@Terber
Hey, no problem. Glad to help.
Appears we lost @Josh? Have you heard from him?
Well, I had two more occurrences of the game freezing/ending situation I described in my last post just before you posted Terber. The game definitely does not like if you window out of it for anything I believe. I do not think you can window out of the game and into any other app without the game causing some issue. It definitely causes either a game ending issue or it definitely drops only you if you window out temporarily and into messages. I don't know what it's called but just regular messages where you get SMS or MMS type text messages from your friends or businesses. Twice earlier today I was checking my messages for correspondence from my doctor's offices and I was told by a friend I convinced to start playing here that the game dropped only me during one of these episodes. The other time it just wouldn't progress into a regular game and was stuck in between the waiting room and the game table and I did window at that point.
@Josh,
At approx 8:42 PM CST just now the game froze and at this point who knows if it's, me, you, my ISP, your server, etc. Have you ever been able to verify if it is ever the player's end of things? As in...is it on their end or yours? I'm just asking because this site seems to have become unreliable and not having issues like this elsewhere. Got dropped 3 times today. Lost a lot of Rank strength during all that too. EXTREMELY frustrating to keep trying to play yet my ranking is going the wrong way and not my fault. I take losses and not my fault. Just not fun...
Not hearing back either....
@Josh,
The last time we heard from you was now over two (2) weeks ago. Are you ok? Is everything alright or anything we can help with?
Our particular last correspondence was regarding some suggestions and screenshots that I had sent primarily to you. You had responded back that you thought they were good ideas including possibly some extended statistics for the players. After that I posted several times about continued game drops or freezes along with requests to repair back my ranking, removing losses that shouldn't be there, and reducing the quitter number (what do you call that new metric?).
Any chance you can give us an update?
Also, was there something I said or did that rubbed you wrong? If so my apologies.
BTW...
You may notice on a different string where I have tried to contact several players that only two have come back acknowledging receipt. It would be a new player I brought to this app to play here hopefully named Lori and some more chatting with Terber.
Thanks,
M.O.B.
@Mike Ox Big Hi Mike, yes saw your posts and sorry for not getting back sooner. Been busy with work and also taking some time off...spend last weekend kayaking on the Susquehanna river and caught some small mouth bass...then back to grind at my day job...anyway...all is well...just a little busy with other stuff.
I saw you tried using the tagging feature. Seems like mixed results. I haven't tested it a lot myself. This forum is an open source "out of the box" plugin that installed on the website so I haven't delved into all the features and how it works. I know I get emails when I'm tagged but I'm not exactly sure what happens when there are multiple people with the same screen-name (since the app actually uses your email address to log in) or what happens if the user has never logged into the forum before. I've meaning to look into it a little more to see...Also not sure if many other players come to the website so not sure how likely people are to respond.
I am adding notifications within the app itself in the next update and will try to include forum notifications and give people a button within the app to reply so we may see more people engaging that way.
I also would like to change the expert table and stats taking your suggestions into account but it's probably a few weeks a way before I finish coding and testing it.
I am still seeing a fair amount of errors and crashed games in the logs. I've setup monitoring to keep closer tabs on this. It seemed like things were getting much better after the last release but now I am seeing numbers trending in the wrong direction so need to investigate that further to figure out why. I am changing my thinking a little bit in regard to the fairness of the penalty system as it's hard currently to discern whether someone quit in the middle of the game on purpose versus got kicked out due to network errors. I haven't figured out the best approach yet but thinking about ways to make the either distinguish what caused the player to leave the game and/or offering an appeal button so if someone thinks they were unfairly penalized they can appeal it (with some limitations on how many times a person can appeal and possibly some kind of verification of circumstances).
Thanks for checking in and again my apologies for being non responsive. I certainly appreciate having you as an engaged player and hope to eventually bring in more true Pinochle enthusiast to build this community and attract stronger players.
@Josh
Glad to see all is well and you are just busy having fun and working!!! Just what we are supposed to do till God calls for us... ;o}
Wasn't familiar with the Susquehanna River till you mentioned it and I checked it out. FASCINATING!!! Did you know these facts about your river? It is the longest river on our Eastern Region of the United States and totally contained within our country's borders. It is scientifically considered one of the oldest...if not THE OLDEST river on Earth....some 300 mil years old. It has eels, walleye, bass, and even smaller sharks at the ocean end of it...lol
Speaking of small mouth bass that you caught...
Do you catch and release or catch to eat? What bait? Keitech Swimbait, Zman Finesse TRD, or a Rapala Brat? I read mixed info about if you should eat the fish or not but didn't make any sense because if the river is being used by millions for drinking water then what is the issue? One article source did mention that there is a concern about the catfish and eat only one per month. Amazing I read about some flathead catfish in the 60 pound range...lol...wow.
Don't know where you are enjoying this 400+ mile long river but the photos of the rural sections looked wonderful!!!
Regarding the hit or miss on getting ahold of other players via an ampersand in front their gamer name... Well, some profiles show the person's "@johndoe" below their photo and I have used that spelling along with caps/no caps like they show but nothing... Look below your photo and you'll see the "@josh". For the most part the app does show this for the majority of the population of available...
So I have to try one more time.. LOL
Can you please adjust my ranking and loss numbers? All those crashes / freezes/ abrupt endings have cost me a heck of a lot of Rank wherein I am bouncing around the first quarter of the 1700s when I should probably be somewhere north of our year of Independence by now 1776...!!!...lol. Also, blemishes that are intolerable to me are the ones where I was saddled with a bunch of extra losses in my "Win/Loss" record that are just eating up my win percentage, my nerves, and my stomach lining...LOL.
Lastly, the "games quit" snitch number for my profile has been unfairly inflated past what I am guilty of doing on my own.
Could you please let me know if you could get to these when you unbury yourself and come up for air?...lol I know you are probably slammed with chores and tasks hh
@Mike Ox Big Good evening sir...yes I am a big fan of the Susquehanna. The spot I go is a little north of Harrisburg where the Appalachian Trail crosses the river. It's a huge river, long and wide, but not very deep, and there's several dams so it's gentle current great for kayaking. There's a club of people who kayak the whole river from upstate New York down to the Chesapeake. Someday I might try that.
I do not keep the bass, I throw them back. When I go lake fishing if I get a walleye I might eat that but not the bass. I use a tube lure for the small mouths and that works pretty well.
I did take a look at the "mention" feature in the forum and I think I will have to do some tweaks to get it to work with my login system. I currently let people use whatever screen name they want since the email address is the unique identifier but the forum is expecting everyone's screen name to be unique. I will probably need to do some custom coding to add a number after the screen name if there are more than one. Otherwise, I think only the first person to use it will get matched.
I will take another look at your stats. I am still trying to figure out the changes for the next release and deciding how to transition the current stats so partly am waiting to see what will be carried over.
I am leaning toward having "abandoned" be a permanent count of unfinished games and reporting that separately from "penalties". Penalties will also be for leaving the game before finishing but will be temporary and disappear after a few days. I am considering having an appeal option if the player disagrees with the penalty and having a criteria to decide whether or not to remove the penalty with a limit on how many times in a period of time someone can appeal.
The new stats will also show win %, loss %, abandoned % and winning trend from the last 50 games.
The screen where players choose a table is going to be updated to be more dynamic so I can make adjustments to the table parameters in real time. That way I can experiment with tweaking the levels and try different approaches.
Anyway, that's what I'm working on this week.
@josh
Just had the attached image glitch crash happen at 8:50 PM CST. What was different this time is for a split millisecond I saw the two player's cards before me jerk/twitch and then change but not the suit...just the denomination of at least one of them. Very odd...
I had a rash of drops yesterday and today...
Two yesterday and one just a few minutes ago.
Please see attached.
And I'm sure it gave losses too...Aaarrrggh..
@josh,
Please see message just before this one. I forgot to put your name in that one.
@Josh,
Game crash again. Approx 7:02 PM CST I sat there for a long time and the "Sorry I ruined your day" message came up. Please see attached.
Could you please tell me if it is definitely the game and not me that is crashing and ending??!!
Couldn't have anything to do with the AI robots? I asked that because I have not seen them in quite a while. Obviously they wouldn't come out unless somebody quits but if these crashes are happening because someone quits the AI isn't making it to the table. Is there something switched off or blocking them from the doorway.. LOL?
Looked at the logs from this game. It looks like what happened was the server didn't receive the confirmation from your phone to acknowledge the end of the last trick. It was probably a dropped network packet. I am experimenting on better timeout management so the phone will try again in 2 seconds when this happens but haven't implemented it for every scenario yet.
@Josh,
This one can't be my phone but please check because it is bizarre! A game just ended with that typical warning dialog box stating a sorry blah blah blah... at approx 4:32 PM CST but there is a major twist on this one. Please look at both attachments. One is a screenshot I took when the game froze and the other is a screenshot of the usual dialogue box that comes up signifying that the game has ended. The first one I took before the sorry blah blah blah dialogue box is a screenshot where you will see three hearts with an ace in front of me. Well this is totally wrong because I should be the last card thrown. All three of those cards in reality should be rotated clockwise one player or in other words clockwise 90°. The player to my left through the 8th and I was about to Trump with diamonds. In fact after that Trump on that book I would have gotten the message that the rest of the tricks are mine. This is getting old Josh and I'm very frustrated that I'm stuck in the 1800s with my ratings because I keep on losing a ton of rating points because of stuff like this and I've never gotten my reading points back so my rating number definitely does not match my win-loss record. Granted some of the rating number loss has been at my hands but a bunch of it has been at the game apps crashes.
Please let me know if it is my phone again but I don't see how with cards now being rotated on the table.
Thanks,
MOB