Maintenance Watch

[NuadaAkali]

Ahhh...I completely forgot about the servers. Being naive I would expect them to have two teams working on it simultaneously.

Here is also some food for thought. I've done very very limited coding (I got a C in java many years ago and decided to switch majors --about 10 years ago? idk anyways besides the point). Why wouldn't they have all the coding pre-prepared and simply "copy and paste" it over and reboot everything? Obviously it's not that simple but I guess it would make more sense to me that way.

Perhaps a live test server where they could have all the "down time" and patching nonsense and then for the real game just copy stuff over.

I guess it comes down to man power and them not having enough of it?

The way gaming companies work is they have different "teams" and resources for various projects, but they're all under the name of the company. SE is no exception. A team popped up with ideas for FFXIV ARR and that's all she wrote. The resources are company-provided, but only after a game has a certain amount of success does the company offer more of its resources to a certain team. It's all gauged by numbers and profit.

How does this answer any of your questions? Simple. The team simply doesn't have the resource available (and yes, probably not the manpower) to open up a PTS while they work on patches. You have to remember that servers do not come cheap and are often times easily broken if not managed properly. Another thing to take into account is that the servers would most likely have to -double- in number to do a request of this multitude.

[Ganfal]

The way gaming companies work is they have different "teams" and resources for various projects, but they're all under the name of the company. SE is no exception. A team popped up with ideas for FFXIV ARR and that's all she wrote. The resources are company-provided, but only after a game has a certain amount of success does the company offer more of its resources to a certain team. It's all gauged by numbers and profit.

How does this answer any of your questions? Simple. The team simply doesn't have the resource available (and yes, probably not the manpower) to open up a PTS while they work on patches. You have to remember that servers do not come cheap and are often times easily broken if not managed properly. Another thing to take into account is that the servers would most likely have to -double- in number to do a request of this multitude.

Another thing no one else said here. It's pretty common that a content has been fully tested on the Test Server but doesn't work as expected on the Production Server. Some other times, there are content they applied on the last Test Server patch, but it wasn't applied to the final Production Server patch. Or, even worse, a hotfix that was already applied to the Production server but wasn't on the final patch, since it was applied after the Final patch was generated (for instance, can you imagine if the board bug came back and you started losing your precious Gil?). Even if everything went all fine, there are chances that, with all the data from the Production Servers, something go south. That's why the QA teams have to complete a checklist on every server. It takes a lot of time.