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Quarterly Producer Letter for Q2 2024 ×

Why not half patch?


Nonpareil

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I think the biggest problem so far is not that the content was postponed but that the blaringly obvious problems were postponed. The things people were mainly concerned with were easy fixes that i'm sure there are no bugs with:

 

50s Bracket

Kira bug

Abandoning quests

Companions' ability bar resetting

Companions constantly "wanting to talk"

 

I'm sure there are 20 other small fixes that could have been easy, but why are you not atleast releasing the obvious easy fixes?

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Sometimes what looks easy may not be that easy. If they found a problem that problem may have an impact on some of the other so called easy fixes which is why they postponed in the first place. Even though I do agree that depending on what the roblem is the smaller things could still have been implemented today.
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I think the biggest problem so far is not that the content was postponed but that the blaringly obvious problems were postponed. The things people were mainly concerned with were easy fixes that i'm sure there are no bugs with:

 

50s Bracket

Kira bug

Abandoning quests

Companions' ability bar resetting

Companions constantly "wanting to talk"

 

I'm sure there are 20 other small fixes that could have been easy, but why are you not atleast releasing the obvious easy fixes?

Because subscriptions run out 2 days after the intended patchday. Imagine the response to half a patch if the entire 1.1 patch wasn't good enough to release. It'd be like a ghost town.

Edited by Sensational
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If you already have everything fixed to 5 hours before the patch, what could have broken so horribly that they could not implement some of these fixes? And you can't tell me making 2 brackets for a pvp system is a hard thing to do. Or that fixing so that the abandon quest button works is hard. Those 2 codes i could write myself.
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If you already have everything fixed to 5 hours before the patch, what could have broken so horribly that they could not implement some of these fixes? And you can't tell me making 2 brackets for a pvp system is a hard thing to do. Or that fixing so that the abandon quest button works is hard. Those 2 codes i could write myself.

 

The patch would have been (most likely) a single application to install and run on each server, with time for some testing that the server is still running OK. Un-bundling would not have been practical.

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The patch would have been (most likely) a single application to install and run on each server, with time for some testing that the server is still running OK. Un-bundling would not have been practical.

 

I imagine copy and pasting with a few tweaks could be done in 2 days to un-bundle it if that is indeed how they patch the system.

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I imagine copy and pasting with a few tweaks could be done in 2 days to un-bundle it if that is indeed how they patch the system.

 

That is not how software development and testing goes, sorry to say - a lot of this stuff is linked as others have noted - no sensible QA process could run like this.

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I think the biggest problem so far is not that the content was postponed but that the blaringly obvious problems were postponed. The things people were mainly concerned with were easy fixes that i'm sure there are no bugs with:

 

50s Bracket

Kira bug

Abandoning quests

Companions' ability bar resetting

Companions constantly "wanting to talk"

 

I'm sure there are 20 other small fixes that could have been easy, but why are you not atleast releasing the obvious easy fixes?

 

Because it isnt that simple.

 

It is like a Magento solution small changes sure can look very simple but it is far from it.

 

It isnt like they have drag and drop functions on the patch so they can easily choose what should be in and what should not be in

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I think the biggest problem so far is not that the content was postponed but that the blaringly obvious problems were postponed. The things people were mainly concerned with were easy fixes that i'm sure there are no bugs with:

 

50s Bracket

Kira bug

Abandoning quests

Companions' ability bar resetting

Companions constantly "wanting to talk"

 

I'm sure there are 20 other small fixes that could have been easy, but why are you not atleast releasing the obvious easy fixes?

 

You're so cute. You have no idea of software is made, do you?

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Because it isnt that simple.

 

It is like a Magento solution small changes sure can look very simple but it is far from it.

 

It isnt like they have drag and drop functions on the patch so they can easily choose what should be in and what should not be in

 

That made me smile - images of my orange gear being upgraded.

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half patch is against the ToS.

 

I'm going to assume you're a troll...

 

That is not how software development and testing goes, sorry to say - a lot of this stuff is linked as others have noted - no sensible QA process could run like this.

 

I'm going to assume you're a much more advanced coder than I am and that you know what you're talking about. But that being said I would imagine that since they have to break it back down again regardless to fix it, they could say 1 week from now release the fixes and 3 weeks from now the content. This is of course assuming that they don't plan on releasing all of this in a few days. But currently their postponement is indefinitely.

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But that being said I would imagine that since they have to break it back down again regardless to fix it, they could say 1 week from now release the fixes and 3 weeks from now the content. This is of course assuming that they don't plan on releasing all of this in a few days. But currently their postponement is indefinitely.

 

Or they could just do it the way they're doing it because it's their game and not yours.

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I'm going to assume you're a troll...

 

 

 

I'm going to assume you're a much more advanced coder than I am and that you know what you're talking about. But that being said I would imagine that since they have to break it back down again regardless to fix it, they could say 1 week from now release the fixes and 3 weeks from now the content. This is of course assuming that they don't plan on releasing all of this in a few days. But currently their postponement is indefinitely.

 

Not a coder, but have managed some major software roll-outs in government and the public sector. I expect an announcement fairly soon on rescheduled dates once they assess whatever the problems are.

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If they announce a legitimate reason and a timeline within the next day, I'll forgive them knowing how testy programs can be. Regardless I still think they're looking too far into this extra content and not realizing that the main thing that is causing unsubs is the current problems, not the new ones they're presenting.
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If they announce a legitimate reason and a timeline within the next day, I'll forgive them knowing how testy programs can be. Regardless I still think they're looking too far into this extra content and not realizing that the main thing that is causing unsubs is the current problems, not the new ones they're presenting.

 

I suspect that a minor content update is not going to keep people in the game, while a badly bugged update might drive more away. Tough call - but I think that is what we are seeing here.

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Or they could just do it the way they're doing it because it's their game and not yours.

I bet that's the mantra Gersh, God of Bad Design repeats to himself every day. He's worked on some really successful games so far, I guess that's why BW took a page from his book.

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There are various ways that they could create updates. What follows is a simplification of a couple of those ways.

 

One way puts each feature into what is commonly called a branch. A branch is basically a copy of all of the source code from a certain point in time. Say they took version 1.0.0 and made branches for 50 features. Each feature is developed in isolation and then merged back to the "mainline". This becomes slightly problematic when you have features that depend on one another (so I won't go into that). This is also expensive from a testing point of view as you need to test the feature in its branch and then once it has been merged in the mainline.

 

Another way is to make a branch for all parts of the update, where all 50 features are worked on at once. This has a problem if you just want to release a few of the features (like what you are asking for) because you will have some things that are working right and others that are not at any given point in time.

 

Either way you look at it with those (most common) ways of creating a software release it is non-trivial to release a partial update.

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This is of course assuming that they don't plan on releasing all of this in a few days. But currently their postponement is indefinitely.

 

From the link on the front page of the forums...

 

"The maintenance window for Game Update 1.1 will be rescheduled for some time within the next few days, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

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