Current State of the Game

[jeheinz72]

Originally Posted by Rain King

Is your league the "Put Words Into People's Mouths Association"?

I didn't say any of that. Your guy explicitly said that the users who are mentioning their experience with the game are "not adding any value to the conversation" just because their leagues are different than yours.

Your issue should have gone in the Bug/Support forum or the thread title should have been more specific that it is looking for support for a specific league if you do not want others to weigh in on their experiences.

But isn't the issue we're bringing to light really an issue for everyone? If there is a "tipping point" as Lukas stated, isn't every day you advance, etc essentially moving that file one step closer to that tipping point? And if that tipping point got moved up significantly in 21 with the addition of new features (which I feel is the case), then shouldn't the community at large be at least a little concerned what new features may come that moves it forward even more? It's the old "First they came for...." quote - we're that first line, maybe your file that you treasure is down the road, but with this tipping point situation, it's on the path.

So in a way, we're going through an issue that down the road, maybe many others run into (of course, ideally they 64-bit it - but even Lukas doesn't seem to know if that would be in 22 or when it would be).

So maybe instead of ragging on our league for being very concerned about this, folks around here could be more supportive in trying to discern the cause of this issue that could possibly strike a much larger portion of the user base. That isn't a "bug" necessarily, it's a much larger concern.

[jeheinz72]

And to add - I think every member of our league probably hopes that ideally the non-stop crashes and issues are our-league-specific, and Lukas et al can peek under the hood and fix it.

Like we all recognize that's the ideal case for everyone - but maybe opening up the hearts and minds to the fact that it isn't, is a bit more productive.

[Rain King]

1.) I absolutely think your issue should get looked at (Lukas has already provided you some great support).

2.) Very few people play through 100+ years of league history and experience this issue so I do not think your issues make much of a blip on the overall "state of the game" which is how it was presented to the community.

3.) When your group started dismissing other's experiences after trying to make a case that OOTP21 is a poor version of the game for your specific reasons I took exception.

4.) Criticism of the game is great when it is done in a constructive manor. The community has worked through and helped the developers find many issues in this way. When a league decides to ambush the forum, dismisses pretty much everything a member of the OOTP team says as they try to help them and also dismisses anyone else's opinion that is no longer constructive.

[jeheinz72]

Originally Posted by Rain King

1.) I absolutely think your issue should get looked at (Lukas has already provided you some great support).

2.) Very few people play through 100+ years of league history and experience this issue so I do not think your issues make much of a blip on the overall "state of the game" which is how it was presented to the community.

3.) When your group started dismissing other's experiences after trying to make a case that OOTP21 is a poor version of the game for your specific reasons I took exception.

4.) Criticism of the game is great when it is done in a constructive manor. The community has worked through and helped the developers find many issues in this way. When a league decides to ambush the forum, dismisses pretty much everything a member of the OOTP team says as they try to help them and also dismisses anyone else's opinion that is no longer constructive.

1) Lukas absolutely has - we're all eagerly awaiting hearing back once they check out the file.

2) Yeah, but my point above is that it's 100 years now. They add more features in 22 and don't resolve this, maybe then it's 50 years. Then in OOTP23 more features and it's 25 years. If the tipping point situation Lukas stated is the real case, that tipping point will never move further away from file inception date unless they tackle it. So better to tackle it now when it's just those of us in a 100-year league and not when it's a much higher userbase because in OOTP 23 it happens after 20 years.

3) Shade dismissive yeah, but I think if one reads the OP, in the 1st sentence it becomes pretty clear that the "game" that's being talked about are longer-term leagues and files. So 3D crashing new files doesn't really advance the conversation at hand. Maybe chalk it up to poor thread titling, sure.

4) Next time we'll send a more cordial invitation? And I don't think we dismissed anything Lukas said, we more provided clarity on the situation we're experiencing. There were some assumptions in Lukas' statements that we clarified as already tried or were divergent from our 30-person user experience, so they were worth pointing out.

[NCBeachBum]

I haven't had any stability issues with this version until this week, and suddenly had my first out of memory error crash (while in an almost new solo league) on the same day several other people in an online league were talking about having the same problem. I sort of wondered if the newest patches could have introduced something new, or exacerbated something old.

(damn, Heinz, how goes it? been a while, man)

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

You're not wrong in that obviously this is a bad thing. That being said, this is just an inherent limitation of 32-bit games. It's not a problem with the game per say, it's just a limitation of the technology being used and for sure a big part of why the goal is to move all versions of the game to 64-bit going forward.

All saves that increase in file size can eventually get too big to run, that's just how things work on a 32-bit game.

The problem isn't with OOTP21 specifically, the same has been true of every version of OOTP. It's just that your save hit this point while on OOTP21. The same thing would've eventually happened if you stayed on say, OOTP15 until now, or if the league size grew a bit slower and didn't hit critical mass until OOTP24 (if OOTP 24 was still 32-bit, which hopefully will not be the case).

So will the change to 64bit fix this issue with leagues becoming too big?

This is a concerning issue for me since I like massive leagues so I'd likely hit that tipping point well before 100 years. Makes me not want to put so much effort in editing and creating the league if I have a set limit before it crashes.

I hope the push to 64bit is a major priority and should be first on the list of changes, at the very least for the latest version.

[SirMichaelJordan]

Originally Posted by NCBeachBum

I haven't had any stability issues with this version until this week, and suddenly had my first out of memory error crash (while in an almost new solo league) on the same day several other people in an online league were talking about having the same problem. I sort of wondered if the newest patches could have introduced something new, or exacerbated something old.

(damn, Heinz, how goes it? been a while, man)

What system are you on? I'm on Mac.

I have a pretty large league and haven't had any issues until the recent patches.

I usually dont have a problem running 100+ years with every league loaded.

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

So will the change to 64bit fix this issue with leagues becoming too big?

This is a concerning issue for me since I like massive leagues so I'd likely hit that tipping point well before 100 years. Makes me not want to put so much effort in editing and creating the league if I have a set limit before it crashes.

I hope the push to 64bit is a major priority and should be first on the list of changes, at the very least for the latest version.

It's definitely high on the list

Originally Posted by SirMichaelJordan

What system are you on? I'm on Mac.

I have a pretty large league and haven't had any issues until the recent patches.

I usually dont have a problem running 100+ years with every league loaded.

The "100 years" is not necessarily a strict limit. So many settings and options at play. If you ran with a complete setup with all foreign leagues, keeping all stats and retired players, you might hit the limits much sooner. If you run a smaller setup, or use different stats options, you might be able to do 150 or even 200+ in some cases.

Also do note that a couple versions out there are currently 64-bit already, which will be almost impossible to run into out of memory issues. I forget if it's all or only some mac versions which are already 64-bit editions, so it may be different for each person.

[Matt Arnold]

I will say that you often do better with honey than vinegar - the best way to get help is to clearly state your issues, and help us out by providing trace files or league files as necessary to help us investigate issues.

We have clearly heard that leagues that run for a long time have seemed to run into more issues this year. I don't actually know if it's something we changed (I could see the scouting changes potentially saving a few more reports than previously, but that's still a pretty small fraction relative to the rest of the league setup that I hesitate to blame it entirely), or simply more people finally reaching that 100+ year mark that starts to show the issues. Unfortunately, there's not usually a lot we can do about it right now, although those who provide us with files that show problems we'll certainly look into and see if there's something that we can do. I know we saw an issue with games crashing when you hit the button to automatically update your league, and we did find a different way to run that download which was included in one of the last couple patches and should help fix that issue. If there's something else that perhaps is just tipping over the edge due to a common league function, we'll certainly see what we can do there. And as Lukas alluded to, it's obviously high on our list for future versions, although we certainly can't guarantee it will be in any specific version.

As for the rest, as I said, please do be sure to report issues to us and we do our best to investigate.

(also, for some reason I seemed to have forgotten to post this when I first typed it up)

[SirMichaelJordan]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

It's definitely high on the list



The "100 years" is not necessarily a strict limit. So many settings and options at play. If you ran with a complete setup with all foreign leagues, keeping all stats and retired players, you might hit the limits much sooner. If you run a smaller setup, or use different stats options, you might be able to do 150 or even 200+ in some cases.

Also do note that a couple versions out there are currently 64-bit already, which will be almost impossible to run into out of memory issues. I forget if it's all or only some mac versions which are already 64-bit editions, so it may be different for each person.

I keep all stats. Pretty much full deatil but I delete players that never reach the majors. I have 16gb of ram. I never got up to 200 years but I did surpass 150 without any issues.

[jeheinz72]

Originally Posted by NCBeachBum

(damn, Heinz, how goes it? been a while, man)

What up Snowman! Been forever man (granted I still have PBRL in my sig here lol)

[Antonin]

Originally Posted by jeheinz72

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve played OOTP since version 3 and this is the buggiest final release by a long shot. A lot of the things that are bugs used to actually work and have broken along the way

The last version I purchased was OOTP 18. My favorite version, the one I play almost exclusively, is OOTP 14. I was considering buying OOTP 21 this weekend because of the sale. At that price, it's hard to turn away, even in these financially uncertain times.

But I think I will just continue with my half dozen or so fictional OOTP 14 leagues. OOTP 14 works fine for me, and is pleasing to look at.

I have never understood what Perfect Game is, and what the company wants to accomplish by introducing it. But I understand that this is their product, and they have the right to give it any direction they want.

I am quite happy with OOTP 14.

[NeuroticTruth]

Lukas,

Thank you for your response. I wanted to take some time to properly digest your comments here and throughout the thread before I properly responded. Before doing so, I greatly appreciate the time you spent in discussion in this thread. I didn't expect a dev to respond to my post, let alone engage in conversation, so that was encouraging to see. Also, thank you for offering to take a look at the league file. Any input / assistance would be greatly appreciated. As far as your initial post goes, here are my thoughts (grab a coffee, this might be a long one boys):

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

As far as the conclusions here about our focus, all you have to do is look at any regular patch change list to see the respective focus on the regular game as opposed to PT. Most patches, we've put easily 90%+ of the fixes, changes, time and effort etc. into the base game.

-- Your changes to the base game affect not only solo / league play but PT as well. While there are changes that affect online leagues, there are bugs that have plagued online league for numerous versions that (despite being reported) have never been corrected. My point here was that the focus clearly has shifted from being focused on potentially improving these issues, to tuning the base game for PT use.

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

There was no reduction of beta testers for this release, in fact the beta team is larger than it ever has been. I have no idea where you might've gotten the idea there was a reduction from, but it's objectively inaccurate.

-- Safe to assume here that I do not have verifiable proof. I got this information directly from current and former beta testers. All of which echoed the same sentiment.

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Out of memory issues can often come from leagues simply getting too big for either the game or your system to handle, and in that case there's nothing we can do about this. The only short term solution is to eliminate any unnecessary data in the save to reduce the size. One long term solution we are actively working on is to make all versions of the game 64-bit in the future, which will go a long way toward eliminating any memory errors and issues.

-- This topic seemed to hijack the thread a bit. I'm not going to rehash this much as this has already been spoken to immensely. I will say, however, that this issue doesn't just happen with our "large league file". I've seen this issue happen in numerous files of varying size, birth date (version it was created on initially etc), and depth.

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

If you report this through the bugs forum or (best of all) through tech support and also include league files that show where this is happening, then we'll look into it and fix it if at all possible, just like we do for as many of the issues reported as we can.

If you already did report it and haven't heard back, then please bump the report or even just directly send a message to one of the team to let us know it's there and to take a look at it, and we'll try our best to do so. It's not that we want to ignore any issues, but we have a lot on our plates, we are are human and we do miss things and can use reminders sometimes.

-- This is a direct quote from a current beta tester "tbh, despite being around OOTP a long time, i don't know what the "right way" to report a bug is. i've filed bugs in their bug tracker i get access to in the beta. i've posted in the bugs forum. in basically every case, there is never a peep of a response - like no ack, no nothing." This is a feeling I think many of us have experienced. That's why some of this is so frustrating. We DO report these issues. Sometimes they get fixed but it feels like overwhelmingly our reports go ignored.

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

In spite of selling more games than we have before this year, we've overall received fewer reports of crashes and major issues than we have for any previous versions. So far from somehow having gone downhill, according to the majority of the feedback we've received, this is the most stable version of the game ever.

Now of course, just because that's the case for the majority of users, doesn't mean it's the case for everyone.

-- I moved this section to last and took it out of place because I feel like it speaks more largely to the point of my post. My intent wasn't to bash and slander. My intent was to draw attention to something a, albeit small, minority of your player base is experiencing. Collectively, our discussion throughout this thread was never meant to dismiss anyone's experiences. As I stated, my greatest fear is the shift in focus will eventually lead to the evaporation of quality online communities and leagues. We (the players in said communities) play the game differently than your ever day user. We experience the game in greater volume than your average player. We use and abuse the games in ways that most people wouldn't even think to consider. I have almost 4,000 hours in this version alone on Steam. Granted, some of that is idle time. I would venture to guess at least half of that is true played time. That's not to say that our experiences and opinions are superior. But it does speak to the immensity in which we spend our time in this game.

When I mention the shift in focus, I'm speaking more towards what I see developmentally happening and how its affecting online leagues. I mentioned bugs because they're easier to relate to, but there is a larger problem that's happening here that is harming long term online leagues. It truly feels like we're not even considered when you make an implement changes. Again, I understand we're an extreme small minority, but we've devoted years to this game and our communities. It is difficult to me to continue to feel so under represented. I would love the opportunity to put a list together of some concerns we have and get your thoughts on them.

Again, I don't to derail the discussion here. Nor do I want it to come across as bashing or that we don't appreciate the effort. I just wanted to explain my initial post in greater detail as it looks like it wasn't quite understood. Progress is clearly being made in terms of clarification of issues. I'm sure its difficult to continue to support a file that's been through 9 different versions.

Thank you again for your time and your assistance. It is VERY much appreciated.

[luckymann]

Touch wood, I haven't had any of the problems mentioned in the OP but I share their opinion that these sorts of things may for now be specific to their league and others like it, but can quickly become more widespread as each of our saves evolve and grow larger, thereby potentially becoming more vulnerable to having similar issues befall them. So it is something we all need to watch, and obviously something that needs to be fixed ASAP before that tipping point becomes more common.

I'd love for someone to spell out the safe way to purge unneeded data / stats / players without it affecting the integrity of your league's history and records. I've pored over the manual and searched these boards but see nothing on this topic at all, only warnings that to do so without knowing what you're doing usually results in the league history being affected adversely.

[BIG17EASY]

I will start by saying that I hope Lukas and the dev team can solve your issue. I know what it feels like to be invested in this game and to potentially lose a game I've spent years on. But, I have an issue with two things you've said.

Originally Posted by jeheinz72

2) Yeah, but my point above is that it's 100 years now. They add more features in 22 and don't resolve this, maybe then it's 50 years. Then in OOTP23 more features and it's 25 years. If the tipping point situation Lukas stated is the real case, that tipping point will never move further away from file inception date unless they tackle it. So better to tackle it now when it's just those of us in a 100-year league and not when it's a much higher userbase because in OOTP 23 it happens after 20 years.

Did you miss the part where Lukas said your game may have been teetering on the brink while you were using OOTP20? Never did he or another dev say that the "breaking point" was moved up due to new features. He only said that at some point there is a breaking point, depending on size of the league, saved data and numerous other issues. So it's only you who says that more features will shorten the time until leagues reach that point.

Originally Posted by jeheinz72

3) Shade dismissive yeah, but I think if one reads the OP, in the 1st sentence it becomes pretty clear that the "game" that's being talked about are longer-term leagues and files. So 3D crashing new files doesn't really advance the conversation at hand. Maybe chalk it up to poor thread titling, sure.

This is the first sentence of the OP:

I think it goes without saying that this release has been disappointing to say the least.

That can only be taken as a broad, sweeping statement. This sentence combined with how members of the league have teamed up to complain about the direction of the game (PT, in particular) comes off just as poorly as the dismissive responses some have given regarding the problem your league is having. Lots of people have made posts about problems they've had without actively trying to portray the game poorly, complain about the direction of the game or claim they have "sources" on the beta team that say bug reports aren't useful.

If you (meaning your entire online league) have a problem you need fixed, stick to the problem, the facts surrounding it and ask for help. Don't come in and cloud your problem with sweeping complaints about the game, claims from unnamed sources on the beta team and gang up on the dev team, then get upset when others come to the dev team's defense.

[Déjà Bru]

The takeaways from this thread for me:

1) The bigger the league, and the longer the league, the more probability of out-of-memory issues. This is true of ANY league but of course an online league may be accumulating more data than a single-player league. It seems to me that this has ALWAYS been true of OOTPB; I remember talking about this a decade or more ago.

2) There's not much to do about league longevity if you love it but you can do a great deal in the options about reducing the amount of data in the league files (less feeder/international leagues, retired players, messages, stats, etc.) to stave off these issues.

3) The "Current State of the Game" is fine, despite the limitation above. Yet, the conversion of the game to 64-bit (according to Lukas, this will alleviate the problem) will be a sales incentive for me when it happens.

[Lukas Berger]

I just wanted to give a little update that I have not had a chance to check this out today, had too much going on, but we have not forgotten about it, and it's high on our to do list

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

Lukas,

Thank you for your response. I wanted to take some time to properly digest your comments here and throughout the thread before I properly responded. Before doing so, I greatly appreciate the time you spent in discussion in this thread. I didn't expect a dev to respond to my post, let alone engage in conversation, so that was encouraging to see. Also, thank you for offering to take a look at the league file. Any input / assistance would be greatly appreciated. As far as your initial post goes, here are my thoughts (grab a coffee, this might be a long one boys):



-- Your changes to the base game affect not only solo / league play but PT as well. While there are changes that affect online leagues, there are bugs that have plagued online league for numerous versions that (despite being reported) have never been corrected. My point here was that the focus clearly has shifted from being focused on potentially improving these issues, to tuning the base game for PT use.

Just some quick replies here that are not meant to be the final word. But as far as this goes, it's not really the case we're doing much to tune the base game for PT. There's really not a lot of crossover between the two modes and the dev time for each is pretty well defined, as well as the teams that work on each pretty much each have their own areas. There's not too much crossover among the folks that work on each team and we're not really worrying about PT when making changes/improvements in the base mode of the game.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- Safe to assume here that I do not have verifiable proof. I got this information directly from current and former beta testers. All of which echoed the same sentiment.

I mean, I have no idea how they would know this. Especially not the former team members. There's no viewable list of how many members of the team there are

We do review the team each year to see what people have been able to contribute and if over a period of time (always more than just one dev cycle) they have not been able to contribute much, then sometimes we'll talk things over with them to see if they're in a position to continue or not but if anyone does leave the team, it's always with the plan of replacing them with someone who is in a position to contribute more, not just to have less folks on the team.

So basically each year, the beta team is expanding, not contracting. Each mix of folks has its own personality though and personal circumstances vary, so some years there may be more activity than other years, but that's really not something we can directly control.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- This topic seemed to hijack the thread a bit. I'm not going to rehash this much as this has already been spoken to immensely. I will say, however, that this issue doesn't just happen with our "large league file". I've seen this issue happen in numerous files of varying size, birth date (version it was created on initially etc), and depth.

This is a super complicated subject, because there are just so many things that can go into this beyond just the pure league size.

A few are:

The overall specs of your system, amount of memory etc of course.

Beyond that, the amount and type of programs you run in the background, and whether you have exceptions properly set up for OOTP in those like anti-virus and disk cleaners that might interfere with OOTP, overall health of the system itself, age and health of your system's memory and hard drive, how often you restart your system. How often you update your Operating System, and how often you update individual drivers for components like video and sound cards.

Even things like whether you leave a specific league open for long periods of time when you're not actually playing (which can increase the chances of corruption happening to a file, depending on the other programs and processes running) can make a difference in the health of save files.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- This is a direct quote from a current beta tester "tbh, despite being around OOTP a long time, i don't know what the "right way" to report a bug is. i've filed bugs in their bug tracker i get access to in the beta. i've posted in the bugs forum. in basically every case, there is never a peep of a response - like no ack, no nothing." This is a feeling I think many of us have experienced. That's why some of this is so frustrating. We DO report these issues. Sometimes they get fixed but it feels like overwhelmingly our reports go ignored.

Nothing is ignored if it's posted in the bug reports forum/or the beta team's project tracker. We read everything posted there. But that also doesn't mean we reply to or fix every single thing there.

Again, there are different reasons. One, just to reply to everything would take more time than we have, and we prefer to give priority to working on the game itself rather than replying to literally everything.

I don't think you'll find any game company that replies to all or even most bug reports users make and in fact, I think/hope we'd be pretty high on the list of the companies that communicate the most if you were to compare. I mean, sure in the bug reports forums there are tons of bug reports that we didn't reply to, but there are also tons we did and overall hundreds of posts from us replying to bugs and working through issues with folks.

Beyond that, a specific report may be a duplicate of other reports we've received. It may be something we've determined not to be a bug. It may be something relatively minor that we've determined would be better served going on a list of similar minor issues to be fixed at a latter time. We have have more pressing priorities at the moment and a specific issue just falls a ways down our priority list.

It may be we just don't currently have the time or manpower to fix a specific issue or that the fix would take more time and effort than the befit would be worth and so decide to leave it for a future version. We may not be able to recreate a certain issue. Sometimes we have plans for a larger overhaul of a certain area in the future, so it makes sense just to leave the issue for them. Plus sometimes we do fix a bug but ma just forget to reply to the reporter and tell them.

And other times, maybe we just missed something. Like I mentioned in my first post, if you have reported something you're sure is an issue, and not received a reply, feel free to be persistent and to point it out to one or more of the team.

Anyway, there are lots of reasons we might not reply to or fix a specific problem immediately, but it doesn't mean it's useless to report it. We do see and note all issues that are properly reported, even if they aren't immediately fixed or immediately(or ever) replied to.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

It truly feels like we're not even considered when you make an implement changes. Again, I understand we're an extreme small minority, but we've devoted years to this game and our communities. It is difficult to me to continue to feel so under represented. I would love the opportunity to put a list together of some concerns we have and get your thoughts on them.

What can I say here? This is a fair complaint. I know a lot of folks, including many we respect highly and have contributed to the game greatly, who are active in online leagues have made this same complaint repeatedly in the past, that we don't give enough time or attention to the needs and priorities of online leagues. And I can't truthfully say that's wrong.

For sure in the past, online leagues have gotten the short end of the stick developmentally more than is probably fair. It always seems like the changes that online leagues are clamoring for just fall on the part of our to do list we don't have the time to get to each year. And that's ultimately on us, in that we should probably be moving those things further up the list a bit more often. We do want to improve though.

For instance, just within the last few months, I know Matt's been compiling some specific input regarding online leagues to work though a list of their most pressing issues and complaints/needed improvements etc for OOT22. Some of those changes already made it into OOTP21 patches, especially build 71 if you check that list out. Anyway, if you and your league wants to put together a list of priories yourself, we'll certainly look it over and add it to the list we already have.

Now how much of the rest of the list will ultimately make it into OOTP22 remains to be seen (it's a big list and we're still a small team!) but we are aware of the need to do more for the online folks.

I cannot promise we'll be perfect at this or always include just what you want, but we do want to do better and certainly not to take a group of our most loyal and passionate customers for granted.

[The_Niddler]

Anyone have any luck with creating better quality players for their drafts?
I am not trying to pile on to OOTP, but 21 has been the worst so far.
It was recommended to remove feeder leagues, I did that, just as bad, I re-added feeder leagues, just as bad.

Anyone have any suggestions?


And Lukas, you are my dude, you know I give you props and have worked with you in the past on issues and you have always helped me...but you stated:

As far as the conclusions here about our focus, all you have to do is look at any regular patch change list to see the respective focus on the regular game as opposed to PT. Most patches, we've put easily 90%+ of the fixes, changes, time and effort etc. into the base game.

I am only speaking for myself, but I take it as, you have to put out so many fixes because you lacked on the regular game in between versions and now you are trying to make up for it with patching things and fixing things.
If you focused on the base game from version to version, as much as you are stating, then would you have as many patches that are needed?

Again, that is not a slam on you or the ootp crew, I am just giving you a different perspective on it and how I think about it.

[The_Niddler]

And with all of that said, I do thank you and the rest of the OOTP crew for what you guys do Lukas.

OOTP has provided a great product and as long time users, we have come to expect a high quality product from your previous versions, so when we do run into things, it is hard to accept them some times, for lack of a better term.