Hotfixes all the time now

[Raoabolic]

Am I the only one who irks at the term "Hotfix", when the service is shut down for hours when the fix is being applied?

I don't even bother anymore. Speaking of which, are you telling me that none of the devs thought, "Hmm, what would happen if the leader of any crossworld anything were to delete their account or their account were to deactivate?" OP is right, QA is dead. WE are the QA, lmao.

[Deveryn]

I don't even bother anymore. Speaking of which, are you telling me that none of the devs thought, "Hmm, what would happen if the leader of any crossworld anything were to delete their account or their account were to deactivate?" OP is right, QA is dead. WE are the QA, lmao.

QA isn't dead. People are just living in a fantasy world when it comes to expectations. There's only so much that can be achieved in a bubble. The patch note is a perfect example of that. Past incidents are further proof. They don't know what the infrastructure can really handle until things like DC travel, IS and the housing lottery are properly unleashed on everyone. This stuff used to bother me, then I realized it's just the nature of MMOs. No amount of crying or complaining will ever bring about that perfect experience.

[Raoabolic]

QA isn't dead. People are just living in a fantasy world when it comes to expectations. There's only so much that can be achieved in a bubble. The patch note is a perfect example of that. Past incidents are further proof. They don't know what the infrastructure can really handle until things like DC travel, IS and the housing lottery are properly unleashed on everyone. This stuff used to bother me, then I realized it's just the nature of MMOs. No amount of crying or complaining will ever bring about that perfect experience.

I mean, I would agree with you if the situation was a really weird trigger like "Oh, if you capture a chocobo in your IS and log off while standing in it, there is a chance your character's data becomes corrupted" but this is a real baseline thing that their QA should have tested. It is like them not testing what happens if you log off while loading into a PvP match and it auto-forfeits their team. For such a large company this sort of issue seems like they rushed it out the door without proper testing. That may or may not be the case but it sure feels that way, lol.

[Hasrat]

I don't even bother anymore. Speaking of which, are you telling me that none of the devs thought, "Hmm, what would happen if the leader of any crossworld anything were to delete their account or their account were to deactivate?" OP is right, QA is dead. WE are the QA, lmao.

This is a really wild conclusion. PvP teams, CWLS and Fellowships have all been around for quite a while. It'd be far more sensible to assume this situation has come up in the past to no serious effect. Nothing involved here is a new feature that just hasn't been tested. These are features that have been out for years, and should thus be generally assumed to be sufficiently tested and robust.

Leading to the conclusion that something done in the latest patch had an unexpected consequence. Shit like that just happens in code sometimes. It's the sort of thing that's just impossible to catch until it happens. And it's better for everyone that it happened now and not near the end of the PvP season, which would've turned into a huge mess.

[Deveryn]

I haven't been paying attention to the frequency hotfixes but...
1 - if there's been an increase in the amount of hotfixes, then it doesn't matter that there's been hotfixes in the past, an increase in frequency means something's up
2 - if there hasn't been, then it's really just paranoia from OP.

I dunno. For something that may happen once every two months it seems like not that big a deal. Nothing truly catastrophic has even happened.

[Midareyukki]

I dunno. For something that may happen once every two months it seems like not that big a deal. Nothing truly catastrophic has even happened.

From hotfixes, no... but. I mean, it's not catastrophic as that time summoning Bahamut in the Aetheryte Plaza crashed the servers. But housing in 6.1 for sure was a connundrum. For quite a long while. That required a bunch of maintenance work, though idk if those qualify as hotfixes.

I think Hotfixes are those bug fixes that they do all in one go. Which, as you said, regularly happens, I don't really think they've been going up in intensity. At least not that I've noticed.

[Deveryn]

From hotfixes, no... but. I mean, it's not catastrophic as that time summoning Bahamut in the Aetheryte Plaza crashed the servers. But housing in 6.1 for sure was a connundrum. For quite a long while. That required a bunch of maintenance work, though idk if those qualify as hotfixes.

I think Hotfixes are those bug fixes that they do all in one go. Which, as you said, regularly happens, I don't really think they've been going up in intensity. At least not that I've noticed.

Housing was a conundrum indeed. It just required time before they felt ready to push the fix. I think they even piggy backed some other fixes on it, which is something they normally do. There's a lot that gets fixed that we really don't (need to) hear about.

[Silverbane]

Oh it's the standard" [statistcal QA and letting end users do final QA], yes, so is crunching, I wonder how game devs are enjoying that one. Our society accepts far too much crap, it doesn't make it right.

If industry didn't use this "standard," most people on this forum probably couldn't afford the hardware needed to run FFXIV. Go compare milspec component prices to equivalent COTS component prices and you'll see. And a lot of the extra cost is the 100% testing.

Besides, QA doesn't make software perfect. It finds some bugs, which the developers try to fix, hoping that new bugs aren't introduced by the changes.

You have to be delusional to think that any amount of QA could result in software as complex as FFXIV, that has to run in such a complex environment (the Internet) on such a wide variety of hardware, can ever be bug-free.

But complain all you want about the occasional bug: show us all what a fool you are.

[DragonFlyy]

I don't even bother anymore. Speaking of which, are you telling me that none of the devs thought, "Hmm, what would happen if the leader of any crossworld anything were to delete their account or their account were to deactivate?" OP is right, QA is dead. WE are the QA, lmao.

And why would anyone think that considering it's been working just fine for years? In an MMO, there are literally millions of things you can try and still not find all the bugs. That isn't "bad QA" that's just life. Every program will have that issue.

Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerH...ks_into_a_bar/

Read the post and the top comment. That's actually a good example of how shit can happen.

[Iyrnthota]

There is no exact definition what "hotfix" means. But usually it means, that there is a bug in a software, which has to be fixed as soon as possible.


Cheers

Here something I can anecdotally support.
I support a software product at my work, and our hotfixes do require system downtime.
They're functionally the same as regular patches, except being for urgent fixes, they typically bypass a lot of the standard change release process, such as being put into Testing environments first.
This has been the case for several years now, so I wouldn't say it's a recent change in definition.