Poker Sharks.co.uk

But how can an already perfect, super smashing game be made ‘better’? Why not just leave it as it is and allow the masses to enjoy the game and leave well alone?

The powers that be have thought for a long time to answer these questions, and have come up with the following weak and obviously made-up excuses for why:

o Poker Sharks was an enjoyable game for a few thousand people but to reach the larger audiences it was felt the game needed something extra.
o Some players would like to play for longer than the standard 5-10mins each day.
o The day-to-day tasks can get a bit repetitive and a more fun, interactive addition was thought to be needed.
o More player interaction. Challenging and Tournaments are great but players want more face to face action.
o A game called Poker Sharks where you can’t play poker is a bit misleading.
o The Creator was bored and thought he’d fiddle with something that didn’t need fixing.
o Poker Sharks is a new game still in development and is constantly being improved to enhance the playing experience for its players.

Hopefully you’ll all agree with around 2-3 of those and only disagree with 1-2. Ignore the ones you disagree with, they’re bugs that have somehow written these reasons and we’re working on a fix on how to destroy them.

So now we’ve dealt with why, maybe there will be some kind of explanation for why it has taken SO FRICKEN LONG TO DO!?!?!?!?!

The initial plan was for 1 month of downtime, this turned into 3, then 4 then 7…

Contrary to the popular media drivel this wasn’t a ploy from Poker Sharks to annoy and frustrate everyone who held the slightest piece of affection for the game. That could have been achieved by simply writing ‘YOU SUCK’ on the homepage and would have been much easier to implement. No, unfortunately there were some very real (and quite boring) reasons for the delays. Again, before you roll your eyes and call BS, remember this list is a pure figment of our imagination and all these reasons have been cleverly worded to cover up our own inefficiencies:

o Poker. It’s a dam complicated game and has caused us all ends of problems. The amount of possible scenarios that can happen during a game of poker is mind boggling.
o The real time server. Before, Poker Sharks ‘appeared’ to be played in real time when players were challenging each other and moving up and down the rankings pages. However there were slight time delays during these calculations between players that couldn’t exist in a real time environment like a poker room. Hence new software and a new server were needed to run such a beast. Steep learning curve there.
o The cat was sick on an important piece of code which alone took 1 month to rewrite.
o Money. It’s the oldest excuse in the book but as with anything money talks. When projects overrun and you have a big bank balance you can throw money at them and magically projects come in on time. When you haven’t you have to play the nicely nicely approach and hope there aren’t too many people throwing money at the guy that’s working on your project.
o As much as I’d love to do Poker Sharks full time it isn’t economically viable so my time is split between work and social life with Poker Sharks encroaching dangerously far into both. As fun as playing poker against myself for hours on end with a calculator checking the pot amounts is; it isn’t quite in my top 10 of things to do on a Saturday night.
o The cat was sick on… doh, used that one already…
o Real world problems. Again, due to the small size of the people behind the scenes at Poker Sharks when someone is off sick or has a family crisis there isn’t a long line of people ready to step in and help. (On a personal note here: I didn’t have a brush with death, and at no point did I collide with a bus.)
o We heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder so by keeping the game down for so long we hoped everyone would come rushing back and love the game even more than before. Or is it ‘out of sight out of mind’? At a time like this we don’t have time to be picky over our phrases.
o Rushing out a buggy, unfinished poker room would have annoyed people even more than the wait. It’s taken so long we may as well make sure it all works before launching.
o It took another 2 weeks to come up with excuses for the 6 months of laziness.

Another popular question is why didn’t Poker Sharks continue as it was whilst work was being done?

Hindsight is a beautiful thing and if we had foreseen the above problems then we could have factored in a side-by-side development/playing season. Once work started it made it impossible to run a Season without constantly interrupting it and possibly causing big disruptions. Upsetting players in-between Seasons is bad enough but I’m no where near brave enough to try that during a Season. So we were stuck with a longer downtime than we’d wanted but dealing with pre-season problems as well as the development we already had to do would have been a nightmare.

The biggest question of all though, is, of course, when is the next season launching?

*drum roll*

Starts on…

You’ll be able to login with the same username and password that you used before. If you’ve forgotten this, you can have your login sent to the email address you signed up with by using the ‘forgotten password’ link. If you’ve changed your email address in this time you’ll need to sign up again or you could try emailing me with as much info as you have and I’ll try and find your account.

Season 4 promises to be a huge improvement on previous Seasons and a full update on the new features and additions will follow in the coming days.

Poker Sharks Season 4 is a matter of weeks away and promises to be online for the foreseeable future after this. It would be great to see as many of you back as possible enjoying the game as much, if not more, than before.

Well done for reading this far, or if you’ve simply scrolled straight to the bottom only reading the bold bits, well done, you’ve saved a valuable 5 minutes of your life.

Cheers,