All,
A couple updates regarding LIVE.
JAVA Update
Java recently released an update with tighter security settings. To continue to play LIVE with the latest Java installed, please follow these steps:
1) Open Control Panel
2) Open Java Settings (listed as "Java")
3) Click the "Security" tab along the top
4) Click "Edit Site List" button
5) type in "http://www.whatifsports.com" and click "Add" button
6) type in "http://live.whatifsports.com" and click "Add" button
7) click OK button
8) click OK button
9) restart your web browser
These steps white list the LIVE site to you can maintain high security settings within Java but still play LIVE.
LIVE Stability
LIVE is built in Java and is a very old code base. We cannot modify the code for a variety of reasons. With each Java update, the stability of LIVE has decreased.
We have been auto restarting it each morning at 5:00a ET but that has proven to not be good enough as we see reports of it being down at various times times throughout the week. This is a major headache for all of you that enjoy the game.
Today, we introduce another layer to help improve stability. It's not perfect, but it's better than what we had previously and is open-ended should we need to improve further.
Every hour, we have a process set to check if a game has started or concluded within the last 30 minutes. If nothing has started or concluded within the last 30 minutes, the LIVE service will shutdown and restart itself.
This should improve "up" time. The only downside to this is if we have users camped out to play in the LIVE rooms but not playing any games, you may be booted during the shutdown service.
If we find the hour interval to be too restrictive, we can adjust further. If it's not quick enough, we can open up some additional options (such as power users auto-restarting the service).
Future of LIVE
As we rebuild SimLeague Baseball, a new and dramatically improved LIVE experience will follow. Timing is still TBD, but it's part of our blue sky planning. Technology has changed so much since it was built, we are very excited to see what LIVE 2.0 will look like.