[mikev]

Originally Posted by f.montoya

No. Not kidding. Broadband connections vary and your connection is probably different from mine as well as others out there. And don't forget that not everyone has a broadband connection.

Those that don't are more than likely not involved with online baseball leagues.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

Failure or interuptions due to "server" side issues, including bandwidth overload are possibilities. There are all kinds of server hicups during any given day and OOTP just doesn't handle them well.

56 megabytes is not too large for a simple manual download for those with a reasonably fast internet connection but it is too large for an online league. If your file is this size, then you are including too many items when creating the file before uploading.

To me, I read this as "too bad, but it doesn't work. Sorry." 56 megabytes is not an unreasonably large file. Even with a 384/128 DSL line, you're talking less than 10 minutes of download time. Quite simply, if including X number of items causes the download to break, than it shouldn't be coded into the game to allow X numbe of items to be included, or the game should be patched to fix the issue.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

There is no official stance by SI regarding how many leagues you can include in order to have an online league run without issues. The very fact is that the whole system isn't perfected yet as this was the very first version of OOTP to include the "in-game" upload/download feature. Markus is aware of the problem and with beta-testing beginning soon for the 2007 version, it's at the top of the list of things that need attention.

It's very unfortunate that the "Final Patch" has been released for 2006 already, and anybody with an online league experiencing these types of issues will be forced to upgrade to 2007 (for a 35 dollar fee, of course) in order to fix something that, quite frankly, should have been taken care of in the beta testing phase. I haven't beta tested in quite some time, but isn't a part of that process a stress test of sorts to see how far things can be pushed before they start breaking?

Originally Posted by f.montoya

That said, I do know that Markus is planning some improvements in how the game orgainizes the files needed for online leagues and that we should expect file sizes to remain reasonable in the next version.

Hopefully.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

For those using OOTP 2006 for online "universes" and have to have 100+ boxscores and game logs and all the news and history files included for all leagues in their league file, you can expect issues with the in-game up/download feature.

But the upload feature works fine. It's the downloading and extracting that is broken. Either it doesn't work at all, or it works and then news and emails are blank. Which is funny, because the "Baseball Universe" aspect of 2006 is exactly what was touted as one of the great new features of the game... for solo players, apparently.

I think that online play was an afterthought with 2006, and it's too bad.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

While you mention that FTP is an extremely stable transfer tool, I agree. The FTP upload is working fine within the game. That's not the issue at all. It's the downloading within the game that causes the problems we are discussing here. I merely point out that the game is having a problem when the download progress is too slow, gets interupted or severed and what could cause some of that.

Right. The game is broken, not the FTP process. FTP has worked properly for years and years. However, it's proving very difficult to get someone affiliated with SI/OOTP to say that there's something wrong, and even harder to get them to fix it. Which it should be... fixed.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

The bottom line is, you have every right to complain about something not working the way it was meant to work.

At this point, our complaints seem to be falling on deaf ears.

Originally Posted by f.montoya

Unfortunately, the limits of this feature are seemingly being pushed beyond what it can handle and the only way around this now is to work within it's limitations. Or go external with downloading the league file as we did with previous versions of OOTP.

Which is probably what will have to happen.

Hey, if we're doing more than the game is capable of, fine, we know it's limits. However, THIS SHOULD BE FIXED RIGHT NOW. There is absolutely no way that anybody who has bought OOTP2006 should have to wait, and pay, for OOTP2007 to fix issues like this. The bottom line is that the game doesn't work the way it was advertised to, and it's (apparently) not going to be fixed.