We wanted to provide an update regarding the site outage on December 26th.
As you may have heard or experienced, late Wednesday afternoon due to an outage at Amazon’s hosting center which was beyond our control, the DerbyWars site became unreachable for most players. While the site came back online within a few minutes the speed was not satisfactory for the next hour. This happened in the middle of the Santa Anita card, and the decision was made to cancel the remaining races. Based on the rules and the percentage of races completed, various games were either canceled or finalized at that point.
This was unfortunate timing in the middle of a big race day where over 20 games were in action and running smoothly. It also necessitated the cancellation of the $30,000 December Shootout. All players in the shootout were refunded their $195 entry fees.
We want to thank everyone for their outpouring of support and understanding, including many great comments, fair criticisms and suggestions for handling things in the future. Our current rules call for 60% of scheduled races to be completed for a tournament to be made official, but many players have suggested that we consider postponing and rescheduling remaining races. That idea does have merit and is one we will explore for the future.
The way we handle cancellations is important, because with DerbyWars running games over 250 days per year, we will undoubtedly run into track cancellations, internet problems and other unforeseen circumstances in the future. In 2012, we’ve successfully hosted over 4,800 games and paid out over $1.4-million in prizes with greater than 99% uptime.
On Thursday, DerbyWars resumed normal operations and games are running smoothly as usual.
I welcome any feedback and comments you may have. I can be reached at support@derbywars.com.
Best regards,
Mark
Mark Midland
Co-Founder
DerbyWars
