ManagerLeague : Online football manager : Applying the fix!

Fix has been applied. All issues were fixed as planned. Good luck in Season 13!

As most people are aware of by now, some things went wrong during the previous season-change.
The problems caused by this were by no means "small" or "simple".
It sounded simple enough though : "Some teams did not promote / relegate as they should have".
Trivial problem, really...or not.

First of all, there was a lot of research put into exactly what had happened, and then of course why. This took considerable time, but once found, it was far easier to sort out and fix for future season-changes than I feared.
Correcting the mistakes that had already been made, however, was not.

Not only would we need to find out exactly who had been affected or not, and then we could think about moving them manually into the right departments and divisions, swapping them with the correct teams etc.
But at that point, all fixture lists would be wrong, the league cup had teams that shouldn't be there, and many departments cups were quite wrong, holding teams that were no longer in the same division.

A simple solution would be to take the easy and ignorrant way out, and just perform what is known as a "rollback". This means going back in time, putting in the copy of the database from before the season-change and run the change again.
Easy for me to do, but hardly very user-friendly. It would incidentally mean that all new players since last season would be magicked away instantly, all transfers since then would never have happened, and all friendlies (or credit-purchases for that matter) would never have happened.

The more challenging, but by far the best solution, would be to leave things as they are, and only fix exactly what is wrong.
So, even though I am on vacation, some 40 hours have been put into the better option.

Right about now, a program is running through the database, correcting the faults, remaking a bunch of fixture-lists, cups and whatnot, reporting every change back to me, with checks and failsafes all over the place. It analyzes the copy of the database from last season, specially the playoff-matches from round 33, and should be able to pick out the teams that were affected. The number of teams affected is roughly 620, give or take 1-10.
All teams that were affected will receive a message explaining what has happened, and that they have been either promoted or relegated as they should have been after last season. In addition, the teams get a small money-reward as compensation.

The only side-effect you should all notice, is that since your fixtures are all regenerated, you might face your opponents in the league in a different order this time around.
The game will be offline while this takes place, but the portal will still be operational (allthough maybe sluggish due to the hard work on the servers).

I hope you will be understanding about this problem and accept my sincere apology. Some times things are very simple: 1 guy working with the techincal side of ML, something goes wrong, guess whos fault it is

Then again, I hope you will also recognize our efforts to solve this, even while being on vacation. Actually, I think you owe me a beer, each, for that

(A credits purchase will do fine though, and put a smile on Chairmans face as well!)

So, while you are reading this, the fix is either hard at work, on about to start, and will sort things out for us so everything is ready for round 1 tomorrow. I certainly hope so, as I would like to go for a swim!

I will return with more information as soon as the fix has been applied successfully.

- Spinner (NOT quite enjoying his WORKING vacation on the island of Mallorca)
- - Still smiling though

Written by Spinner 15:46 13/08 2006

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