Life In 19x19

logan wrote:AGA-European Go Team vs. Sedol 10 Game Series

http://go9dan.com/Home/Promotion/4

Game 1: Sedol Lee vs. Andy Liu

Date: January 20, 2013 @8am EST

well, the first game was interrupted by server issues -- network lag caused Lee Sedol to lose on time by move 51

They'll play a rematch tomorrow (Jan 21): same bat time, same bat channel.

Maybe this is a chance for LeeSedol to see that his server hasn't improved at all since starting beta and he can put the hammer down.

They only made it to move 11 today before one of the players lost on time again (Andy this time, I think).

The lag was so bad, I had reloaded my page, which of course bumped me out of the game, and once the game is over, you can't get back in. So I don't what the conversation was and plans for rematch.

There's no such thing as bad publicity eh......

I managed to get into their 3rd attempt, just in time to see it had already timed out or got stuck by move 4

xed_over wrote:I managed to get into their 3rd attempt, just in time to see it had already timed out or got stuck by move 4

Hmm

these guys are going to crush kaya.gs, it's just unavoidable.

I wonder who did their testing? Beta phase on Go servers seems to have some abnormal meaning.

This is just embarrassing. It looks like they will be wasting a great idea through poor preparation.

Whoever runs go9dan.com obviously has money (to sponsor a go league of top pros) and connections (to reach out to various pros). They seem to lack technical chops and preparedness. They could easily have hired someone with the skills of wms/KGS or Gabriel/Kaya.gs, so it looks like they lack HR vision as well. Did they blow their budget on promotions and not have enough money left over for engineers?

Their website doesn't even have announcements that cover the recent problems. This is incredibly frustrating.

The whole operation seems very amateurish. Lee Sedol's name deserves to be associated with something much better than this.

Rant over.

lemmata wrote:Their website doesn't even have announcements that cover the recent problems. This is incredibly frustrating.

well, actually they do (though maybe you're looking for more details?)
http://go9dan.com/Home/NewsContent/14

One of the most important aspects of the beta test phase would have been for 2 or 4 or 16 guys on the other side of the world to play each other.

Unbiased as i can be on this thread, making an html client for a realtime system is not trivial at all.

Its not a "solved" problem, in the sense that there are many opinions, diverted technologies and strategies to solve a particular problem. In Engineering terms, there is no recognized architecture for online games based on HTML.

Figure that sites like Facebook took more than 4/5 years to have actually live-updated content. For many years it was a plain blog. And even now, its not particularly a real time environment: you don't get things as they happen, not even which contacts you have are actually online.

Kaya.gs's architecture ended up having issues with the unexpected, as many technologies we use are rather green and we have had to deal with issues around them. Many issues we had came from third party solutions, not our own. (for example, there are a few phrases that if you try to translate, it will hang the client, due to a bug in the translator which we didnt do).
(critical)Issues on html clients are guaranteed to arise.

There was one thing we did by decision, regardless of technical quality, which was running the server as soon as possible with as little expectancy(features, quality) as possible.The first alpha release didn't even have passwords for users. And the intake of issues we had on the first 3 weeks was astounding and unexpected, which let us work over them gradually, as we expanded features and functionality.
48hs before alpha launch, the lobby looked much worse than this :

Go9dan went the other way around, which is prepare everything for launch, and have little battle experience. In turn, they experience these kind of issues at key moments.

They will improve with some time, and get better gradually. I actually would like to see the pro league running, and see how they attract Asian players from titans like Tygem and Wbaduk.

I hadn't experienced lag before on that site, which they claim is related to the betting system on that latest post. Performance is one of those things that no matter how well you did things before, the new one can mess up all the ones from before.

Kaya.gs wrote:There was one thing we did by decision, regardless of technical quality,
which was running the server as soon as possible with as little expectancy
(features, quality) as possible. The first alpha release didn't even have passwords for users....

Go9dan went the other way around, which is prepare everything for launch,
and have little battle experience.
In turn, they experience these kind of issues at key moments.

Kaya's procedure is better: start small ("Hello, world!"), test the hell out of it; add features incrementally, test the hell out of it; rinse and repeat.

(I have a feeling NASA's Curiosity has followed a similar approach: baby steps, test test test; more baby steps, test test test; repeat.)

Let's see how long it takes Go9dan to successfully complete the 10-game match.

speedchase wrote:these guys are going to crush kaya.gs, it's just unavoidable.

Hmmm, I seem to remember Kaya advertising a rebroadcast of a quebec tournament, and the server crashing with noting working right. The game ended up being rebroadcast on kgs...

People forget these things quickly (like you have), so give them a chance.

xed_over wrote:

lemmata wrote:Their website doesn't even have announcements that cover the recent problems. This is incredibly frustrating.

well, actually they do (though maybe you're looking for more details?)
http://go9dan.com/Home/NewsContent/14

Thanks for the link. I didn't see that the first time the issue occurred. I suppose that this is the news from the second occurrence. I would have liked a little bit more information (or at least some timeline for future updates), but I guess it is better than nothing.

badukJr wrote:Hmmm, I seem to remember Kaya advertising a rebroadcast of a quebec tournament, and the server crashing with noting working right. The game ended up being rebroadcast on kgs...
People forget these things quickly (like you have), so give them a chance.

I cannot speak for speedchase, but I am willing to give them a chance. However, they have looked pretty bad so far, so it is natural to worry. In fact, you might say that we are worried because we want them to succeed. They have many fantastic ideas that are worth trying.

Also, it is not fair to compare Kaya's early technical issues with go9dan.com's (Kaya's problems seem to be...well there are already threads about that). Kaya's development model leans heavily on user testing. This was made clear upfront and they have visible features on their site that actively seek feedback. While they don't implement every requested new feature, they have been very good about fixing reported technical issues related to existing features. Furthermore, the expectations generated are different when broadcasting two amateurs in Quebec playing in a regional tournament. When you announce that the strongest player in the world will play the first AGA pro on your server, then you are implicitly telling people that your server's technology is ready for big time. If the server is not ready, then they should have managed people's expectations better.

I hope that Go9dan.com gets its act together...