Another great question that I will try to answer from the perspective of the Ombudsman which is at least something.

None of the following is to be considered some kind of excuse. The why/who/when means nothing as long as the client’s performance is unstable.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is virtually no testing environment in the world that can fully prepare us for the real deal. Online poker networks are immensely complex and operate under heavy, heavy load. And networks are worse than individual card rooms because there are a lot of external systems that the room has to communicate with. So we could have tested for nine years I think without still being able to know for sure that everything would work dandy.

The new software is not “just” new end-user software. More important than the 1.0 version P5 Poker Client is the release of the P5 Engine itself. The Poker Clients are just applications utilizing the new technology enabled by P5 and P5 is a far bigger and more important release than the first version clients.
Every line of code in our core system has been rewritten. Every line of our end-user software (Poker Clients) has been rewritten. But they still have to communicate with some systems that are not of the new generation.

I think it’s fair to say that this is where we’ve run into more trouble than expected. A lot of these end-user bugs you experience are not per ce caused by the game clients or by P5. The bugs just manifest in ways that affect you through the game clients.

In retrospect it may also be that we focused too much testing resources on the actual roll-out (which given that we rolled out P5 as well as the P5 Game Clients was a mammoth task) and relied on our systems to work together in accordance with the many tests we have performed once we got them past the critical rollout phase. The industry has a long industry of botched roll outs of new software (us included) so we really wanted to get that right. A bit frustrating to get everything airborne so smoothly, just to run into some unexpected in-flight turbulence right away

Please keep in mind that this is only our take on the situation. We are not testers, system designers or anything so you can’t read too much into the above. That will just lead to a bunch of follow up questions that can’t be answered.

Humble salutes

Ombudsman
Ongame Network

Interesting!