A week of polish: faster pages, less baggage, and a beta invite
After last week’s big clear-out the work carried on, in smaller and less dramatic pieces. A few pages were still dragging, two crashes needed hunting down, and Android players now get an invitation to the beta without leaving the game.
⚡ The next batch of slow pages
- The new monitoring did its job and pointed straight at the worst offenders: My Team, the stat leaderboards and Franchise.
- The pattern was the same every time. The database had no suitable index to work from, so it waded through an enormous pile of rows to find the handful it actually needed.
- The season leaderboards had a second twist. The database had two possible routes and kept picking the slower one, no matter what I added. It only sped up once I removed the bad route entirely.
- All three pages are noticeably quicker now.
📦 How long detailed box scores stick around
- To stop that from creeping back, there is now a retention rule. Individual game box scores — the per-player line for a specific match — are kept for the last three seasons of each save game. Older ones are cleared automatically.
- This is the one change in this post that takes something away, so here is exactly what stays, permanently: every result, every standing, records, your players season statistics, transaction history, trophies and achievements. None of that is touched.
- An old game still opens. You get the final score and the scoring drives — you no longer get the individual stat line for every player who was on the field.
🐛 Two crashes, both my own doing
- A crash when advancing to the next week from certain pages. I had introduced that one myself a few hours earlier. It is gone again.
- The Power Ranking page returning a blank screen in one specific situation.
- Neither was reported by a player. The monitoring caught both, which is exactly the job it was built for.
🤖 Android app: closed testing continues
- The app is still in closed testing on Google Play. I am not naming a release date while I do not have one.
- If you play on an Android phone, you will now see an invitation to join the test inside the game.
- It takes two steps and the order matters: join the Google group first, then open the Play testing link with the same Google account. Do it the other way round and Play will not show you the test build.
Two weeks without a single new feature — from the outside that looks like nothing happened. But a manager game where you wait on every page is not fun to play, however much is buried in it. From here on it goes back to content. If something still feels slow on your end, tell me and I will go look.