About the deploy of this new version i can only say, "what you guys doing?"
Every time you make a deploy of anything, you first test it on a "shadow" copy of the live server, to see if it goes throw and the game server starts up alright passing all code analysis that i am sure it runs on boot up.
If any errors occur you just fix it in time.
But all of that deploy thing, you do BEFORE hand, not the day of the deploy itself
About that Alert that got into this deploy package, it's clearly a human error in the dev. team, someone made a check-in in the wrong version.
But then again, if the package was made and done yesterday, this would not occur.
You don't have to use the PTS for this if you don't want the spoilers, just have a private test server to test the deploy, nothing fancy, just a hard copy of the live one.
Well, this makes sense to me, as i work with this kind of thing every day