Warning to potential HM2 upgraders

This new version of holdem manager is a buggy and incomplete release, I am requesting a refund for this software which is a beta version at best.

There are many forum posts about it and the major consensus seems to be that they released that software way too early with dozens of posts about issues of features not working correctly and also the lag/delay with even 8 tabling Pokerstars with HM2, Tableninja and Notecaddy. It really is unplayable already with 8 tables, no multitabling possible at all.

In the press release on HM2 Is In The Store! from November 1st they claim:

"HM2 was in beta for over 6 months and is being launched with the same commitment to outstanding support and customer service that helped Hold’em Manager establish a new standard in poker software support."

Yet I have received a key for "HM2 Alpha Evalutation" on August 1st 2011. How can it have been beta tested for half a year if they only sent out alpha evaluations to paying customers 3 months before that release? And how can it be an "Award winning software" if it can't even be used for 8-tabling on a quad core, 8GB Ram, 64bit system with SSD drives. I feel ripped off and abused as a beta tester instead of a paying customer. They obviously spent too much time and effort on marketing and hyping this release instead of testing and improving it first, probably nobody of the developers even using it themselves under real world conditions.

I have been a loyal, happy and very quiet customer of HM1 for years now but my anger in regard to this issue boils over and I will become more and more vocal about it on forums now which is the only reason I registered here today, to warn people of the dubious practices this company has adopted recently. This is simply unacceptable, taking money from customers for an unfinished product, next asking them to work on the beta testing by sending logfiles, making screenshots and explaining errors. They should pay beta testers to do that and not the other way round that we as customers pay and then have to work for them to make the product usuable!

Worst of all is that upgrading to HM2 invalidates your HM1 license. Seeing that HM2 is not usable under daily, real world conditions and having HM1 license invalidated this is just a nightmare. Also they drag out refund requests and are currently overwhelmed with negative feedback and support requests so for the next couple months until this software is actually usable I can only recommend to avoid this mess completely.

Welcome

I don't have tableninja and I don't use notecaddy, but I have no problem running 8 PS tables on my lowly laptop with HM2.

Well i don't know what the problem was but i couldn't play after it got took off the beta version.It slowed down my computer to a crawl.I just uninstalled it and went back to hem1.My code seems to work fine.Just e-mail there support explain whats going on, and i'm sure they will work it out some how.
There support is very good.

I've been running HM2 since April, when it was still in Alpha testing. Other than NotesCaddy, which is still buggy as hell IMO and why I keep it disabled, HM2 runs perfectly fine for me. Until June I ran HM1 in parallel with HM2, but in June I switched completely to HM2 and would never consider going back.

I pretty much live in the HM support forums too, and the stuff about releasing early with tons of stuff not working is mostly BS. I've been deeply involved with alpha/beta testing. Testers were clamoring for release for months beforehand, but HM kept postponing the release to get things "right." It was quite complete and stable by then, but then just at release they rolled out a massive update with a TON of new features and fixes that really didn't get a long enough test cycle. So yeah, GA had some rough edges, but they were releasing 2-3 updates a week to address them and quickly got the worst bugs under control.

It's been quite stable now for some time for a lot of us. Most people having performance problems are due to NotesCaddy, which is included with HM2 now but not developed by the HM2 development team, it's a 3rd party poker author's product who has his own support area on their forum. I recommend you turn NC off completely until it becomes fully baked. I have no performance issues with multi-tabling and NC disabled.

There are thousands of satisfied HM2 customers, only the most vocal 100 or so with major issues are complaining loudly and saying it's "unusable." And that's their right of course as paying customers, but to suggest that it's not usable for anyone is straight up BS. You've got 2 people right here in this thread so far saying we're running it without major issues. If you've lived in their forums as much as I have, I think you'd know that people were complaining about HM1 problems and bugs right up until HM2 was released, and HM1 has had almost 4 years to get it right. HM2 is a much more ambitious project and a complete re-write of HM1, so it's not surprising what with all the myriad of user system variables out there that they will have rough edges starting out. As someone in the software development field, this is totally not surprising, and I've seen a LOT worse rollouts of major software releases than this.

As to the licensing, they have repeatedly stated that HM2 users can switch back and forth between HM1 and HM2 licenses by just emailing support. You cannot activate both at the same time, but you can choose which one you want to run.

JoeBob, I expect your problem was NotesCaddy as well. Same thing happened to mine right around release, and I looked and noticed NC had been enabled. Turned it back off and things were fixed. The NC author (which as I said is not the HM people) has supposedly released a few bug fixes to address the problem, but from what I'm hearing NC is still not ready for heavy volume yet.

Maybe Notecaddy is the reason for the lags that make even 8 tables unplayable for me but I paid 174 USD for the whole package and expect it to work as such. If not then I am not a paying customer but a beta tester and as such it is me who should be paid for my efforts. They say that their constant request for feedback, logs and screenshots is good customer service but I disagree. It actually is turning their paying customers into unpaid employees who do the debugging work for them, such as you obviously did as well, dmorrs68. Did you get paid for that or receive a discount on the software at least? Why would you work for free and even pay a company to work for them on an unfinished product. Maybe you enjoy doing this kind of thing, I do not.

When I purchase a software for 174 USD I expect it to work and not having to help the developers making it work first. That is what open source and shareware is for.

Virtually no company pays their alpha/beta testers. Testers are people who *want* to get in early and be involved with the new software right away. The entire software industry works this way. I've alpha/beta tested dozens of software packages over the years, and the most compensation I've ever got was a free copy of the released software I was testing -- and that wasn't always, maybe 20% of the time.

For those that don't share the same enthusiasm for new software, then testing isn't for them.

Show me one major software release that is bug free? You won't. They don't exist. PT3 was bug-ridden upon release. So was HM1. HM2 and PT4 will be no different. There comes a point in the development lifecycle where things are stable among your small group of beta testers, so the next step is to draw a line in the sand and release. Depending on how complex your software is -- and trackers/HUDs are extremely complex, because they aren't self-contained but instead integrate and inject themselves into other running processes (like poker clients) -- you often have no idea how it will perform "in the wild" and you will never know until you release it. There are just too many variables with people's systems and how they use them to have all the bases covered.

HM2 isn't in beta, it's perfectly usable as it is. Yes it has bugs. But also anyone who works with software regularly knows that the first release of a major version (and HM2 is a total rewrite, so it's a 1.0 version of HM2) is going to be buggy. People who don't like to deal with that should never buy 1.0 versions, that's pretty much an unwritten rule in the software industry. HEM is no different here than anyone else. If you wait until you know with absolute certainty that your product is 100% bug free then you will never release anything and your competitors will eat your lunch.

As I said, those of us who have actually been testing for months felt that HM2 was worthy of release months before it actually was.

I strongly disagree, I can not even 8-table Pokerstars with HM2, Tableninja and not even 3-table when Notecaddy is activated and that on a quad core with 8GB Ram, dedicated SSD drive, Nvidia 470 Fermi, so a really well equipped system that has never shown any problems before. But HM2 immediately introduces severe stutters and lags on every single user action making it extremely difficult to even send one Tableninja command to the correct table. When I first used it, it was extremely tilting because the commands all landed on the wrong tables performing unwanted bet or fold actions, losing me money.

I am an average user with no interest in testing or developing which is why I pay hundreds of bucks for software in the first place. I pay it so it just works and I do not have to think about it. Claiming that HM2 is "perfectly usable" is just false. It may be perfectly usable for guys like you that like fiddling and tweaking and reporting bugs, but not for end of the line customers like me who just want to use it. And telling on forums that it is usable is just misleading guys like me into buying it and thereby voiding their HM1 license.

*sigh*

HM2 is perfectly usable for a number of people. Maybe not for you, but you do not represent the entire HM2 market, sorry.

If you have any history with TableNinja at all, you will know that it has long caused performance issues for many people as well. Again, as with NotesCaddy, TN is not developed by HM, they just have a bundling agreement. When NC and TN were separately available products, they still caused performance issues for many people when all were turned on simultaneously.

Honestly, I think HM shot themselves in the foot by allowing all these 3rd party poker products to be bundled with HM, because now when they crap out it looks bad on HM.

Those of us that run HM2 without any of the bundled real-time tools (NotesCaddy, TableNinja, not counting SnG Wiz or LeakBuster) are not having major issues with performance. It has nothing to do with me spending time "fiddling and tweaking and reporting bugs." It Just Works for me, without any of that.

You're unhappy with the product. We get it. By all means speak for yourself and report the problems you have, but please stop trying to insist that nobody who isn't fixing the code themselves can use HM2. It is patently not true.

I don't use HEM/HEM2, but how does this mess compare to the PT3 release?

It's been so long but I expect pretty similar. I beta tested PT3 for months prior as well, and was pretty happy with it until I discovered HM1 which I much preferred. Around PT3 release I recall a lot of outcry from people who hated it compared to PT2 (and like HM2, it was a complete rewrite and different product to the prior version). Some people just hate major change, which is where a lot of the complaints with both PT3 and HM2 came from. Others have legitimate gripes due to the specifics of their systems, how they play, and the other combinations of software they use *cough*. HM1 was buggy for some people right up until HM2 came out (just look at the support forums) yet it still had a massive following, reportedly greater than PT3.

Points being:

1. Chasing bugs is a never ending process. What with the constant poker client updates and endless combination of user configurations, there will be constant changes and regular breakages along the way.
2. There is always a greater number of bugs immediately following a major release. Of any software. If you don't have the stomach for that, wait awhile before buying/upgrading.
3. Despite some people having bugs and finding the product "unusable" there is always a silent contingent (usually a majority) of users who are using it just fine and don't report anything. Support forums are always full of the people with issues -- people having no problems at all tend not to pop in just to post that everything is running great. Satisfied customers seldom have a reason to visit support forums.

The latter point is what people like OP seem to forget all the time. They look at their fellow commiserators and make the assumption that all users are having their same problems, when it's obviously not true.

A few of us who are happy with HM2 have been trying to pepper the posts with helpful advice and mentions that we're not having major problems, but you know how it gets lost in all the drama.

Just glance over the official forum topics on http://forums.holdemmanager.com/bug-reports/ and http://forums.holdemmanager.com/hm2-releases/ to judge for yourself. In my opinion it is very bad and they have gambled away a big part of their good reputation with this release. Since my purchase 4 days ago I have become increasingly vocal about this topic after having been a happy and quiet customer of theirs for years. But with this new software and especially the way they handled my complaints and refund request so far I feel patronized and abused as a paying customer.

From the dozens if not hundreds of threads on their forums and on other poker boards such as 2p2 I can safely deduce that I, as a disappointed customer, am in the majority.

LOL, how can you deduce that the majority find it unusable? Tunnel vision much?

HM2 has shipped tens of thousand of copies by now. Now go count up all the unique people in forums who find it "unusable." Not everyone reporting minor bugs -- we're all reporting bugs, as we've done with HM1 and PT3 and everything else -- but those who find it truly unusable. Get back to me on that. I'll bet you won't find 150 unique people.

I told you, I live over at the HM forums so I'm well aware of that which you speak. I'm just telling you that it's not the majority.

But go ahead with your delusion, because obviously you're not listening when 2 of the first 3 people to respond in this thread are telling you that we're satisfied with it. You've made up your mind, and there's obviously no reasoning with you.

Just a HU hundenapf you've got 2 more posts on the forum for the day (new users are limited to 7/day). Might want to save them (or not) for something more than this back and forth.

Let's agree that it is a moot point to judge the average customer satisfaction with this release. Could we at least agree on that I should be able to get a refund for this package I purchased 4 days ago as it is not working for me and I am individually dissatisfied. That I should be allowed to go back to HM1 as it was before without further discussions and being patronized?

Absolutely. A dissatisfied customer should be entitled to a refund, and at least in the past HM has always been good about doing so. I don't know if/how the upgrade will affect that, but in principal it should not and you should insist on a refund if that's how you feel. Have you contacted their sales dept?

As far as patronizing goes, LOL. I was merely rebutting your argument with a sound and logical argument of my own based on facts that you chose to ignore. Instead you insisted that nobody could possibly find HM2 usable simply because you couldn't, and the fact you can point to others who share your displeasure obviously means you are right and the rest of us poor simpletons who actually like HM2 must be either completely delusional or on the HM payroll.

The point is that satisfied customers tend to be silent, so all you tend to hear are the vociferous dissatisfied customers. My queries have now moved from "how to make it work properly" to "how to obtain the most useful information for my own needs". I find the people there very helpful.

FWIW, I've been very happy w/ HEM2. Ya some bugs, but no doubt they'll be fixed; maybe just wait a bit and have faith becuz they will correct the problems w/ notecaddy esp..

btw, i have a dual processor w/ only like 4GB ram, and i have no problems with 6 tables, even with a wifi connection.

I think the last couple of posts have proven my point.