ISLE OF MAN - Last Sunday’s online tournament on the Mahjong Logic (eMahjong) server, a tournament was aborted due to technical problems. As a compensation, eMahjong will ad 100 USD prize money to the next tournament, coming weekend.

According to Jonas Alm, CEO of eMahjong, the company is working hard continually with fixing bugs and trying to work around external problems such as high network latency. “However”, says Mr. Alm, “there is simple mathematical proof that it is impossible to guarantee functionality in any software. Compared to other gaming networks of our age we have a very low failure rate: less than 1 percent.”

Classical rules

The European Classical Tournament which was played last Sunday (2 rounds of 30 minutes) was a promotional event. Apart from the subscription fee of $2,30 is (of which 30 cts as 'rake' for Mahjong Logic) there was an extra $230 available; there were 28 players, so that is $286 prize money, to be divided amongst the players 1~4.
After 30 minutes a message appeared that the tournament was aborted because of server problems. Automatically 30 cts was transferred back to the players' account; the remainder of 2 dollar is to follow soon.

Jonas Alm confirms: “The fee (30 cents) is auto-repaid, while the pot bet has to be repaid manually. This gives us room to make a pay-out of the pot differently depending on how and when the tournament was aborted. All buy-ins were repaid within about an hour and a system message was sent to all online users to inform about this."

Fix

“We try to catch errors as nicely as possible as per common good programming practice", says Mr. Alm. "This means trying to catch unexpected errors as well. If an error state is detected in a tournament, we prefer to shut down the tournament in a controlled manner rather than let it continue and potentially end with the wrong results.

“In essence, it is much better to try to display an error message than to just let the game client crash or give the pot to somebody who was not a top scorer in the tournament, etc. So while the tournament was aborted, it was - and is - still possible to play other games.”

Mr. Alm continues: “We already have a fix for the tournament error but it is not technically possible to release it for about a week. All classic rules tournaments (which are the only ones affected) that did not already have registered players have been cancelled until the fix has been released.”