. One reason might be the undertaking we've seen them take on with this site transition and getting all of this as correct as they can this year.

justiceberry
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by justiceberry » Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:27 am

the customer service provided with nfbc isnt touched by other contests. some other big contests dont even reply to your emails and Tom and Greg always make a point to reply, i dont know how they do it, but props

The Union jacks
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by The Union jacks » Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:35 am

Feel like they have a good IT team now but maybe not 'baseball people' but they are addressing things fast and with all the experience of Tom/Greg and all the players here my bet is on it being a truly great product in a short period of time.

Chest Rockwell
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Chest Rockwell » Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:46 am

I do not for the life of me see how we can congratulate the NFBC crew for yesterday or for much when it comes to the IT part of this contest over the last few weeks. I care about these guys too and hated to see their Easter ruined but to shower praise come on...

I also think the personal attacks on them were total BS.

I think the answer is somewhat in the middle. We obviously continue to have huge issues and mistrust of this contest from a technology standpoint. I think 90 plus percent of what drives that is well earned.

I have no issues at all with the FAAB glitch yesterday. IT servers and databases are occasionally going to have issues. A contingency plan worked and it was well communicated. Very little if any harm done.

I do have a huge issue with how little testing and planning was done with fine tuning this new package. I for the life of me cannot believe that if Greg/Tom/any experienced NFBC player was involved in testing these things would happen. Small stupid SH!T like live stats defaulting to period. No games played anywhere. Moving multi position guys around on Fridays. These people are too smart to not catch this in testing so therefore I am left to assume no testing. I then make the assumption that either consciously or sub consciously it was said hey the first few weeks of the season will require a lot of fine tuning. To that I say we deserved better.

I would encourage everyone to stop the atta boys and also stop the personal attacks. We all love this contest and all have to see that this contest is very much in danger in current form with the IT issues. Let's keep our eye on the ball and help be a part of the solution while still demanding a top notch product. IMO I am a lot better friend to these guys by helping them get the product we all desire rather than the I am sorry you got your Easter ruined routine.

Bjs2025
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Bjs2025 » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:03 am

I agree that there were obviously issues but being completely frank I experienced hardly any of them.

DOUGHBOYS
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by DOUGHBOYS » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:24 am

It has become a fine line.
We all love the NFBC, Greg, Tom, and the fact that they care and are just as passionate as we are.
The problem, as always, has been with the IT side of the NFBC.
It has even become comical in my own mind in what is more humorous, the attacks on IT or Greg and Tom defending IT.

When the draft season started, there were many things that needed corrected in the draft room.
I thought to myself, "Here we go again." Another new site, another IT mess.
But, this crew was different.
They were quick to put out the fires and none of those fires spread so far as to ruin the drafting experience.
I was even a little impressed that they fixed a lot of things in a short period of time.
That draft room ran like a top for the rest of the year.

I knew that when in-season management began, that there would be problems.
How could there NOT be problems?
Everything is new. Every user used to STATS. Carrying over every item needed without forgetting something is a task bordering on the impossible.
Greg, Tom, and the crew dropped the ball on positional changes.
They made that clear.
STATS never fully got live scoring correct, so I'll give this IT team time to get that fixed and I'll bet they do that.
The other fixes are all on a smaller scale, such as the blue lettering, etc.

Really, I think we're on the right track. We are going through the worst of this process now.
The first few weeks of in-season management for any new process will have problems.
In my mind, the worse thing this IT team has done is attempt to throw their problems back at the users.
A few weeks ago, we were told to look at our caches or cookies.
Yesterday, we were told to go to Google Chrome.
Don't do that, IT.

My hope is that this IT team is as quick as putting out fires in-season, as they were with the draft room.
If so, I think everybody will be happy within a few short weeks.
I hope they put positional changes at the top of that list.
That is an item that effects every team.
In the mean time, it does little good to criticize what we have.
We're playing among the best this hobby has to offer.
Greg, Tom and the bunch are passionate and the best at what they do.
We are the best at what we do.
Hopefully, the tech side of things can make strides to be the best at what they do.
If that happens, we won't need threads like this :D
On my tombstone-
Wait! I never had the perfect draft!

lrr
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by lrr » Mon Apr 02, 2018 9:37 am

Can you imagine the spring without the NFBC? Can you imagine opening day baseball without the NFBC? I try to keep it all in perspective. Problems occur with anything new. It will get better. Major items will be taken care of shortly. Let's enjoy what we have.

Chest Rockwell
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Chest Rockwell » Mon Apr 02, 2018 10:45 am

lrr wrote:Can you imagine the spring without the NFBC? Can you imagine opening day baseball without the NFBC? I try to keep it all in perspective. Problems occur with anything new. It will get better. Major items will be taken care of shortly. Let's enjoy what we have.
I totally agree. I just think it is a little naive to think the IT issues are not a threat. NFBC for profit enterprise with small margins. Lose 10 percent of your customer base and you have serious issues. Which is exactly why we all need to work together to make that not happen. Including not drowning out the voices of people who express their frustrations in a civilized manner.

CASS
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by CASS » Mon Apr 02, 2018 10:57 am

Chest Rockwell wrote:
lrr wrote:Can you imagine the spring without the NFBC? Can you imagine opening day baseball without the NFBC? I try to keep it all in perspective. Problems occur with anything new. It will get better. Major items will be taken care of shortly. Let's enjoy what we have.
I totally agree. I just think it is a little naive to think the IT issues are not a threat. NFBC for profit enterprise with small margins. Lose 10 percent of your customer base and you have serious issues. Which is exactly why we all need to work together to make that happen. Including not drowning out the voices of people who express their frustrations in a civilized manner.
I think Chest's original post is really on point. It's not the FAAB issue yst (or it shouldn't be) - things happen that create one off nightmares that we need to have patience for. What is not acceptable is to insult our intelligence by saying this site was even remotely regression tested. I mean testing 101 when launching a new version is making sure the old matches the new right? A majority of things screwed up could have been caught by the most basic testing.

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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Walla Walla » Mon Apr 02, 2018 11:08 am

I'd be more than happy to put up with the problems, if only the State of Washington would let me. sigh! :cry:

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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by rkulaski » Mon Apr 02, 2018 10:15 pm

Chest Rockwell,
Great post and well said.

I feel like I jinxed faab as last weekend was flawless and faab bids were so easy to set.

I am sure IT will eventually fix the problems for us but seems like a lot of this could've been prevented with proper testing prior to rolling out the new software/website as others have mentioned.
Richard Kulaski
Fairview, TN

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Outlaw
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Outlaw » Tue Apr 03, 2018 5:46 am

Having spent over 30 Years in IT, I can tell you, they did testing and Beta testing for many months, B/C there is no way they launched all the new features on a brand new platform and website (mapping) without doing so. To state they didn't is just factually wrong. Most of the issues are and have been related to Bandwidth and processing power, areas where a lot of companies underestimate initially. The fact that changes can seemingly be made quickly and easily shows the design has been well thought out, adaptable, scale-able and planned. It also appears it has been designed to handle a lot more too in the future.

This inst Microsoft where you just go buy a canned Fantasy application with all the bells and whistles and install it. They had security issues to consider in regards to all the data and customer information. Every application and OS out there continually deals with bugs, fixes, upgrades, patches, etc... Go to online to web based companies and see if they have green security (Https) lock key in their browser address and you'll be surprised at how many still do not. NFBC/SportsHub does!!! See where this takes you, as do many other Fantasy sites (https://www.rotoworld.com/) No where is where and that's and NBC affiliated company.

They attempted to keep the best of the previous design and make the new design and operation better. They had less than a year to accomplish all this and it was caused by the sale of the operation to a new entity. The other option would have been to suspend the NFBC and possibly their other games during this time for "Testing" and I suspect that would not have gone over well with many folks - think of your summer without NFBC fantasy???

We should be appreciative that here we are in week 2 and things seem OK and they have proved they can make the needed improvements and do so quickly. All we need to do now is make constructive recommendations/requests and stay away from the negatively and let them just do their job without all the Vitriol, B/C they have proven they can do it and they do listen and they do care.

Bjs2025
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Bjs2025 » Tue Apr 03, 2018 7:36 am

^ Good to hear from someone with actual insight. Thanks

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Greg Ambrosius
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Greg Ambrosius » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:00 am

One thing we all know about baseball is that this sport is a marathon. It's six grueling months of action and right now we are through five days of a 180-day season. No team has won or lost the pennant yet.

In a way, our debut season with new software is the same thing. We are five days into this regular season. We certainly haven't won the pennant and I don't believe we've lost it yet, either.

Nobody deserves accolades or firings five days into the season. Certainly not here. Do we wish the drafting season had gone without a single hitch? Of course we do. Do we wish the first five days of the NFBC season went without a hitch? Of course we do. All MLB players and teams wish for the same thing.

We can talk about the testing procedure here and we will. But one thing that I'm seeing that is making me very happy is the performance of the software. The draft software worked very well on over 800 leagues. Do we wish we had installed 1 Round Auto at the launch? Of course. But did we add it and did it work well? Yes. The live auction and draft software also worked very well, albeit through a server issue on the first day in Chicago and New York. We loved the way that software worked. Live Scoring is working the way we wanted, along with Live League Standings, Live Overall Standings and more for over 10,000 teams. FAAB has had two flawless runs, with the software processing over 25,000 claims on Sunday. So the software seems to be working as expected through the early part of the season.

Our biggest hiccups have been server issues and there's a reason for that. We feel like we have a handle on this now, but it just shouldn't have happened. The overload caused the problems on Sunday and the delay of FAAB. And just for the record, it wasn't the first time we've had to delay FAAB. Anyone around for the first few years knows that we pushed back the 7 pm ET deadline an hour a couple of times because of server issues at STATS that struggled to handle a couple of hundred users all making bids. Unfortunately, it has happened before in the NFBC.

Back to testing. There was extensive testing, but could there have been more? Of course. Could we have had more eyeballs on this and sooner in the process? Of course. But I'll admit that when we tested we were looking at performance of the software and we made several tweaks to get it right. What we definitely didn't get right was the correct display of all the data. We can take the blame for not noticing that Live Scoring wasn't defaulting to Today's Stats or that it wasn't totaling the Hitter and Pitcher totals for the day. Or that the stat categories weren't in the proper order. Or any number of things. Display issues should have been addressed, but honestly we were watching performance issues more than anything. That's on us.

The one good thing I hope you can see is that tweaks like display issues can and will be addressed quickly here. Nothing against STATS, but during the last couple of years when we didn't have any full-time programmers on our game, changes would be put into a 2-week Sprint that could take up to 4 weeks to be addressed. Even simple changes went into the next Sprint. That doesn't happen here. We have a full-time staff of programmers who will make the changes, test the changes and then get them live on the site as soon as they can. We have been and will continue to be more responsive to changes than ever before.

None of this is meant to squash the criticism we've seen from some of you (well, some is over the top). Any delays, any issues, any display screwups, need to be called out. But when they are called out with better solutions we are able to work together and get them changed. The Live Scoring is a perfect example of that, as is the Team Stats page. I think both will be much improved from when we launched in no time and everyone benefits from that feedback.

So let's move on and continue to make the site better. While the STATS site grew to be comfortable through 14 years of tweaking, the code was from 2002 and 90+% of you were still drafting on Flash software, which is more than outdated, its extinct. Everything is being coded in a way that we can improve it, tweak it, modify it, whatever to make the final result better. And improving the display of anything, while definitely a different preference for 3,000+ owners, can always be done. Let's keep the software humming the way we all expect it to be and continue to make the site better. And if it involves criticism or long nights along the way, so be it. It's just part of the job.

Now let's have a good Day 6 of 180. Good luck all and enjoy.
Greg Ambrosius
Founder, National Fantasy Baseball Championship
General Manager, Consumer Fantasy Games at SportsHub Technologies
Twitter - @GregAmbrosius

Lunatic
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Lunatic » Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:39 am

Greg Ambrosius wrote:One thing we all know about baseball is that this sport is a marathon. It's six grueling months of action and right now we are through five days of a 180-day season. No team has won or lost the pennant yet.

In a way, our debut season with new software is the same thing. We are five days into this regular season. We certainly haven't won the pennant and I don't believe we've lost it yet, either.

Nobody deserves accolades or firings five days into the season. Certainly not here. Do we wish the drafting season had gone without a single hitch? Of course we do. Do we wish the first five days of the NFBC season went without a hitch? Of course we do. All MLB players and teams wish for the same thing.

We can talk about the testing procedure here and we will. But one thing that I'm seeing that is making me very happy is the performance of the software. The draft software worked very well on over 800 leagues. Do we wish we had installed 1 Round Auto at the launch? Of course. But did we add it and did it work well? Yes. The live auction and draft software also worked very well, albeit through a server issue on the first day in Chicago and New York. We loved the way that software worked. Live Scoring is working the way we wanted, along with Live League Standings, Live Overall Standings and more for over 10,000 teams. FAAB has had two flawless runs, with the software processing over 25,000 claims on Sunday. So the software seems to be working as expected through the early part of the season.

Our biggest hiccups have been server issues and there's a reason for that. We feel like we have a handle on this now, but it just shouldn't have happened. The overload caused the problems on Sunday and the delay of FAAB. And just for the record, it wasn't the first time we've had to delay FAAB. Anyone around for the first few years knows that we pushed back the 7 pm ET deadline an hour a couple of times because of server issues at STATS that struggled to handle a couple of hundred users all making bids. Unfortunately, it has happened before in the NFBC.

Back to testing. There was extensive testing, but could there have been more? Of course. Could we have had more eyeballs on this and sooner in the process? Of course. But I'll admit that when we tested we were looking at performance of the software and we made several tweaks to get it right. What we definitely didn't get right was the correct display of all the data. We can take the blame for not noticing that Live Scoring wasn't defaulting to Today's Stats or that it wasn't totaling the Hitter and Pitcher totals for the day. Or that the stat categories weren't in the proper order. Or any number of things. Display issues should have been addressed, but honestly we were watching performance issues more than anything. That's on us.

The one good thing I hope you can see is that tweaks like display issues can and will be addressed quickly here. Nothing against STATS, but during the last couple of years when we didn't have any full-time programmers on our game, changes would be put into a 2-week Sprint that could take up to 4 weeks to be addressed. Even simple changes went into the next Sprint. That doesn't happen here. We have a full-time staff of programmers who will make the changes, test the changes and then get them live on the site as soon as they can. We have been and will continue to be more responsive to changes than ever before.

None of this is meant to squash the criticism we've seen from some of you (well, some is over the top). Any delays, any issues, any display screwups, need to be called out. But when they are called out with better solutions we are able to work together and get them changed. The Live Scoring is a perfect example of that, as is the Team Stats page. I think both will be much improved from when we launched in no time and everyone benefits from that feedback.

So let's move on and continue to make the site better. While the STATS site grew to be comfortable through 14 years of tweaking, the code was from 2002 and 90+% of you were still drafting on Flash software, which is more than outdated, its extinct. Everything is being coded in a way that we can improve it, tweak it, modify it, whatever to make the final result better. And improving the display of anything, while definitely a different preference for 3,000+ owners, can always be done. Let's keep the software humming the way we all expect it to be and continue to make the site better. And if it involves criticism or long nights along the way, so be it. It's just part of the job.

Now let's have a good Day 6 of 180. Good luck all and enjoy.

Well said, and I am RETIRED (that's right KEN MAGNER, RETIRED :lol: :lol: ) to ENJOY the remaining 174 Days :D :D :D
Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear a word you're saying...Ralph Waldo Emerson

CASS
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by CASS » Tue Apr 03, 2018 9:05 am

Outlaw wrote:Having spent over 30 Years in IT, I can tell you, they did testing and Beta testing for many months, B/C there is no way they launched all the new features on a brand new platform and website (mapping) without doing so. To state they didn't is just factually wrong. Most of the issues are and have been related to Bandwidth and processing power, areas where a lot of companies underestimate initially. The fact that changes can seemingly be made quickly and easily shows the design has been well thought out, adaptable, scale-able and planned. It also appears it has been designed to handle a lot more too in the future.

This inst Microsoft where you just go buy a canned Fantasy application with all the bells and whistles and install it. They had security issues to consider in regards to all the data and customer information. Every application and OS out there continually deals with bugs, fixes, upgrades, patches, etc... Go to online to web based companies and see if they have green security (Https) lock key in their browser address and you'll be surprised at how many still do not. NFBC/SportsHub does!!! See where this takes you, as do many other Fantasy sites (https://www.rotoworld.com/) No where is where and that's and NBC affiliated company.

They attempted to keep the best of the previous design and make the new design and operation better. They had less than a year to accomplish all this and it was caused by the sale of the operation to a new entity. The other option would have been to suspend the NFBC and possibly their other games during this time for "Testing" and I suspect that would not have gone over well with many folks - think of your summer without NFBC fantasy???

We should be appreciative that here we are in week 2 and things seem OK and they have proved they can make the needed improvements and do so quickly. All we need to do now is make constructive recommendations/requests and stay away from the negatively and let them just do their job without all the Vitriol, B/C they have proven they can do it and they do listen and they do care.
Obviously some form of testing was done - just done poorly imo....oh and i've spent the last 20 years in banking software in NY (if we need to qualify posts with resumes). Hopefully it gets better soon

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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by davetniagarafalls » Tue Apr 03, 2018 7:44 pm

I think it would help if the game managers and owners were actual players. Mock users doesn't cut it. Beta Testing doesn't cut it. A $50 beat Tom and Greg league doesn't cut it. I'm sure there's reason to not allow employees to play in national contests. But maybe a satellite league with real teeth would help, even if all winnings go to charity. I'd be more than happy to contribute. But something where the NFBC game managers have to make the same moves that we do under real conditions not spring-training like conditions. Where they draft a Marwin Gonzalez or Eduardo Nunez type for position eligibility only to have to stick him in a 2B slot because he has an early game and can't be moved after he is locked in. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse with that example but it is a big deal because those players are drafted earlier than their projected stats suggest they should - because of the extra eligibility. My point is that you can't simulate the real thing - just ask Daniel Vogelbach and his spring training .400 and 7 HRs (now watch him hit 3 HRs next game in place of Ne Cruz). You have to feel the same pain and frustrations as the owners in real time and space.
"Dont sweat the petty stuff and don't pet the sweaty stuff."

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Tom Kessenich
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Re: Great Job Yesterday NFBC Greg, Tom and Crew

Post by Tom Kessenich » Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:31 am

davetniagarafalls wrote:I think it would help if the game managers and owners were actual players. Mock users doesn't cut it. Beta Testing doesn't cut it. A $50 beat Tom and Greg league doesn't cut it. I'm sure there's reason to not allow employees to play in national contests. But maybe a satellite league with real teeth would help, even if all winnings go to charity. I'd be more than happy to contribute. But something where the NFBC game managers have to make the same moves that we do under real conditions not spring-training like conditions. Where they draft a Marwin Gonzalez or Eduardo Nunez type for position eligibility only to have to stick him in a 2B slot because he has an early game and can't be moved after he is locked in. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse with that example but it is a big deal because those players are drafted earlier than their projected stats suggest they should - because of the extra eligibility. My point is that you can't simulate the real thing - just ask Daniel Vogelbach and his spring training .400 and 7 HRs (now watch him hit 3 HRs next game in place of Ne Cruz). You have to feel the same pain and frustrations as the owners in real time and space.
We have that Dave. That's a huge reason why we have the Greg, Tom, Darik Auction league so that the three of us are on the site doing everything that all of your doing and seeing everything you're seeing. Is it the same as having multiple leagues? No but it absolutely helps us when it comes to seeing site functionality and features, where things are working, where they are not, where we're doing well and where we need to do more. That league isn't a simulation, it's a real league where all of us are active and using the site under real in-season conditions. It's extremely beneficial.

As far as the locked utility player issue we've acknowledged we just missed the boat on that. That has nothing to do with a lack of testing because there was extensive testing done as Outlaw posted. That's just on us for missing it. We apologize for that and we will get it added. That's not on the tech team or anyone other than me, Greg and Darik. We should've been on top of that and we weren't.
Tom Kessenich
Manager of High Stakes Fantasy Games, SportsHub Technologies
Twitter - @TomKessenich

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