Dear HSX: The redesign sucks

The Hollywood Stock Exchange has undergone a redesign. For reasons passing understanding, the powers that be at HSX have changed the format so that it is worse in just about every possible way. It's beyond horrible. So far I can't find anything that has changed for the better. The text is too small, the portfolio is too small and hard to read, the calendar is also too small and also hard to read, and when I tried to trade something, IE crashed. It used to be easy to tell which securities I was holding long and short, because the ones I was holding short were in red italics. Now they are all the same, with the word (long) or (short) next to each. Not as visually easy.

The formatting for the calendar used to be really well done; each day was clearly marked, the StarBonds, MovieStocks, and derivatives were all separate, and it was easy to find the next or previous weeks. Now everything is just in one big long list. On Monday, October 20, there are 28 securities listed on the calendar. Some of those I don't care about, some of them I do. But I have to squint at the damn list to figure out what exactly is going on.

And it's slower than ever, if that's possible. My portfolio usually takes a long time to load, but I do own about 1,700 securities, so there is a lot of actual text to load. I don't have the fastest computer, but I do have DSL. It's not even loading right now.

Of course the ads are now more intrusive. Someone's trying harder to make money on this, but my strong suspicion is that this will backfire, and badly. I haven't read a single completely positive post on the forums. One person had a "pro and con" list - that was the only thing I've seen that had anything good to say about this godawful mess. I normally ignore the forums, but I'm sure paying attention to them this week.

What's bizarre is that it was working fairly well, and now they've put a great deal of effort into redesigning it, and they threw out the things that were perfectly fine!

I've been playing HSX for 10 years. My portfolio is getting very close to H$2 billion. I am in the top 99.97% of all players. My lifetime return is over 98,000%. I'm really good at this, I like it, and I have put a huge amount of time into it. I've learned a lot playing HSX. Now I'm learning lessons I really don't want to learn. I already know what bad design and corporate screwups look like; I don't need any reminders on that score.

I wasn't playing much last winter and spring, but I have been playing fairly consistently of late, and I've been looking forward to upping my game a bit, playing the derivatives carefully, paying slightly more attention to openings and the StarBonds, that kind of thing. Now I'm really not sure I'm going to do more than check on the IPOs every couple of days and the StarBonds on Tuesdays. It's going to be more difficult to find the stocks that are tanking in my portfolio, which is a huge pain.

I've been toying with the idea of auctioning off my portfolio for a while, because it does take a certain amount of time just to maintain my ranking, and I could probably get something for it. I don't know how easy that it anymore; I think eBay outlawed selling virtual reality stuff like this. But the irony is that now that I am more inclined to do sell my portfolio, the market to do is, I'm sure, largely gone, because, until they fix this dog, ain't nobody going to be jumping in to play more HSX.

Which, of course, makes the game that much less interesting. Fewer players would just be less fun.

I am sincerely hoping that someone at HSX has the sense to realize what a horrible mistake they have made and fixes things pronto.