Please call it "Daily Maintenance"!

[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.