CBS Sportsline releases its weekly "report card" (1 Viewer)

[Cowboys#1]

http://www.sportsline.com/fantasy/status

explains their issues and why all the problems..

i hate their slow downs but keep going back.. :(

 

[the rover]

They failed to mention the week when all scores were erased and recorded as 0-0 ties. Our league wasn't fixed for nearly 24 hours.

 

[shamrock84]

 

[inca911]

Where was the link to click and get a partial refund due to their performance issues? I must have missed it....

 

[The Royal Jack]

I like CBS and was suprised by its apparently candid assessment of its shortcomings this year.

They did fail to mention however is that their system basically is collapsing under the weight of new users they brought on board by agreeing to host NFL.com's fantasy games. (They did mention generically that thousands of new users from free games were part of the problem) This new business arrangement has put a crimp on their old customers, as they simply were not prepared to handle the volume from the NFL site.

 

[Cowboys#1]

Where was the link to click and get a partial refund due to their performance issues? I must have missed it....

thats what i was looking for toofirst time i clicked i just scrolled down looking for the "how to collect your refund" link..no such luck..

 

[Righetti]

Week 1: Network Redesign Causes Problems, Grade = "F"

Problem: Over the summer, SportsLine moved to a new network facility. As you might imagine, this is a vast undertaking, and we took the opportunity to not only move but also rebuild, enhance and redesign the systems and the hardware that power both our Fantasy and our General SportsLine services. In Week 1, one of the new systems malfunctioned. The simplest way to describe it is to say that until we discovered the cure, which was the equivalent of turning a switch from "off" to "on", we functioned at less than half our capacity.

Impact: Site performance was slow for many customers over the course of the day.

Solution: The fix proved to be incredibly simple. Unfortunately, discovering which switch to pull was like finding a needle in a haystack and took us much longer than expected.

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Weeks 2, 3 and 4: Site Performance is Good, Grades = "B+", "B+", "A-"

Problem: During these weeks, everything functioned well, and for almost everyone the experience was good. Behind the scenes we were troubled to learn that the new systems were not yet performing to expectations. The improvements in speed we expected (while invisible to you) were not being realized.

Impact: For most everyone and for most every part of the game, these weeks were solid.

Solution: We turned our focus to tuning and improving the new system in order to discover where the missing site performance improvements could be found.

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Week 5: Slow Page Loading, Grade = "D"

Problem: The bigger and more efficient system that supported us in Weeks 2, 3 and 4 saturated in the hour leading up to kickoff on Sunday of Week 5. When we moved our network, we also added and upgraded many of the servers in our datacenter. These new machines have higher capabilities for handling more data. Unfortunately, we discovered that many of the older machines were saddled with too many leagues and when they could not meet the demand, they created what amounted to a "brown-out" which you saw as pages that were slow to load.

Impact: While the duration of the week's problem was short and affected only some leagues, it was at the crucial time leading up to kickoff.

Solution: We reallocated leagues across the new and the old hardware based on the capabilities of each.

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Week 6: Stats Update Creates Slowness, Grade = "D"

Problem: As a part of our work to improve the new network, we made changes to our file system that inadvertently impeded our fantasy statistics' generation. It was clear that reprocessing the stats would take us into the first hour of game time and once again compete with the burst of traffic that precedes kickoff on Sunday. We had no choice but to set off the process. Again, while most people would have had little or no awareness of the problem, some league members that were trying to set lineups just before kickoff would have seen slowness or even been unable to connect.

Impact: Same as week 5 even if it was brought about by an altogether different cause. Again, the symptom was an inability to adjust lineups before kickoff.

Solution: This unique problem was solved as soon as it was found with a simple change.

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Week 7: Site Performance is Good, Grade = "A-"

Problem: We went back to work trying to discover the missing and expected extra horsepower. For the most part, all systems seemed to be working as expected. Week 7 performed well for you, but behind the scenes the hoped-for advantages of the new design were not being seen.

Impact: All was well.

Solution: We continued to pore over the system in search of the missing performance.

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Week 8: Kickoff Time Sluggishness, Grade = "D"

Problem: Despite the good performance in Week 7, we remained troubled by the missing horsepower and broadened our search for answers. Once again, a new problem would be revealed by the crush of traffic leading up to kickoff. The new and bigger systems which were designed to more-than account for this traffic burst were again not answering the call. As we probed, we found a problem caused by the introduction of our new Free Fantasy game. This year, we offered a Free Fantasy Football game to attract less experienced players who may not yet have a group of friends together to form a league. It has added hundreds of thousands of new teams and new players to our system. The software that was supposed to disperse these new leagues across our network did not allot them evenly. Instead, it put a crimp into one segment of our system. This uneven stress creates what amounts to a bottleneck, and during peak traffic bursts, it can bring the system to a crawl.

Impact: Just like Weeks 6 and 5, while we performed well for the vast majority of the time, we struck-out at the most important moment for some Fantasy players.

Solution: Because so much of the season has elapsed and so much data has been collected, redistributing the leagues would be far too risky and too traumatic. Instead of moving thousands of leagues and incurring a site outage for those players, we chose to add more machinery and focus on the efficiency of the affected part of the system.

 

[QuizGuy66]

I'm sure the "refund" will be a steep discount for ongoing renewal customers, at least that'd be my guess.

-QG

 

[My Hope Street Alias]

I also thought that their intro was leading straight to some discount talk. Wrong. My leagues are full of lemmings. I'm sure we'll be back next year discount or not.

 

[#1 Chiefs Fan]

An Important Message to Our Fantasy Customers

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Message · Report Card You may have experienced periods of slow or interrupted service this Fantasy season.

Every year, CBS SportsLine takes great pride in doing the work required to remain the acknowledged leader in Fantasy Sports. We relish being the industry leader, and we respect the challenge of delivering the best in Fantasy to an audience that expects nothing less.

To meet that challenge, we set ambitious and often competing goals for ourselves:

Make league setup easier, but allow more flexibility for custom scoring

Add more advanced features, but keep pages clean and instructions short

Supply more live, updating stats, but make page-loads faster

Allow for growth, but make the network simple and speedy

These are bold and contradictory goals. Not easy to do. If you can achieve these and deliver week in and week out for everyone who plays, you deserve the title of Champ.

In the past, we've met that challenge, but so far this year, we've fallen short.

What Went Wrong?

This message may be news to you. For many of our Fantasy customers the 2006 season has been better than ever. There are new game features, we launched the innovative Heads Up Fantasy game, and we enhanced live game action with the new CBS SportsLine Sunday GameCenter.

Some of our customers experienced service interruptions, but they were short or infrequent. In fact, for almost everyone, the amount of time in which problems occurred has been only a small fraction of the entire fantasy season.

The problem has not been the AMOUNT of time things have not worked. The problem has been WHEN things have not worked.

Many of our affected customers experienced problems at the worst possible time: just before kickoff on Sunday or at the peak of play between the early and late set of games. By our standard, if you missed either of these crucial times the entire week is a bust, and for that we are deeply sorry.

What are We Doing to Fix It?

Addressing the quality of service issues that have occurred this fantasy season is the #1 priority for nearly every member of the CBS SportsLine staff. Be assured that our staff has been on high alert since the beginning of the season and will remain so until YOU tell us that our service is running smoothly.

What follows is our season Report Card. It's our performance assessment through the first half of the year. We're openly sharing this with you for several reasons.

First, we want you to know that we view our performance this year as unacceptable. CBS SportsLine holds itself to an extremely high standard as we know that's why you choose our service.

Second, we owe it to you as you've stood by us year in and year out. Your membership is proof that we ARE the best in the industry, and we relish being the best by serving you better.

Finally, we're already planning for your return next year. We know your business is not a guarantee. Ironically, much of what is now causing problems was part of the effort to make your Fantasy Football experience better. We made changes to support the growth of our business AND improve your game. We know that the changes we made will do just that. We expected that these changes would achieve that goal from day one. Unfortunately, we're not there yet.

So, here's our Report Card, complete with our own weekly grade. Going forward, we'll update it on the Friday before games and on the Tuesday following. We'll also post status on Sundays. If we have future issues, you'll learn exactly what happened from us, and we'll tell you what we're doing to fix it.

Thank you for playing Fantasy Sports at CBS SportsLine.

Really? There are some leagues that HAVEN'T had problems?

 

[Boris]

I like CBS and was suprised by its apparently candid assessment of its shortcomings this year.They did fail to mention however is that their system basically is collapsing under the weight of new users they brought on board by agreeing to host NFL.com's fantasy games. (They did mention generically that thousands of new users from free games were part of the problem) This new business arrangement has put a crimp on their old customers, as they simply were not prepared to handle the volume from the NFL site.

pretty sure they've been handling nfl.com for a few years (although the nfl recently announced that they're dumping them). i know some of the guys that started commissioner.com, which was bought by sportsline. they're all gone now, which is the real reason for sportsline's decline imo.