Race not open / Connection problem

Working on it, right now.

Races are running again, although some may have restarted rather than resumed. Please accept our apologies for this, I will gladly postpone races if requested by the league host.

In the meantime, I have tracked the root issue down to one race in particular and will investigate why it caused a crash.

This just happened again as I tried to re-insert two races. The following races will not be resumed as they seem to be causing the problem:

427360
442216

I will be spending the rest of the evening analysing these races to track down what caused this.

Yeah, I got things up and running again, but I will need to keep those two races out of the system for now. They seem to be bringing it down, there is obviously a glitch somewhere relating to them which is causing much wider issues.

In fact, the scale of the damage done by these two races is exactly what we are working to resolve in the next lag update. The service will not be so connected in this way, and one race having a problem will cause far fewer issues than currently.

This is very annoying for everyone involved, but this may also prove helpful, having identified so specifically where the problem is we can debug the situation and hopefully uncover what caused it.

Again, please accept our apologies. I understand the great amount of inconvenience and even distress this must have caused many of you, that is why we are working exclusively on this particular area of the service at the moment, and not focusing on gameplay updates until 2015. We appreciate your patience at this time.

Just FYI, the reason it restarted "twice" within a couple of minutes was because once the service was up again, I tried to make those races run again, and needed to do so to identify that they were the problem. That initiated a second restart. So in other words, the service didn't have any additional issues, it was just me tinkering with it and getting it running. :)

Sorry to hear that Russel. I seem to recall you have been impacted by several issues as of late, as these are occurring at the time your league runs. We should be much closer to finding out why with the data we've collected tonight.

There were several problems, but we have solutions on the way:
[list]
[*]The two races highlighted above were crashing the system - we will find out why
[*]The system currently is prone to widespread fallout from tiny problems - we are working flat out on strenghtening the entire system significantly by December and making tiny errors the tiny problem they should be, not the mess they are now
[*]Races such as yours shouldn't have restarted, either. They should have resumed from where they were once the service came back online. This may also be due to these races in question causing wider-spread corruption of data. The improvements to the system will make this far less likely also, and we are looking to find out exactly why this happens too.
[/list]
These are our priorities currently. I don't expect any sympathy, but the simulations are actually very complex and comparable to many racing simulators on the market, not just what they visually appear as (dots on a track). This provides us a lot of scope for increased depth and gameplay updates in future, but it also means we've been very ambitious out of the box with the system we've built. It's a bit like an F1 team taking an aggressive development path that will pay off in the long run, but might initially be more tricky to work with. Unlike many other games on the market, we are running a 24/7 live MMO service, ambitious for two devs working from home. I don't think there's any other way to put it.

We just had another simulator crash, a very similar incident to last time with some races restarting rather than resuming as the service came back online.

If any races need to be postponed, or run at double speed (if you need to get through them quickly) just let me know, and I will take care of it.

All I can do at this stage is apologize again and ask you to bear with us until we finish the updates that are coming in the next 2 weeks or so to address lag issues.

I have postponed your races now and reset the data.

FYI - I have isolated another race which seems to have been related to the problems this time. Unfortunately we are having to collect data in this kind of slow methodical way on the problem because there is no way to test for things sometimes. Some things only end up appearing in live environments, and this is one of them.

You are in the same league as Tjerk. I was asked to postpone your league and did so at the request of the managers. I apologise if you were not expecting this, obviously there are different tiers in the league and perhaps the bulk of the communication about this occurred in a single tier.