Please call it "Daily Maintenance"!

[Mushy]

from the mouths of the developers themselves: these tools, this client, the server is junk this is why they are making 2.0. i repeat THIS IS WHY THEY ARE MAKING 2.0. and to Deatheye the people responsible for the problem did lose their job. remember? Now they can only work with what they got while they develop a completely new client/server side putting in the current stuff too, and continuing the port to PS3. they are stretched. This is very different than your job deatheye. doing roll outs and checking load stability is very different than managing a team of coders(many types), artists(many types), engineers(many types), and the testers. If you could do any better apply at square and fix all their issues(ohhh wait...)

[Asiaine]

*munches quietly on her cookiee as she observes the latest rants on the lodestones*

I'm not sure which is most odd.

That people would rant so much but still stay here and forget their own rants a few days later (which means it wasn't that important to begin with).

Or that people make so many silly rants that are completely illogical or unfounded to begin with.

Some days, reading the lodestone makes me sad.

[Answa]

blahblah This happens EVERY patch. blahblah

No it fucking doesn't. It's only happened since 1.21, for whatever reason, and became more of a problem after server merge.

I can understand that this makes it more of a problem. I actually got in touch wich such patchwork too, and I know it's awfull. But that's SEs problem, not the customers.
I can't just tell my customers I screwed up in the past thats why everything is fucked up now, get over it and give me your money.

You have the very, extremely simple option of not paying.

[lordvr]

There will still be emergency maintenance after patches even after 2.0. Count on it.

[Mushy]

No it fucking doesn't. It's only happened since 1.21, for whatever reason, and became more of a problem after server merge.



You have the very, extremely simple option of not paying.

correct. they said this was a beta essentially if you want to pay for it go ahead, and told the others to come back 2.0 where they will be given free time

[Cynthis]

SE's coders should be perfect. They should never make any mistakes. They should test every one of their tens of millions of lines of code every time they add content, testing each line for every single foreseeable and unforeseeable circumstance. They shouldn't even need to compile before they ship the patch.


Or you know, OP could learn about software development.

It seems to me a lot of the problems after patches are related to a lot of people playing at the same time. This can hardly be a surprise to the development team and given that it seems to always be a problem, I'd say it warrants significantly improved test focus. Besides, some of the explanations for "emergency maintenance" the last month have been quite silly in my mind. Unfortunately I can't find the descriptions right now...but I seem to recall one emergency maintenance was described as fixing a problem with an item that disappeared or was not available. Unless that item is your character, that does not seem to warrant emergency maintenance,

What I would prefer is some predictability. Have a weeekly maintenance window and make fixes at a set time with the only exception being repeated crashes and login problems which would equire faster action. Instead, in April we had all world maintenance on April 5,10,11,18,26,27 . We had maintenance on individual/several worlds on April 7,9,14,16,19 and payment processing maintenance April 23.

I am just not sure if an MMO is the kind of software suitable for a contiuos deployment pattern...

I do want to stress that I think the game is improving tremendously and the development team is doing a great job. I would simply prefer that new features weren't rushed.

[Timo]

You have the very, extremely simple option of not paying +1

[Zyph]

I actually work in IT. Not in aplication development. But as another person allready wrote on the forum, if they would put a software update live and that would cause such problems every time with that much downtime they would loose theyr job pretty fast. Sometimes I need to update systems too and I know if I would handle this like SE does I would loose my job too.

On critical system we load a backup of the running software nad implement the patch there. Then somone working daily with the software has to do basic jobs and check if they work fine. There are also programs out there that simulate load. Or sometimes we even made them ourself to test the behaviour of the new system with heavy loads on it.

There is seriously something wrong with the way SE handles this...

Imaging you working in a bank and putting the hole money transfer offline every two months, and customers loosing all therey money... You would tell them the same too?

Reading your comment I have to wonder if you actually now anything about software development and releases.

Developing a patch is worlds different from applying a patch. For one, the developers run their updates through the QA team, meaning that if the QA team didn't find whatever was wrong, someone dropped the ball there. In a game of this scale, patches such as these are being built upon tons and tons of preexisting systems, some of which likely haven't been touched by a developer in years. A simple off-by-one error, a precondition check that was ">" instead of ">=," something that would only be discovered in an extreme edge case condition. Unless you can design an AI that simulates EVERY possible thing a real human player could do at EVERY instance of play and let it run automatically (and people have tried) there's no way a QA team is going to catch such a rare instance of instability. For games that receive updates that affect core systems, the last line of QA is unfortunately the players.


Basically: deal with it. Better things get fixed that left in a crappy condition.

The issues we're having this time are likely the result of the team squeezing out what they can with the current engine and server architecture. They've said it before, this engine is not ideal, they're trying to appease us with new fixes and content but the core systems are only designed to do so much, they're not very robust like that. I mean, have you seen what happens when you purchase an item using Item Search? It goes into the instance, buys the item, then exits the instance, without actually loading the market ward zone, that's why it lags. If that's not a hack-a-round, I don't know what is.

[Deatheye]

from the mouths of the developers themselves: these tools, this client, the server is junk this is why they are making 2.0. i repeat THIS IS WHY THEY ARE MAKING 2.0. and to Deatheye the people responsible for the problem did lose their job. remember? Now they can only work with what they got while they develop a completely new client/server side putting in the current stuff too, and continuing the port to PS3. they are stretched. This is very different than your job deatheye. doing roll outs and checking load stability is very different than managing a team of coders(many types), artists(many types), engineers(many types), and the testers. If you could do any better apply at square and fix all their issues(ohhh wait...)

Not really. I have projects too where I need to talk to different companys cause on makes the Database, one the software that uses the database, I need to set up the basic network, server, client infrastructure etc.
There are specialist for different softwares, for specific Hardware / Infrastructure parts.
We need to coordinate between companys and inside they different companys they need to coordinate there teams / teammembers.

Sure SE has propably more people involved, the project itself is on a bigger scale. But the basics are the same.
If the difference is just about the scale of the project, I'm sure there are people out there that have to deal with bigger projects than I have to.
And it's really wierd that I can't remember any other MMORPG (and I played a few) where every patch seems to put unfinished stuff out, cause new problems and a lot more downtime then anticipated.

And with so many emergency patches, thats also not a good sign.... emergency... says it all, doesn't it?

In regards to 2.0 we are going again to the point: I can't tell my customers I screwed up int he past that's why now everything new is screwed up too.

If a company makes an error that hunts them they have to live with the consequences which are unhappy customers.

Developing a patch is worlds different from applying a patch. For one, the developers run their updates through the QA team, meaning that if the QA team didn't find whatever was wrong, someone dropped the ball there. In a game of this scale, patches such as these are being built upon tons and tons of preexisting systems, some of which likely haven't been touched by a developer in years. A simple off-by-one error, a precondition check that was ">" instead of ">=," something that would only be discovered in an extreme edge case condition. Unless you can design an AI that simulates EVERY possible thing a real human player could do at EVERY instance of play and let it run automatically (and people have tried) there's no way a QA team is going to catch such a rare instance of instability. For games that receive updates that affect core systems, the last line of QA is unfortunately the players.


Basically: deal with it. Better things get fixed that left in a crappy condition.

The issues we're having this time are likely the result of the team squeezing out what they can with the current engine and server architecture. They've said it before, this engine is not ideal, they're trying to appease us with new fixes and content but the core systems are only designed to do so much, they're not very robust like that. I mean, have you seen what happens when you purchase an item using Item Search? It goes into the instance, buys the item, then exits the instance, without actually loading the market ward zone, that's why it lags. If that's not a hack-a-round, I don't know what is.

Is it just me or does it seem like SE is the only one mmorpg company having so regularly emergency patches?

I know from other MMORPGs there is always something wrong with a patch. And that I can understand. Goes back to what you allready explained. But it never seemes to be so bad to varant an emergency patch.

And I also have basic programming skills. So I know how a something little like a wrong space or a missing "!" or what ever can totaly screw you up.

Telling a customer to

deal with it.

is not the way to have a customer relationship... what every the cause.

[Cynthis]

There will still be emergency maintenance after patches even after 2.0. Count on it.

True but I would hope they are fewer and further between after a few patches at least since 2.0 will be based on code that has been developed by the urrent team and where they are not doing "hacks" to fit new features into an old code base and server structure that clearly had serious problems.