Suggestion for Handwiever/NetBridgeVu/BridgeVu

[nige1]

Here's a question: who is it necessary for? What do they do with it? What does BBO get out of it?

Satisfied repeat customers.

We don't generally respond directly, as there's not much to say. Suggestions are noted, but we have thousands of suggestions waiting for attention, and very limited resources.

BBO should reassess programming priorities. e.g.

• Mending GIB represents a bottomless pit of wasted effort. Each attempt seems to make GIB worse. A modern replacement might be more cost-effective, in the long run.
• Customers repeat a few suggestions regularly and often. A handful would seem to require little effort to fix. For example, restoring the Dealer "Tricks function".

[mycroft]

You've only answered the last question, which definitely isn't enough here. How much does BBO get from those "satisfied repeat customers" when the product that satisfies them is free? You're saying that not being able to use NetBridgeVu will get you to play fewer tourneys? Or get you to join Prime if it becomes a Prime-only benefit?

 

And how many repeat customers? Because really, if it's worth $3/month (or even, as the tipping point rather than the whole reason, say $1.50/month) to enough people, there's a market there for someone to take it over - possibly even buying out/licensing the codebase - and continue development outside BBO. Given the free market and all, why hasn't that happened? Surely not that BBO is pricing an obsolete, undocumented and unsupported codebase out of reach of any reasonable enterepeneur able to make money. Or clean-rooming an equivalent that uses the same API and Bridge notation so they don't have to license it.

 

Or maybe, the loss of those "repeat customers" would have paid 1 day of barmar's time, and there's 130 things that will cost more...

 

If they do go with "regularly and often on the forums" - and by that I don't mean the 3 people who complain about X every couple of months (please note, for some things, like categories, I'm one of those 3!); to my memory on the forums that means the first priorities are:

- Implement a pause feature so that people aren't "rushed into" playing the next hand, and can talk about the last one

- reintroduce rubber bridge

- figure out how to solve the "can't find our fourth because he's in/not in Casual" problem

 

I'm frankly ignoring the fourth one, which is "give us our dealer-with-tricks-function back", because if that's so important to you, dealer is right there for you to install on your own computer and use your own cycles. If you're not technically-minded enough to be able to install dealer and DDS (on a Windows machine, at least), the cost of someone who can, even if you can't pay a granddaughter in pizza and beer, is less than Prime membership for the year...

[pescetom]

I'm frankly ignoring the fourth one, which is "give us our dealer-with-tricks-function back", because if that's so important to you, dealer is right there for you to install on your own computer and use your own cycles. If you're not technically-minded enough to be able to install dealer and DDS (on a Windows machine, at least), the cost of someone who can, even if you can't pay a granddaughter in pizza and beer, is less than Prime membership for the year...

I pass the rest, but not this gratuitous provocation.

BBO has said nothing to suggest it could not correct this error of judgement by either simply turning the related server back on or by moving that version of Dealer to the mainstream server.

BBO did explain what happened and promise it would consider how to resolve the problem, but nothing happened.

Nobody here or on BW has been able to explain clearly how to make this work under Windows and what additional software if any one must purchase and from where, if you really know then please explain.

As a loyal customer who regularly contributes to make BBO and its ecosystem work and who pays BB$ too, I fail to see why I should face this problem. If I run a simulation on BBO to resolve a problem on BBF then I am adding value to the business proposition, surely that is not hard to understand.

[mycroft]

Okay, you got me this time. I thought it used DDS for solving, but it uses Ginsberg's solver, which has disappeared off the face of the .net.

 

Looks like suokko has built a program that uses "dealer"'s syntax and the DDS library.

Or you could learn a new input syntax from a TCL perspective with Thomas Andrew's deal.

Or a reimplementation in Python (which is what I'm going to do right now, because, well, my other job uses Python, so I'm very comfortable with it).

 

Note: I haven't tested any of these, but a) I trust Thomas Andrews, maker of one of the Complete Indexes of bridge deals; and b) it's not hard to get a dealer equivalent in coverage to van Staveren's "do not use this for dealing tournament hands" dealer.