Trevor just posted that the next wave of VT invites will be going out on Monday. This phase of the VT beta will eventually (once all the invites have gone out, over several waves) include *all* current DDI subscribers who have opted into communications from WotC.
New info as of 3/14/2011
Over the weekend, the DDI crew found a fairly substantial memory leak in the VT which resulted in them pushing back the opening of the next phase of the beta test until it is fixed. No date has been given as to when that will be.
From Trevor here.
Trevor then expanded on what happened here.
New info as of 3/14/2011
Over the weekend, the DDI crew found a fairly substantial memory leak in the VT which resulted in them pushing back the opening of the next phase of the beta test until it is fixed. No date has been given as to when that will be.
From Trevor here.
Trevor then expanded on what happened here.
I won't get in to too many details, but here are the very basics of what happened this time around.
We found an issue Sunday.
We start digging into the problem and getting info to the people who need to know about it.
Everybody (basically) is in the office on Monday.
We still have all sorts of regularly scheduled meetings and workload that we're dealing with, and now we have to determine exactly what the problem is (we had a pretty good idea, but with more eyes and people we double and triple check).
Problem is defined, fixes applied and checked.
New round of testing begins for the fix.
We have a meeting with all the important peeps about the timelines involved, how this affects the invites and shifting schedules of individuals to make sure all the moving pieces can happen in order when we need to launch the beta again.
Talk about communications - Do we have a firm date yet? What information do we have? We strive for a level of transparency and useful information, so I dig until I find what we're most certain about.
I put the info together and it gets reviewed and I pop in here to put it up
I'm missing all sorts of details along the way, but that's the basics. This doesn't happen every time I have some information to share, but when it's an important and timely/reactionary thing like this, something similar to this likely happens. It's not as simple as have all these people drop everything else they're doing and work on this and only this until we get everything worked out.
As to opening back up the beta group, it's good to hear you guys enjoyed that environment. This time around we'll be inviting a lot more people into the beta, and the day we send out those invites, we want them to have access to the group and the table with no waiting - it's just a better experience for all those people new to the beta. That means front-loading all the waiting unfortunately, which we're dealing with now (points to the afore posted mention of how awesomely patient people have been).
I know we're excited, and I know we all want this, and because we're human, we want it yesterday (well that and we said we were going to have it before yesterday). This is a beta. We are tinkering around with features, UI, etc. There will be problems like this. We will deal with those problems while dealing with everything else that we need to on a day-to-day basis. Balance that with the fact that you guys are, and the longer you wait, that
. And this is what I'm balancing - in the face of delays that have to happen, getting useful information to you in as timely a way as I can in order to combat as much of that as possible.
And with that said, I'll get back to finishing up drafting tomorrow's DDI update post so I can go home and grab some food. Hope that was helpful and not too rambling/stream of consciousness - I blame writing too many things at once
Last edited:
