The team here at PartyPoker would like this opportunity to announce something rare: a release where none of the hard work we’ve put in is instantly visible to our players!

Instead, we have spent the last 45 days digging into and optimizing the very core of our software. We have focused on hundreds of tweaks and fixes which in aggregate dramatically improve the stability of the poker client and ensure that all players get a consistently high-quality experience.

The results have been impressive. We are recording dramatically better performance and stability – in particular over long session times and whilst running multiple tables.

However, as encouraged as we are by these numbers, we’re still fine-tuning some things and hope to get the number of ongoing issues as close to zero as possible. As part of that effort, we’ve created a debug version of the client, which players with ongoing problems can download by contacting our customer service department. It will create a detailed crash report that will help our engineers further diagnose and eliminate performance-related bugs.

In short, we’re listening, and we’re committed to creating the best possible experience for all of our players. So please don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts, comments, and problems surrounding our platform, and while we can’t respond to each suggestion individually we will certainly consider each and every submission.

And for those of you for whom performance issues kept you away from the best tables in online poker, we ask you give it another try!

Good luck at the tables.

Bill Rini
Poker Room Manager, PartyPoker

Wow... very nice (and shocking) to see a party rep here. FWIW Bill I still have some serious performance issues while 12-tabling stts and running pokertracker and pahud, and I have updated to the latest release. The Party client never really crashes for me but the lag is unbearable sometimes. But please continue to work on client stability and please maintain a presence here on these boards, it'll be good for business.

I should add that I have a new machine that is capable of handling 16 tables on the iPoker network and 20 tables on stars while running PT/PAHUD with minimal lag. And I always get lag while 12-tabling party that ranges from annoying to debilitatingly annoying.

this is pretty common with party, isn't it?

nice to have a party rep at the forums at least

@Towlie: Would you mind if I or someone else from Party contacted you to get more details about your lag issues? We want to get these sorts of issues cleared up and we can't always recreate them due to all of the possible system configs.

@JimmyFingers: We haven't done that many releases that don't include something that players wouldn't notice. We might do something in tournaments that cash game players might not notice and in another release we might do something in cash games that tournament players might not notice but we do try to add some value in each release.

@Everyone: Please feel free to share your thoughts here.

Party Bill,

A lot of the performance issues seem to come from all of the additional crap in the client- the Party Bets Spam Bar, News scrollbars, spinning jackpot wheels etc- can't you make an option to turn all of this off. Put it in an obscure place so that the fish won't turn it off and that way everyone is happy.

Well since you are asking here goes:

Wait list: I've lost count on how many bugs there are with the waitlist function but here are a couple. 1. It is sometimes possible to take a seat even if there were 10 people in the waitlist and you aren't even on the list. 2. sometimes it says there is a seat for you even when you are already at the table

Another thing: if you happen to time out and want to join the next hand you need to uncheck/check the sitout/autopost buttons a few times or you will miss the next hand. when you time out there should be a "i am back" button available immeadiately like there is at stars (it is possible you sometimes won't notice that you have missed a hand for example when taking a quick break while multitabling but don't want to wait to sitout at all tables)

If you've had a long session the transaction history, bonus details etc pages don't work. it says you are timed out. only way to get them to work is to reopen the software or find the info from the web page. I've also set all the url's to open in firefox but when I click something in the software that opens a web page it opens up in internet explorer.

table filters: needs a possibility to carry filters over to other limits so I don't have to click them every time I go browse another game/limit. Also could the tables stay filtered even after you close the software (again like at stars)

Honestly I never thought party would have a rep here but it's great to have you here Bill. I am counting on you getting things done.

Also wtf is this "loading string #xxxxxxxxxxx" popup I get in every table every few minutes after todays update?

It's been talked here among other things: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...d.php?t=109435

@HighSteaks: Good question. In the case of the spinning jackpot wheels; they only appear on tables where people are playing on jackpot tables so it's a tough call to say that it's "additional crap."

That being said, we're still left with the very valid issues of the Party Bets news bar and other news scrollbars. Let me look into that.

I appreciate the feedback and I hope people keep it coming.

Bill

Bill -- glad to have you here, although my welcome is going to include a healthy dose of of skepticism. I'm going to warn you up front: you're facing an uphill climb gaining the confidence of the more-established posters here, because on more than one occasion a Party rep (usually Mike O'Malley) has popped in here to post and announce that he's here as a contact-point for 2+2'ers, only to make one single spam-filled post, and then disappear never to be heard from again. I want more than anything to believe that you're here for more than a quick cup of coffee, but...well, I won't believe it until I see it. I know that may seem unfair, but you can thank Mike O'Malley for the frosty reception you'll receive here from many, and if you see him in the Gibraltar halls, feel free to give him a swift steel-tipped toe to the testes from all his friends over at 2+2. On more than a few occasions, we've been allowed to get our hopes up that Party will stop offering the worst customer-service in the industry (I'm not exaggerating, Bill: the WORST; it's shocking, really, that such a major player in the online poker world is satisfied offering 4th-rate barely-English-speaking support). But our hopes have quickly been dashed each time, as Party inevitably returns to its bottom-feeder customer-support status. I really, really hope your presence here signals a change of course in Party's support philosophy, but like I said, you've got your work cut out for you.

Stars and FTP have support reps who post here frequently. FTP will actually collect questions and then once a month or so will post a "FTP answers" thread that addresses a ton of player concerns at once. It's a great model that you should think about adopting. You don't need a paid full-time 2+2 support liaison, but you should do your best to add all of the concerns we voice here to a "To Do" list, and then give us answers at least once / month.

@Lessu: In terms of the waitlist, I will personally look into the issue of being seated ahead of other players. We have two waitlists; one for a specific table and one for any table meeting a certain criteria. The specific table people are prioritized first but let me dig into this to see if there isn't a way to better apply this logic.

Your second wait list issue might be a bug and I'll check into this.

Regarding your missed hand issue I can say we are aware of this and though I can't promise a specific date for the fix it will be resolved. In fact we are in the process of looking at the entire multi-tabling experience and trying to determine how we can better meet the needs of the MT player.

In regards to pages opening up in IE, that's an OS issue and there's not much I can do to help you there. In terms of timeouts, let me go grab a few of the webpage guys and see how we can't bring this to a satisfactory conclusion.

In terms of your filter issue, that's certainly doable but we may wrap that up into a bigger initiative. Again, sorry, I can't give you a specific date but we're thinking along the same lines so you can rest assured it's on the list.

Best,

Bill

PB,

It seems that many of your promotions seem very strongly targetted at very low volume or low stakes players - games where someone might win $5 or $10 or even $50.

That doesn't overly inspire high volume players.

@teddyFBI: I can understand your skepticism. Nor do I blame you for that skepticism or expect to be judged on anything other than my actions.

That being said, what would you like to see out of our customer support? It might be easy to point to some distant event in the past but what I am interested in is how are we not serving your needs today. Obviously, I can’t change the past but I can influence things going forward and the best way I know how to do that is to hear from people like you.

Party Bill,


Please open your doors to US citizens again!!!!
Please!!!!

An option to turn off all unnecessary graphics would indeed be nice. The software is extremely heavy at the moment.