OK, I disagree with you. As far as problems with networks when they update... I can think of a couple. When UltimateBet and Absolute combined to create CEREUS, there were problems for a lot of people for over a week. Lag, not being able to log in, etc. When Cake updated like 4 years ago, there were buttons on the screen that did absolutely nothing when you clicked them, if I remember correctly, one of them was the Cashier button! I am sure there have been others, if not with poker, then absolutely with every other genre of software.
As far as only opening the update for play money... do you realize that the software for both play money and real money is the same, not two different programs? And you don't have a designated play money account and real money account to differentiate between them(this isn't pokerstars.com and pokerstars.net). About the only thing that could have been done would have been to put up a beta download that people could choose at their own will to download and play on and if they had problems, it was their own choice to download. I'm guessing a big problem with something like that is that they would have to probably have double the tech infrastructure to implement essentially running dual sites simultaneously and connected. If you want to help it get back up faster, just play play money instead of real to create the traffic and produce the bugs.
Can't say anything about Cereus, as I never played there. I remember when they rolled it out, and don't remember hearing of problems of this extent, but the landscape was also different back then and I might not have noticed.
But Cake's software implementation problems never came close to this. Fair enough, across all software ever, there have been bigger ****-ups to be sure. But in the realm of internet poker, I'm not so sure. Again, the biggest issue that remains to be seen is how Merge deals with refunds. That will be the biggest deciding factor in how this fiasco is viewed -- though I'm sure many, many players have already made up their minds, and THAT is the reality of Merge handling this so badly. Allowing play across the entire site for (what I now see was) over 8 hours yesterday, and again today, knowing the issues that are being dealt with? I don't understand how ANYONE could rationalize that as handling this well.
Having players beta test (at will) would have been huge. And that should be the norm. See Pokerstars re Zoom -- flawless implementation, and beta tested over hundreds of millions of
hands by real players. Is Merge the same as PS? No, but to say that this cluster**** was inevitable is pretty ridiculous.
Looking at the functionality of the new client, it seems pretty clear that, by and large, real players were NOT testing the software, as there are a number of bad design flaws. The right-click drop-down menus and lack of player lists directly in the lobby (just ask cash players), no auto-posting on every table (need to either manually post every hand or sit out all tables in order to sit next blind), improper scaling in Mini-mode so as to make multi-tabling using tiling extremely difficult or impossible, bet slider (can't 3x, etc in Mini-mode as the scaling is pathetic, so they scrapped the buttons entirely), the two-aspect filter (I still can't figure out why the "filter" and "game selector" weren't part of the same filter), info tab has been removed from MTTs (your stack, average stack, # remaining, upcoming blind level changes, etc), two-click note-taking system is really annoying especially for multi-tablers, etc.
Never mind the implementation issues. Just the scaling issues in Mini-mode, the lack of auto-posting and the multi-click method to see seated player lists all tell me they had no idea what they were doing when they rolled this out. TBH, the fact that they ****ed up Mini-mode so bad so as to make multi-tabling impossible BY DESIGN is actually really blowing my mind right now. It's as if they made no effort to consult players about what is important in a poker client.
Perhaps the lag, non-running / non-loading / unbalanced tables, non-working hand history images / inaccurate hand histories, etc. could not have been avoided. What I do know is that other firms have shown that they can be avoided... with foresight, that is. Even if we take the cluster**** of this update's implementation as a given, it is clear that Merge was more concerned about rolling out this update as quickly as possible than about giving players what we want/need in a functional client.