PowerPlay Magazine

Hello friends,
Today the first official season in beta version of hockey was concluded by the seasonal calculation. Overall the impressions are positive apart from a little problem at the beginning and at the end. The main target of the basic testing was achieved and we even managed to build up a stable community of users with about 5000 managers logging in daily. However some problems did occur. I will start with the latest one. An error occured in the seasonal calculation concerning the relegation and promotion and when we tried to fix the problem there were some error mainly in the top division. Some teams from this league and those that were relegated into the second divisions had some wild results which will not repeat.

Teams from the top division also got about 2 million more funds which we decided not to fix in any way. It is only a beta version and because of the game being off line we were under time pressure and fixing these funds would cause new problems. The top division has incorrectly displayed games in the calendar from the previous season which we will fix later. I have to say that we did all that we could with Gioel to avoid the restart of all teams as this alternative was a very possible scenario. I would like to express my gratitude to him publically, that despite his sickness he managed the situation.

Talking about problems, I also have to mention those that are more serious and long term. You probably noticed that we haven't done so many new things in the last 2 week as we usually do. The reason is that we had to modify the code because of optimization so that the server would not stop working. The optimization took so much time that we did not manage to finalize the sponsor negotiations at the end of the season so the sponsor money will be assigned during the first days of the new season. Also the news about the end of season and rewards have not been implemented. This will all work from the next season.

The game runs on one single server at the moment and it runs smoothly. However, we are having problems with the game calculation taking place at 17.30 your time. All the games, of which there is about 7,000 have to be calculated by 18.00. In reality there is not half an hour for this calculation byt only 7 minutes and 30 seconds as the game is accelerated 4 times. The calculation can be done in 5 minutes but when there is 400 managers online it could take 2 hours which will cause that the process will not complete and big problems occur. After talking to our provider we decided to invest some money and run the game on 2 servers. However, the situation did not improve at all for reasons that cannot be explained here. The only solution to this problem is to move the servers to a different country where everything should run smoothly. The problem, however, is finances which are putting us into a tough spot but it is necessary to make this investment. Therefore we have to be thrifty with our resources and the only solution at the moment is to try and advertise on our pages. If you happen to know a company that could be interested, you can contact us by email at support@powerplaymanager.com. We also offer a very attractive option to become a sponsor of teams in the game as a real company. Because of the problem mentioned above, we had to return to our old server and we halted our big advertising campaign that our support teams have been preparing in their countries. It is also possible that managers will be denied access to the game for a few minutes during the game calculation. Once moved to the new servers all these troubles should disappear and the game should be secured in the long run regarding the servers and speed. It is much worse with the financial side and we are considering the possibility to start selling PRO packs during beta as a form of supporting the project. I would like to ask for you understanding on this matter as we are all doing what we can within our free time and we fund the whole project from our own resources. It is certain that the next few months the PRO packs will stay free. I will inform you about the change of servers as the change of DNS will require game outage which should be not too long however.

New:
- during playoff the link to playoff page displays on the top bar
- the prize money for the rank of the team in the playoff displays in the final ranking page
- a simple flash chat was added to the online page
- we edited the old FAQ and soon we will provide a brand new version

Fixed
- you cannot give a number worn by other player to another player on your team
- the players that you have set for shootout are used in the game correctly
- the sorting of teams in the home and away standings has been fixed
- under certain specific conditions it was possible to schedule two game for one day - fixed

That is all from me for now. Congratulations to manager fallout on the championship title in the opening season of the top division and thank you all for your support. I hope we can take this project very far together.

Ivan alias tuttle