so whats the emergency maintenance for?

[DSaint]

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..."

[Tuathaa]

Some people can't help but exaggerate.

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

[Gralna]

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

[RiceisNice]

...

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...

[Raeletta]

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.

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.

[VraeliaValkyria]

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'!)

[GenJoe]

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.

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.

[Raeletta]

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.

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.

[Clavaat]

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.