Should we revert back to Chat 1.0?

Citizens,

Two months ago, I made the decision to transition Torn over to Chat 2.0 rather than investing significant resources into addressing the fundamental issues present in Chat 1.0 which we were already planning to replace.

Chat 1.0 was ancient software initially created over 15 years ago. Our current developers are unfamiliar with its rigid structure, a problem that limits our ability to update or resolve its shortcomings effectively. In my eagerness to move beyond the limitations of Chat 1.0, I chose to launch Chat 2.0, believing it to be more or less ready for widespread use. Unfortunately, this was a mistake, and I apologize for how this has gone down.

I was unaware of the issues that would emerge under a mass-scale deployment, and when they came to light, I initially thought these problems would be resolved quicker than they have been. Sadly, we've failed to deliver solutions to some of these issues within a reasonable time frame. It feels like we're always one update away from resolving everything, but maybe it's time to just give up for now and return back to the old system.

No matter how frustrating this has been for players, you can rest assured this whole process has been no less frustrating for me.


Today there's been some developments...

- All third party rate limiting is now disabled, resolving issues caused by using many browser tabs at once.
- All known Notebook issues have been resolved.
- Timestamp tooltips have been added to all chats.

Additionally a 'retry connection' mechanism is scheduled to be released tomorrow which will help "Connecting to the server" issues, chat entirely disappearing, and the inability to load certain channels. The next immediate priorities will be synchronizing chat states between all browser tabs and devices, as well as addressing interactions with chat and sending of messages between page loads. As I said, it always feels like a breakthrough is right around the corner, which is what makes this decision to revert back to 1.0 so difficult.


Here's the priority list as it stands...

[image: i.gyazo.com]


Although the team has fixed the majority of critical issues over the last two months, there's still lots more work to do. It's clear there will still remain, at a minimum, plenty of non-critical issues and minor frustrations for a few more months.

Based on this situation, I have decided to allow the community to choose whether we persist with Chat 2.0 or revert fully back to Chat 1.0 while we iron out the issues. Please consider the following before making your choice:

- If Chat 2.0 remains operational in the production environment, the team will continue fixing the remaining issues until things are perfect, and then begin working on significant updates to improve it to a point where it is far superior to Chat 1.0.

- Reverting to Chat 1.0 will inevitably cause disruption to Chat 2.0's development, and thus a delay on new features such as custom group chats.

- Please remember that Chat 1.0 had its own problems too. The original move to Chat 2.0 was expedited due to the fear of a hard connection limit. We'll almost certainly need to spend considerable resources resolving these issues instead of working on Chat 2.0.

- The revert back to Chat 1.0 may not be smooth, and all existing chats on 2.0 will be lost. We have no developers on the team who know Chat 1.0's old code, so it will be a challenge for us to achieve a clean transition back to the old system, let alone updating it to resolve its critical flaws

- The slowdown after a few minutes across all Torn android apps caused by Chat 1.0 will return. After many months of work, we were unable to resolve this with Chat 1.0, and this is another reason for my haste to move to Chat 2.0 in the first place.

- There are problems that are very difficult to reproduce outside of a production environment. We will obviously do our best, but when the new chat eventually returns, we may encounter similar issues again that are only reproducible with wide-scale usage. But we'll make sure to carry out proper closed betas within the community beforehand.

As you can likely infer, my preference would perhaps be to push onward with Chat 2.0 as this will ensure that we are able to refine it as quickly as possible. But of course, there are many issues with it which affect your gameplay, hence why I felt it important for the community to make the final call.


Reverting back to 1.0 will see us migrating back to the original chat, and then focusing development towards attempting to rebuild it in an effort to resolve its inherent connection limit flaw. The migration process may not be very smooth, and the rebuild will be hard work, but this will then hold us over until Chat 2.0 is in an optimal state for us to re-release it in the future.

The alternative is for us to continue with what we're doing, releasing updates and fixes every week. I can see the chat team are working hard every day, and they are capable of resolving these complex issues eventually - the only question is time. At some point, they will all be resolved, and we are seeing significant progress weekly, but it doesn't seem possible to commit to a dedicated timeline.


Should we continue working through the kinks of 2.0 while it's in production until we can get it perfect? Or is it best to revert everyone back to 1.0 and begin investing some resources into that to resolve its limitations before continuing with 2.0?

Thanks.