so whats the emergency maintenance for?

Blame Sony for this one, Sony Europe decided to let people activate the Heavensward pre-order codes too early. Some downloaded and installed the update and broke their games. There was a thread about it not the other day, had a GM post in it a couple times.

Ugh, people complain about every little thing. You could get an item for free from SE and people will still complain how they didn't earn it or w/e.

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Originally Posted by GenJoe

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Anyway, I do feel like SE does way too many "hotfixes", this time it is unusual, but after any patch, they'll usually take it down the very next day for ~3 hours for hotfix meaning that some bug has slipped through the cracks and they weren't able to catch it before it went live.. This is why we need a test realm so we can test for bugs on a much larger scale instead of having a small in-house team testing them out.. Does anybody ever remember a single patch where it wasn't followed by a hotfix the day after?? I don't, I understand it's sometimes necessary but with FF14, it seems to be a 100% of the case.

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Exactly. This is precisely what I mean. They rush to fix too fast and end up costing us more down time when they mess up instead of at least trying to be "right first time". Its impossible to be 100% right first time but... at least appear to have the effort of it. I'd say its probably around 40% right first time since I started playing.

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Originally Posted by Adire

There's a difference between a gamebreaking bug and an inconvenient bug. If it's gamebreaking, it's important to note it in patch/hotfix notes. How often do you see many of these in these emergency maintenances? I don't see them often. It's almost always small, insignificant, or non-urgent fixes/additions to the game.

These things can be thrown in with patches they needed to do anyways. They do not demand a separate maintenance every time they notice something is a little wrong.

Edit: Also, it should be noted that every maintenance takes away from our paid subscription time. Is it a lot of money going down the drain? No, but the principle is still there.

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Ya this is also what I mean. Also like my last reply as well.
[off topic but screw this 1000 character limit...]

ITT: Non-software developers

"But that game does it this way! *pout pout pout*"

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

And no Sega does not have a good track record.
http://kotaku.com/pso2-update-brings...bug-1250176828

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the sega comment was supposed to be extreme sarcasm I'm sure lol.

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Originally Posted by FallenArisen0990

Ugh, people complain about every little thing. You could get an item for free from SE and people will still complain how they didn't earn it or w/e.

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Yep, that happened already with the free gold dyes everyone got when Square goofed up on its drop rate. People proceeded to complain that "everyone will have one now".

and now im getting disconnected from the server. good job with that emergency update SE. lol...

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Originally Posted by Tictania

Bad google translation:

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"final fantasy XIV: blue sky I sugared" ROFLMAO!

People cry cause the maintenances take away their play time. Losers, go do something else! Surely there are RL things to take care of or TV to catch up. Walk your dog, something!

Oh, wow... Some people like to complain about EVERYTHING. If SE waited more time to fix bugs/issues, people still would complain: "Why SE don't fix bugs asap? Devs are so lazy..."

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

Some people can't help but exaggerate.

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You haven't played SWToR then. It was exactly as described for quite some time.

Everytime I hear people complaining about maint and why they think it wasn't necessary

http://i.lvme.me/r9id6xt.jpg

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

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Going by past experiences from another game. Announcing that you fixed an exploit is often not a good move, especially when you fail to fix the exploit in the first place and people are going to town with.

Doubly worse if it's actually gamebreaking and they won't even punish players for exploiting...

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Originally Posted by Cellia

Exactly. This is precisely what I mean. They rush to fix too fast and end up costing us more down time when they mess up instead of at least trying to be "right first time". Its impossible to be 100% right first time but... at least appear to have the effort of it. I'd say its probably around 40% right first time since I started playing.

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What? I don't think 40% of each patch is borked at all. One or two usually minor things are borked each patch, it's startlingly amazing how well tested their patches are without a public test server.

Honestly, I would rather them fix things immediately than wait and have more things pile up to fix. SE did the right thing to do this. And my gosh, it was only 3 hrs of a maintenance, it is not the end of the world. Jeez! (There ARE other things to do besides play FFXIV all the time, guys. Just sayin'!)

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Originally Posted by Raeletta

What? I don't think 40% of each patch is borked at all. One or two usually minor things are borked each patch, it's startlingly amazing how well tested their patches are without a public test server.

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I agree it's impressive how many patches are rolled out without too many game breaking issues.. considering the circumstances.

But there's no good reason to keep the circumstances as is.. Other than not wanting to invest money on the test server, what harm could it do? Spoilers? Every single patch in my memory, however minor or major, have been followed by a hotfix the very next day. That's not a good track record, I assume the hotfixes are for minor things or exploits they didn't think of, either way, the repercussions aren't felt throughout the game world which is good.. But needing a hotfix for every single patch? I assume hotfixes aren't a regular protocol for patch release but it is a very regular occurrence, maybe SE needs to rethink their methods.

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Originally Posted by GenJoe

I agree it's impressive how many patches are rolled out without too many game breaking issues.. considering the circumstances.

But there's no good reason to keep the circumstances as is.. Other than not wanting to invest money on the test server, what harm could it do? Spoilers? Every single patch in my memory, however minor or major, have been followed by a hotfix the very next day. That's not a good track record, I assume the hotfixes are for minor things or exploits they didn't think of, either way, the repercussions aren't felt throughout the game world which is good.. But needing a hotfix for every single patch? I assume hotfixes aren't a regular protocol for patch release but it is a very regular occurrence, maybe SE needs to rethink their methods.

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I think the reason is because we cannot be trusted. Other games have test servers, sure, but not all of them. A lot of people only go on them to see the new things ahead of the curve, others would -not- report bugs and instead use them for personal gain, which we've seen already, with bosses freezing and people killing them instead of reporting it.

Whilst I'd like a test server to help -test- (I did the beta and enjoyed it and gave a fair chunk of feedback), I'm also glad we don't have one. As it was, Steps of faith had parties demanding video watchers only less than 12 hours after it was out. Imagine it with a frikkin test server.

Test servers aren't very common anymore.

As a matter of fact, QA departments for games in general have shrunk dramatically. The cost of human bodies and extra servers to test vastly outweigh development time to fix bugs and release patches. Besides, we're talking hundreds of thousands of users. They're going to find things that QA did not find, without insanely thorough testing. Note, I'm not just talking about FFXIV here. I'm talking about development in general, games and software. You get Windows updates every Tuesday. Adobe flashplayer has updates every few weeks. The list goes on. It's just the way of things today. 3hrs of user downtime is much less costly than 40+ hours of hardcore testing.