As many of you already know we have had some issues with our tournament
server over the past several weeks. This is the result of a surge of new
players in tournaments since the New Year, which has basically overloaded
our tournament server.
Tournaments can be very slow or not function at all during peak time
periods. Tournament directors have been resorting to running their
tournaments on paper and waiting until off peak hours to post results.
This obviously is not acceptable to you or us.
We have been struggling to make the situation better over the past
couple of weeks and I think we are making good progress now. There have
been many changes made to the software and in addition we have added
an additional server to help with the tournament slow down.
For the time being we are using older servers to assist the tournaments,
but we are in the process of expanding and putting more servers online.
This will happen over the next few weeks.
I know many of you are frustrated, so are we. I have been personally
putting in long hours trying to keep the tournament servers up and
running during our busiest time periods. I've been working
until three and four in the morning quite often making changes and
researching the best ways to fix the problem.
We want to put in place a solution that will last longer than just
a week or month, which is why it has taken us so long to make
progress. Some major internal changes were necessary in the way
the databases and tournament s operate. This basically was
a whole new ball game for us and we want to make sure that it will
scale in the future.
We are hosting over 100,000 tournaments a month right now. That's
a lot of tournaments. We want to be able to do twice that number
with our new changes, so I'm looking forward to seeing you in
the tourney rooms this weekend.
I know we have not done the greatest job of letting the players
know what is happening. We try to keep a few of the top level
TD Managers up to date, but honestly we have been so involved in
trying to fix the problem it is hard to stop and let everyone know
what exactly is going on.
I want to assure you that this is the technical staff's number one
priority. That means that we have been working every day on it and
will keep up that pace until things are running smoothly.
We greatly appreciate your support and patience during this period
of intense growth.
Thanks very much!
Sincerely,
Jeremy Rusnak
President
Case's Ladder, Inc.