Excessive features

Anonymous

Game: fortythieves
Game #: 99814191
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Please describe the problem in detail:

This was a good site at one time, but lately it has become too bug-ridden. Your attempt to put extra features (ie hooks for mouse undo, redo, etc.) has made
the program slow down. The undo function is totally jacked up ..

You should Google "The Law of Diminishing Returns" ... more is NOT always
better ...

david

booya wrote:

Game: fortythieves
This was a good site at one time, but lately it has become too bug-ridden. Your attempt to put extra features (ie hooks for mouse undo, redo, etc.) has made
the program slow down. The undo function is totally jacked up ..

I'm sorry you're having problems with the site. There are 2 parts to our site: the front end and the back end. The front end is the actual card game part (clicking things, moving cards around, etc), the back end is the part on our server that collects scores and gives you back high score tables, leader boards, etc.

So when you say the site has slowed down, which part do you mean exactly? Are the cards moving around slower, or are the parts like loading a new game and saving high scores going slower?

If the cards are animating slow, check your browser zoom level. We find that this often gets set accidentally (via keyboard shortcut) and IE really slows down dramatically when this happens.

Some of the features we've added recently have actually sped up the front end part (using a new animation system on modern browsers*--makes card animations super smooth).

If it's the high scores and page loading that's slow, we're attempting to make that better. That's not caused by more features per se but by more and more people using the site which puts strain on our server. Check out our 6 year traffic graph:



A couple months ago we did some server upgrades that should help out on that front. We've also identified a problem where our database periodically eats up all our server RAM (causing the highscores and page loading to grind to a halt) and we're attempting to find the root cause of that.

As for the undo function--I don't quite understand. Do you not like the interface? The old techniques (button and keyboard shortcuts) are still there and we tried to make it so the new interface wasn't intrusive. Or is there a bug and it isn't working right? We'd love to have more details so we can fix the issue.

Thanks for your comments,
David

* Modern browers are considered to be IE9, Chrome, recent Firefoxes, Safari 6. We support earlier browsers, of course, but we don't extensively test on them (since most people are using the latest stuff).

jim

booya wrote:

MSIE 7.0

We often accidentally break Internet Explorer (which you seem to use) because it's often different and we don't use it. Please report bugs you see and we'll try and fix them.

booya wrote:

This was a good site at one time, but lately it has become too bug-ridden. Your attempt to put extra features (ie hooks for mouse undo, redo, etc.). The undo function is totally jacked up ..

Yes it was on Internet Explorer. It should be fixed now. Thanks for your report. Please let us know if anyone else has problems with this.

booya wrote:

has made the program slow down.

You might check to see if you are "zoomed in". Press Control-0 (that hold control and press zero) to reset the zoom. This is often the cause of slowness for people.

booya wrote:

you should Google "The Law of Diminishing Returns" ... more is NOT always
better ...

Quite true.

-Jim