since the server launched on a friday, can we keep up that tradition?! much better unlock day than middle of the week.
From a software development/production point of view, it sucks to release things on Fridays. If things go sour, then you have to work on the weekend to fix it.
That's all well and good, unless you work in an industry where the peak customer usage falls on the evenings and weekends. Seems like if you are involved in the mmo industry, you should be aware up front that working the occasional 2-6 AM shift, or Saturday shift, is going to be necessary to provide the best service to your company's customers. Unfortunately that's not what DBG (and SOE before them) have been willing to provide.
As a professional programmer, I can tell you that mid week releases are done by many, many companies of all types. It gives all the teams involved half a week to work on fixes and/or perform rollbacks if necessary before the weekend. Unless you want to see your favorite EQ server be down most of the weekend due to a bad release, Friday releases is not the way to go.
He's not saying move the patch to Fridays, he's saying have the expansions unlock on Fridays. Which is an automated process from what I've experienced. There's been enough TLPs now that there shouldn't be any issues with expansions unlocking on Coirnav.
mostly just wishful thinking. it seems much more convenient to the playerbase to unlock on a friday. even doing it at like noon pacific so they are still in the office if something does go wrong, seems alot better than middle of the afternoon on Wednesdays. i know not all of the unlocks have gone without a hitch, but i cant think of one that had a problem so big it actually took hours and hours of dev time to correct
I can ask, but folks are correct that we don't like to do things on Fridays. Also. It's too late to change the June 6 (A Wednesday) unlock of Ruins of Kunark. (The change would have had to be in today's patch)
This. Releasing on Wednesday means that by Friday primetime you are online. A failed push to prod on a Wednesday will have the team working overnight the same as if it was on Friday, so it makes little difference from their perspective (except that its company time being burnt instead of their weekend).
i still cant recall an expansion launch *on a progression server* that required alot of dev overtime to iron out. the worse one i can recall is PoP on phinny and that was mostly just server lag i think. im not sure the devs were able to do much about it. these dont require any kind of patch, or "push" on their part. its an automated unlock. they arent like actual expansion launches were back in the day when servers were brought down and patches were done. the fact Ngreth said hed at least bring it up makes me happy, regardless of what the answer is.
Care to ask Prathun about the multiple hours he spent overnight manually resetting the unlock of Planes of Power on Lockjaw. I believe it went something like: Manually resetting the unlock every 10-15 minutes just to watch the server revert to the Pre-unlock state for around 5 or 6 hours. He finally called in someone else to look at it early in the morning the following day and they were able to fix it. Agnarr subsequently did not have the same issue... The TL;DR is "Sh*t happens" and you don't want it to happen on a Friday.
Launching on friday seems like a horrible idea. If they launch it on friday and someone finds a bug/broken thing the soonest it will get fixed will be monday.
Completely agree it would be foolish to have no dev support if something went wrong. Bad, very bad policy to unlock prior to you leaving for the weekend.
