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dmarc117
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Typical of CBS, I started to read their reply and actually believed for half of a second they were going to do something for their customers, ie refunds, discounts in '07 or something, but all I get is a report card that already tells me what I know. CBS sucks and I am overpaying.

Edited by bustedflush16
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Typical of CBS, I started to read their reply and actually believed for half of a second they were going to do something for their customers, ie refunds, discounts in '07 or something, but all I get is a report card that already tells me what I know. CBS sucks and I am overpaying.

 

I was thinking the same thing :D

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What I get from that is for half the season they have a grade of D or below. That is 100% unacceptable for a pay service. The problems seem to repeat too. Unable to access site right around kick-off on Sunday which is one of the most important times to be able to access the site. You would think after the first week of problems they would have fixed it. But week 5, 6, and 8 were "slow to load" or "sluggish around kick-off". Bull crap!!! The site wasn't just slow, you flat out could not gain access and if you did get in you had to keep the page open or you wouldn't be able to get back in later. The fact is they should just fix it they wouldn't have to apologize for this crap. And I am willing to bet that the same problems exist next season. Unfortunately I am in two CBS leagues and it doesn't look like some of the owners want to change. God forbid if they have to actually open up another site instead of CBS spoon feeding them horrible advice week in week out.

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An Important Message to Our Fantasy Customer

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's Gone Wrong?

This may be news to many who read this. For you, the 2006 Fantasy Football season has been better than ever. You're enjoying new features in the game, you're playing Heads Up Fantasy and you're learning that the new CBS SportsLine GameCenters are the best in the world.

 

Others may have experienced problems, but they were so short or infrequent that they cleared up before they affected your opinion.

 

In fact, for almost everybody the amount of time in which problems occurred has been a small fraction of the 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 you 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. By that measure, so far this season we're batting .500 when we expect to bat 1.000.

What's CBS SportsLine Doing About It?

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

 

First, we owe it to those of you who have stood by us year in and year out as we've grown to be the best in the business. We ARE the best and your membership is the proof. We want you to know what we know.

 

Second, we want those of you who are new to us to know that we view our performance this year as unacceptable. We hold ourselves to a much higher standard, and we know that's what you came here to get.

 

Finally, we're already planning for your return next year. We know your business is not a guarantee, and we want to prove to you that your patience will be rewarded. Ironically, much of what is now causing problems was put in place to make your Fantasy Football experience better. We needed to make changes to support our growth 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.

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Fantasy Football Report Card - Through 11/3/06

Message · Report Card

 

 

top

NOTE: If you're so inclined, please Bookmark This Page.

It will be updated on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

bottom

 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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What I get from that is for half the season they have a grade of D or below. That is 100% unacceptable for a pay service. The problems seem to repeat too. Unable to access site right around kick-off on Sunday which is one of the most important times to be able to access the site. You would think after the first week of problems they would have fixed it. But week 5, 6, and 8 were "slow to load" or "sluggish around kick-off". Bull crap!!! The site wasn't just slow, you flat out could not gain access and if you did get in you had to keep the page open or you wouldn't be able to get back in later. The fact is they should just fix it they wouldn't have to apologize for this crap. And I am willing to bet that the same problems exist next season. Unfortunately I am in two CBS leagues and it doesn't look like some of the owners want to change. God forbid if they have to actually open up another site instead of CBS spoon feeding them horrible advice week in week out.

 

 

I've gotten quite a few good players on waivers and trades talked through due to my league mates listening to CBS "Expert" advice. As long as DMD doesn't start advertising on Sportsline, I'm alright.

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