JC
Coos Cues
Is anyone else getting frustrated with this software?
Mary Coffman was the official liaison between LMS and us leagues but she has now left CIS and now I really wonder where LMS is headed from here.
We have been running LMS for now the third session and the only thing it seems like it's capable of doing well is reporting games to Fargorate. Now this isn't a bad thing as virtually all of our players are now established but trying to use it to manage and report the league internally has been disappointing to say the least.
It actually worked reasonably well for 8 ball but summer rotation league has been a nightmare for now the second session, a year apart.
Mary told me prior to leaving CIS that she has been continually expressing the issues to Steve without so much as an acknowledgement back. Well her job was to help folks make it work and with that kind of support on the back end frankly I don't blame her for quitting.
So I am going to publicly describe the main issues we have had and am looking for some input from others using this software as to their experience. I am doing this to try to get an understanding of where it really stands at this point.
1) The software cannot generate a balanced home and away schedule where you have a true round robin. This is important because of geography and other obvious reasons. If you have to drive 25 miles to play at someone's home you don't want to repeat the trip the second time you play them. It's fair for them to come to you. Now this is very easy to do manually as we always did before but for both of our rotation sessions LMS cannot do it.
2) Win/Loss. LMS is incapable of accurately calculating which team won the match based on the setting chosen. You can tell it to calculate the winner based on rounds first (we play five rounds) and games won second in case of a tie. No matter what settings you chose it doesn't do it right. The very first week of play this was evident and Mary communicated this to Steve and that match is still screwed up to this day. This forces us to run a second win loss sheet to let our league know accurately what the standings are. Sort of defeats the purpose of running a league management software.
3) Ties. Sometimes there are actual ties. Each team won two rounds and split the third. LMS treats these as if the match never happened. I'm sure it has been explained to Steve why this confuses the standing yet he seems not to care.
4) Team standings. LMS cannot seem to sort the standing in the correct order even if it did award the proper win and loss. There is a standard way to rank teams on win/loss/tie and LMS seems not to "get it".
5) Entering scores. LMS does not show you the handicap until you enter the last score of the last player even though it knows this as soon as you enter all the fargo ratings. It's also very difficult to glance at a score sheet and determine who actually won the match. These things should be very easy to correct. Also the entire score sheet including handicaps should be visible in the public section so players can look at the sheets and see what happened including the handicap.
To be fair LMS does a lot of things right. It ranks players correctly and is fairly easy to use. What's frustrating is that Fargo has so much potential and the state of LMS is the final link to making it all fall into place yet Steve is unable or unwilling to take those final steps to make it smooth. I am pretty computer savy and I can only imagine league operators not so much struggling with this.
I write all of this because I want LMS to succeed and Fargorate too. And the later is dependent on the former and just waiting on LMS to be right for Fargorate to blossom IMO.
Any ones experience with LMS is appreciated
Thanks,
John Chaplin
Tioga BCAPL
Coos Bay, Oregon
Mary Coffman was the official liaison between LMS and us leagues but she has now left CIS and now I really wonder where LMS is headed from here.
We have been running LMS for now the third session and the only thing it seems like it's capable of doing well is reporting games to Fargorate. Now this isn't a bad thing as virtually all of our players are now established but trying to use it to manage and report the league internally has been disappointing to say the least.
It actually worked reasonably well for 8 ball but summer rotation league has been a nightmare for now the second session, a year apart.
Mary told me prior to leaving CIS that she has been continually expressing the issues to Steve without so much as an acknowledgement back. Well her job was to help folks make it work and with that kind of support on the back end frankly I don't blame her for quitting.
So I am going to publicly describe the main issues we have had and am looking for some input from others using this software as to their experience. I am doing this to try to get an understanding of where it really stands at this point.
1) The software cannot generate a balanced home and away schedule where you have a true round robin. This is important because of geography and other obvious reasons. If you have to drive 25 miles to play at someone's home you don't want to repeat the trip the second time you play them. It's fair for them to come to you. Now this is very easy to do manually as we always did before but for both of our rotation sessions LMS cannot do it.
2) Win/Loss. LMS is incapable of accurately calculating which team won the match based on the setting chosen. You can tell it to calculate the winner based on rounds first (we play five rounds) and games won second in case of a tie. No matter what settings you chose it doesn't do it right. The very first week of play this was evident and Mary communicated this to Steve and that match is still screwed up to this day. This forces us to run a second win loss sheet to let our league know accurately what the standings are. Sort of defeats the purpose of running a league management software.
3) Ties. Sometimes there are actual ties. Each team won two rounds and split the third. LMS treats these as if the match never happened. I'm sure it has been explained to Steve why this confuses the standing yet he seems not to care.
4) Team standings. LMS cannot seem to sort the standing in the correct order even if it did award the proper win and loss. There is a standard way to rank teams on win/loss/tie and LMS seems not to "get it".
5) Entering scores. LMS does not show you the handicap until you enter the last score of the last player even though it knows this as soon as you enter all the fargo ratings. It's also very difficult to glance at a score sheet and determine who actually won the match. These things should be very easy to correct. Also the entire score sheet including handicaps should be visible in the public section so players can look at the sheets and see what happened including the handicap.
To be fair LMS does a lot of things right. It ranks players correctly and is fairly easy to use. What's frustrating is that Fargo has so much potential and the state of LMS is the final link to making it all fall into place yet Steve is unable or unwilling to take those final steps to make it smooth. I am pretty computer savy and I can only imagine league operators not so much struggling with this.
I write all of this because I want LMS to succeed and Fargorate too. And the later is dependent on the former and just waiting on LMS to be right for Fargorate to blossom IMO.
Any ones experience with LMS is appreciated
Thanks,
John Chaplin
Tioga BCAPL
Coos Bay, Oregon