Now, before I post Party Poker’s second response regarding the irritating fact that their every-3-seconds promotion messages can’t be turned off, let me point out that it’s not primarily the messages themselves that bother me. True, it’s a bit annoying that I can’t follow or participate table chat, but that’s not something I usually do anyway. If someone says something, I like to read it because it gives me an idea of their state of mind (tilting, specifically) but most of the time, the games are silent.

No, what blows my mind about this is the fact that they apparently don’t consider things like this before rolling out this promotion. Messages that can’t be turned off? I’m a software engineer, and I have to tell ya, that’s one of the things that we focus on: The possibility to customize the level of information that the program gives you. End users just want the results. Analysts want the raw data. The programmers and the verification engineers want to know every step of the way what the program is doing. And all it takes is a little flag, and then a numerical value that goes with each value into the Message() function (or whatever you wish to call it). The idea is very simple, it works like this:

Let’s say I have three levels of information. Level 3 is for the user. They want to know if it went “OK” or “Not OK” and they want to know what the result was. So the messages dealing with that information might be labled like so:

Message( 3, “Your transaction was completed successfully.” );

The first parameter, the “3,” is the stamp that categorizes this information. Now, let’s compare this to hypothetical level 2 information, something that an analyst would want who’s trying to troubleshoot a potential problem:

Message ( 2, “Order ID 8568 sent to 192.168.0.155. Received ACK on ID 8568. Saving status and exiting.” );

Clearly, a bank customer wouldn’t really be interested in the IP address of the server that handled the transaction order. But some technical support guy might want the order number to be able to backtrace a missing check, for instance.

Finally, the verification engineers - who check that the program work according to specification, before it’s released at all - might want a message that includes this:

Message ( 1, “Entering function ‘OrderConfirmation(int nOrder, const char* szServer)’. nOrder = 8568, szServer = ‘192.168.0.155′. Timestamp = 12:31:53:455. ThreadID = 0×07C8.” );

Okay, I might have gone overboard in trying to explain this concept. But hopefully you get the idea; different levels of information for different users. And the possibility to toggle what kind of information you’re interested in.

My point, basically, is that this is programming 101. And Party already HAS a system for this, which is evident when you look at their “dealer chat” options. What’s so sloppy about their promotion messages is that it ought to have been trivial to incorporate them into the functionality that they already had, but they didn’t. And this bothers me. It bothers me because their software is sloppy all over the place already, and while old quirks might take awhile to work out it’s disheartening that they’re showing signs of introducing more of them.

My top five list of things I’d like Party Poker to get a grip on:

5: Make the hand histories readable. Include information on winner and starting hands like Stars does. It doesn’t have to be graphic like FT, but what you have now is really bad and should be SO EASY to make better.
4. The little warning alarm that my time is running up at a table is bugging. It sometimes rings immediately when it’s my turn, it often doesn’t ring at all. Fix, please.
3. I’d like to be able to take notes on a player without having the table itself constantly place itself on top of the note-window. Why is this a separate window? Take a lesson from Stars. Seriously.

2. “Sit out next blind” is a really, really easy thing to implement. Get to it. There’s no excuse for this.

… and the number one problem with Party’s software is…. [drumroll]…

1. The fact that when that alarm doesn’t go off and I’ve almost missed my turn, the buttons disappear and I’m just sitting there helpless for a few seconds before my hand is automatically folded and I’m forced to sit out not only for this hand, but the next one too. What the hell is that about?

… and here, as the icing on the cake, is Party’s response. Enjoy!

Dear Fredrik,

Thank your contacting Customer Service.

Regarding your query, please be politely informed that if the messages can not be disabled by silencing the Dealer, they can not be disabled at all. I would kindly ask you to try to ignore them.

Further to the query, please note that these announcements only appear if you play on one of the following games with corresponding stakes:

- NL / PL Hold’em $0.10/$0.25 to $0.25/$0.50 $0.50/$1 to $2/$4 or

- Limit Hold’em $0.25/$0.50 to $0.50/$1 $1/$2 to $5/$10

If the messages from the dealer are very bothering and you can not ignore them, I would kindly suggest that you play on other game types or different stakes. This way the messages will not appear.

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