Hey all,
I appreciate the kind words and feedback and I understand the less-than-kind words.
I'm kept very busy, so excuse me if I just pop in with updates/responses here every once in a while. Trying to keep up with activity on Discord, social media, and multiple forums is more time consuming than it might sound. I've got a lot of other work on my plate and I'm a very slow writer!
Some of you think we've innovated too much while others think we've focused too much on new features and not enough on releasing a perfect core product. Obviously, we won't please everyone, but I can tell you where I stand:
I believe we've innovated quite a bit with what we've released so far when you compare us to other poker sites. This did, of course, add some time to our development. Bugs would've been introduced either way, and we'd have needed plenty of time to fix them either way, but we'd have been done and in beta sooner, and therefore would be further along on the fixes by now.
Do I regret the additions we made given the time it cost us?
I think that we may have had more success by now if we'd skipped them and launched sooner, but I think in the long run, we'll benefit from being different.
As a poker player, I have learned a lot about when to regret my decisions and when not to. There have been a lot of surprises for us, and while I'd make a number of decisions differently with the benefit of hindsight, I still feel pretty good about the feature and policy decisions we made given the information and expectations we had at the time.
So, I don't regret innovating as much as we have.
For those saying we should have innovated more - I completely agree, and we intend to. We had a lot of ideas that had to be cut or put on hold for the sake of development timelines. If we could turn things around instantly, you'd see a drastically different platform. Unfortunately, that's not how it works for anyone, and we've suffered more development-related headaches than your average project.
On that note - many of you are disappointed in the remaining bugs and limited features and on our decision to launch with them.
There are a few major issues that we launched with that I've seen mentioned here:
1) No re-sizable tables
2) HH downloads not working
3) Sit-In Bug
4) Bet slider reset bug
As far as our decision to launch, 2-4 came as (mostly) a surprise to us. We expected HH downloads to be working within 1 week, but they weren't. We thought that we'd fixed the bet slider reset bug, and that the sit-in bug happened very rarely (and would be fixed quickly).
Once we launched our public beta, we learned that these issues were worse than we expected. We managed to fix most (all?) instances of the bet slider bug in our February release, but the other issues weren't as easily resolved.
We also had a number of server crashes in our first week of operation, and we had a large subset of users who had serious performance issues. Our devs fixed the issues causing those server crashes and improved performance for the majority of those users (there is now a smaller subset of users that still run into consistent issues, which we are still working on).
So the team has made progress on some very serious issues, but, as you've seen, it doesn't usually happen as quickly as any of us would hope.
Re-sizeable tables are a little bit different in that we knowingly launched in beta without them, and we also knew they would not be added quickly.
This wasn't an easy decision, though I think, in hindsight, it was probably the right one. We'd still be pre-launch now if we waited for them and that would mean that we'd have still not learned about the unexpected issues we've experienced thus far. So we'd launch later, then have a number of bugs that take longer to fix. I believe this route gets us to our "final" product faster.
I certainly don't blame anyone who disagrees with that decision or who's disappointed that we have a limited offering with some remaining bugs - I'm disappointed by that, too.
If there's one thing that I want to get across in this post it's that our current limited offering has nothing to do with our team's knowledge of what poker players want. We've got some extremely intelligent, diligent, experienced poker players in this company, who have been involved in the community for a long time. While I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far, our product is very, very, very far from finished. Much of what is in currently isn't there by design, but through compromise.
As I mentioned in my first update post on runitonce.eu (
https://www.runitonce.eu/news/1-an-update-and-a-plan/), we started out with different tech leadership and went down a path that was really bad for us for the first while.
Though I'm still no expert on development, and I'm not truly qualified to know this with certainty, I very much believe we're in good hands now with the team we've got. They've accomplished things that previous team members told us weren't possible, and while they've still come in behind schedule on a number of things - it's often because they've been dealing with the technical debt created by our early development.
(If this sounds like I'm passing off blame, I'm not. Choosing a tech team, picking features and designs, detailing specs for the developers, analyzing timeline estimates and planning accordingly - these are all things I've been heavily involved in from the start, and we absolutely made a number of mistakes. I'll spare you the exact details of where we went wrong, but I was as large a part of it as anyone.)
I mention all this because I want to set expectations accordingly. This update we have in the works, which was expected to be the 2nd of many over this time period, is being referred to in a few places as "the big update." It will certainly be bigger than our previous update, which fixed a handful of bugs and made a few visual improvements, but I don't want everyone expecting it to be groundbreaking.
Among the things being fixed and added, there are a number of codebase improvements that you won't be able to notice. This is because we have to keep chipping away at our tech debt so that we can move faster in the future. We're doing our best to strike the right balance of getting some important things done as fast as we can in some spots, and waiting in other spots so that we can refactor things to set us up for a better, more flexible future.
I really appreciate the continued support from many of you and, as I mentioned, I understand why many others aren't happy with our beta platform.
The plan (hope) is that subsequent updates happen much more frequently, and we make continued small improvements to the platform while working on the larger ticket additions in the background (SNGs, MTTs, etc), over time.
As we move forward, we'll keep trying to make the best decisions we're able to as we work towards the product we dreamt up, and we'll keep expecting the unexpected and adapting as best we can.
Originally Posted by Phil Galfond
Hey all,
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