Interesting PokerEdge find.

[gusly]

[ QUOTE ]

As far as "shooting yourself in the foot," this is simply not true. We want the best for our subscribers, and every new feature is created with our subscribers in mind. While you are a subscriber, your stats will be hidden from other users. If you decide to stop subscribing, you can simply change your PartyPoker name (you are allowed to do this once every 6 months).

[/ QUOTE ]

And what if someone doesn't want to change his username, or isn't savvy enough to realize that he should do that?

And I'm sure you'd rather that former subscribers not change their usernames. If it makes no difference, why not exclude those stats permanently -- as long as they weren't acquired by your own "farm"?

[PokerEdge]

If those stats are excluded permanently, than the subscriber will not have the benefit of seeing the stats on his opponents for the current session. Also, the subscriber will not be able to see all of his own stats.

[gusly]

A bit disingenuous, don't you think?

Just in case you truly misunderstood, I'll clarify...

I wasn't suggesting that you not collect the data from the realtime hand histories on the subscriber's hard drive.

You obviously have a field somewhere in your database that allows you to hide current subscribers' stats from other subscribers. Whatever the contents of that field are, they can easily remain the same rather than being updated when a subscriber leaves.

I don't doubt that you have your own "farm" collecting hand histories, but you obviously are ALSO using the hand histories saved to your subscribers' hard drives to increase the number of hand histories in your database. In effect, they are paying for your service and simultaneously working to improve the quality and value of your data.

There's nothing wrong with a symbiotic relationship, but my point is this: since your subscribers are providing you with hand histories that you may not have collected otherwise, why should they be penalized once they end their subscription?

Any new PE subscriber will have access to very complete stats of the former subscriber, and the reason for that is because the former subscriber had PE peeking over his shoulder on every hand. That puts the former subscriber at a disadvantage to other random players who never subscribed to PE and therefore have sat at tables that the official PE "farm" was not watching. The stats on random players will obviously be much more incomplete than stats on former PE subscribers.

All I'm saying is that you should exclude the hand histories of a former subscriber that were collected only because the former subscriber fed you that data. If a machine in your official "server farm" was watching the table anyway, then the data collected should be fair game.

In fairness to you, maybe you don't currently have a way of differentiating between data collected by your official "server farm" and data collected from subscribers' hard drives, in which case it should be fairly easy to create a field to track that.

However, if what you are doing is using subscribers' machines to lower your costs by releasing your own machines to track other tables (by this I mean that if a table was being watched by your own machine independent of the subscriber, and a subscriber sits down at the table with PE running, and your software registers that the table is now being watched by a subscriber and then reassigns your own machine to a different unwatched table to avoid duplication of effort) then separating the data by origin obviously wouldn't be practical.

My point would be moot if you had your own machines watching every single table 24/7. But we all know that's not cost effective... [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

I'm not a subscriber, and I'll never be a subscriber, but I think you should be more up front with your subscribers about how you collect your data and how it will be used. Hell, stick a line in your subscriber agreement that they agree that their hand histories will available to other PE subscribers without restriction if they decide to end their subscription. That way everything would be honest and above board.

Oh yeah, If you already have that line in your agreement, please accept my apologies for this rather long-winded post!

[GFunk911]

[ QUOTE ]
The foundation of our database comes from data collected by our personal farm of computers (100,000+ hands per day).

[/ QUOTE ]

Just curious, how many computers do you have in your personal farm? I guess you might not be running any party skins, but you'd be hugely foolsih to not be, since you can run 4x as many tables per computer.

With 4 skins, so 16 tables per computer, at 60 hands/hr, and a conservative 20 hours in a day, that's almost 20,000 hands per day.

Are you only getting around 100,000 hands per day? Why so few, or do you only have a small number of computers?

[ZeeBee]

Perhaps it's more of a server smallholding than a server farm?

ZB

[Crix]

Regardless how you feel about PokerEdge, I am a subscriber by the way, I think it is commendable that they have come on here to answer their critics.

[Prod1gy]

Run VM ware and you could potentially do alot more per computer.

[Soleo]

I am currently subscribed, like it so far, despite the fact that there is still not enough hands often on my opponents, and I don't mind to help filling database during my sessions. Even if I choose to cancel subscription in future this will take 3 minutes to change my username to become "invisible" for PE users. For me it's OK.

[gusly]

[ QUOTE ]
Regardless how you feel about PokerEdge, I am a subscriber by the way, I think it is commendable that they have come on here to answer their critics.

[/ QUOTE ]

Except that they disappear when the obvious inconsistencies in their assertions are revealed. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]