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ESPN Fantasy Football crashes
The verdict’s in on ESPN’s revamped fantasy football engine: It stinks.
How bad does it stink? Well, they followed up a rocky preseason (live drafts were almost universally tainted by severe technical glitches) with a flat-out terrible first week (crashing steadily all weekend, no live updates for many who had paid for the service, etc.) culminating in the page being entirely down for pretty much the entire day Tuesday, the day folks traditionally turn up to see if they … oh, I dunno … won or not. (Needless to say, I did win, but that’s beside the point.)
ESPN even took the radical measure (for them) of posting an apology and making … well, you can’t call them promises, more like “hopeful statements” … that things will improve.
Our aim is to have our Fantasy Football application operating normally for this Sunday’s games. We will be updating you on our progress and resolution.
Again we appreciate that you are playing Fantasy Football with us and we will do everything possible to make this a terrific experience for you this season.
Some aren’t waiting around to find out. One league I’m in (“The Third Graders”) is trying to replicate everything over to Yahoo’s equally free fantasy site.
It’s a shame, though. I’ve been in ESPN fantasy leagues since 1996, and I hate to see ’em break up on the rocks like this. I’m still waiting to see if they’re even gonna attempt to field their Fantasy Hockey games this year. They claim they are, but in light of the difficulty surrounding football, who knows?
I just wish they’d have spent more time and money concentrating on the final football product than the annoying “fantasy girl” commercials they used to promote it.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Off-Topic Musings
Comments
By Robin
September 14, 2005 10:22 PM | Link to this
Yep, I cannot say I am surprised by the failure of ESPN and their STUPID new system. I hosted a FF league on their site for six years and was happy to pay for it, as the they always have *the best* fantasy analysis, hands down. This year when I went back to start my league, even setting it up was so buggy that I knew we were in trouble. And of course having to pay extra for all the analysis that had previously been either free or included with your league fee was just ridiculous (are they no longer a legitimate sports news source for the general public?) Anyway, the clear and total focus on greed vs providing good service turned me off -- I and my league mates got our money refunded and went to play on NFL.com for free. That site that runs on cbs sportsline's engine and works much better than ESPN's ever did, actually. Whan an ordeal though.