It never ceases to amaze me.
You can have a multimillion dollar media company with production
resources second to none and they'll still cheap out on the IT department. Case in point, the 2013 Speed Channel Fantasy
Bid webpage for the Barrett-Jackson auction coverage.
Now I know it's just a webpage but it's one of the primary
promotional vehicles (pardon the pun) for Speed's auction coverage. They've offered the online fantasy bid for
most of the past decade so you'd expect they'd have all the wrinkles out by
now. At least you'd think so...
It seems this year something's gone wrong. In prior years 10s of thousands of fantasy
bids from auction fans were handled without incident. This year during the Thursday and Friday
broadcast the system frequently failed with a fraction of that number. Friday and Saturday are high viewership days
but the problem started almost immediately upon the start of the Fantasy Bids
on Thursday.
If it were just a vanity contest it wouldn't be a big deal
but the Hagerty Fantasy bid offers multiple tiers of prize offerings with a
grand prize of a new Shelby Mustang.
That makes it a contest which suddenly makes easy participation
paramount. Considering you're forced to
opt-in to sales communications to play there is an effective transaction of
sorts. That means players have the right
to expect to access to the game in exchange for extra spam in their inbox. An expectation not met acknowledged by a
popup once I was finally able to log in on Friday.
Remember, I'm an IT guy so I have some idea about web
servers and capacity planning. That
said, my assessment is that they've either outsourced the back end processing
for the game or they've made a major change that nobody bothered to load test.
Either way it smacks of poor planning, inadequate resources and
incompetent IT personnel. Which is
exactly the results you can expect when you go with the lowest bidder. Results not price is the real definition of a
good value in anything.
For 2013 is appears Speed is getting exactly what it's paid
for.
6 comments:
I find it amazing that they apparently didn't test the system prior to going live. Back when I was managing aerospace programs I would have been fired for making an obvious error such as this.
Amen to that. Good thing these guys don't work for NASA.
Actually this is the second MAJOR fail in three years of the Fantasy bid. I've played for four or five years and the first several had no issue at all. In 2011 they had issues just as bad as this year that were resolved in 2012 which ran flawlessly. Now in 2013 they screw up the thing that worked once again.
The television telecast is a joke - they are really soft-playing the crash this time even as it is in some ways worse than 2011's issues. You would have figured that they would have learned from that fiasco, but it is apparent this was not ready for prime time.
Yeah, I gave up on it in 2011 for similar issues but I didn't remember it being this awful. I don't remember them apologizing for it in 2012 so it must have been better.
Either way, this isn't their first trip to the rodeo and this kind of thing should be far behind them by now.
It really roiled my usually easy self. First time for me to play and I've had nothing but despair and aggravation. What chapped me today was, at the beginning of today's broadcast Bob Varsha said something to the fact the even though Speed, Ford & Hagerty sponsored the event they weren't responsible for the problems. On one of my many, railing tweets, I told them that's like saying your wife is married but you're not. It is total incompetence. How Barrett-Jackson could have their name besmirched with such is beyond me.
The last day the page didn't even update anymore. I suppose the guys who played on smartphones did ok. Two different browsers, cleared cache and never saw a page update nor was I able to bid.
This game is rigged folks and it reflects badly on Barrett Jackson's involvement with Speed. Speed channel's a lost cause since the Fox acquisition but I never thought they'd stoop so low. BJ coverage pretty much made Speed channel and was the first thing I ever watched on Speed a decade ago. Long before Fox and the boredeom of 24/7 Nascar, F1 and MotoGP. USed to be a lot more how to shows on too. Now it's just a channel full of background noise.
In short, Speed is just another BS Fox property now. I hope it gets sold off.
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