Cliffs of Galfond's post: We've pretty much been doing everything right recently, so we are staying the course.

Let's take a look at these parts:

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.
This passage shows he just doesn't get it at all.

Even Doug Polk recently posted that it's "super wtf" that the tables can't be resized.

Phil is trying to say that launching the beta release now was better than waiting many more months to put resizeable tables in.

What he 's missing is that they put too much effort into bullshit (like those changing avatars) and not enough effort into the very basics which are necessary for a poker site -- like resizeable tables ad MTTs.

The sentence at the end is also laughable, as he's saying that launching this bad beta at this point was a good thing, because it allowed them to learn about other bugs.

Yeah... and it also frustrated a lot of your core membership away from wanting to continue playing on your site.


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.
I don't think he gets this, either.

People aren't criticizing the current technical team for its abilities.

They're criticizing both the lack of basic features and the apparent slowness in fixing urgent bugs.

Phil is still too hung up on the fact that they had some previous tech team which didn't work out, and has since switched to this one.

Your tech team can be great, but if they're managed poorly, then they aren't going to get the job done properly. I can say this from over a decade of working in software development.



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.
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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.
Or, simply put, the next update is going to be underwhelming and little will appear different.



In Polk's brief post, he mentioned that the real concern should be the fact that they launched with a lack of basic features and had major bugs. He said that the other stuff (splash the pot, anonymous tables, changing avatars, etc) isn't all that important either way.

I mostly agree. While those design details are worthy of debate, they aren't the main problem.

Someone should have told Phil that you don't launch with a garbage, incomplete product, and you need a marketing budget if you ever want to become anything more than a niche failsite.

Many 2p2 posters are complaining that constructive criticism is falling upon deaf ears, and I have to agree. As affable as Galfond is, he seems very set in his ways, and doesn't seem particularly interested in the community's input. Have they even changed a single thing (aside from bug fixes) as a result of community feedback?