Well my friend you just hit the nail on the head. It is software development and deployment, you can never guarantee an exact time frame. Thats the world of software/game development, stuff goes wrong that nobody could have foreseen. But people that refuse to understand this will rage regardless of the facts.
This was certainly true with old views of the world. However modern software development this is not the case. People learned to separate release from deploy. In a perfect world I could of deployed TBL to the production environment weeks ago. And then when the business says to, flip the switch to release it to customers. Long gone are the days of everyone working from Friday night to Monday morning to release code all at once. Then trying to figure out what went wrong a fix it. Everything can be automated and seamless to deploy new code. I'll mention this state of nirvana is very hard to achieve in an enterprise but regardless it can be done and I've helped many customers get to this state or some version that works for them.
Isn't it 2 hours overdue? It seems my next playtime will be in about a week. Hoped to get something functioning today.... Not that I am surprised. It would be a more than rare case if a patch would have had correct timing. And there was always a fix of the fix... but hope dies last...
last few patches the servers have been back up early seems year on year this time of day euro guilds get punished we cant form a raid force at 10 pm plus
1 hour overdue according to the message (9 AM PT for 4 hours or 1PM PT, and it's now 2PM PT. . . . though I thought it said 5 hours this morning.) Just a guess, but I'm going to say that they extended the down time to deal with the thing in the Fight Fire thread.
So, they decide to install a server patch 2 days after the new "xpac" releases. Instead of paying their employees some OT, and having them start at 5AM, they decide to take the better part of a business day. DB is so unconcerned with player engagement, releasing good expansion packs, and generally maintaining EQ. So far this xpac is horribly underwhelming. Stratos is a useless zone, the trial of smoke tests are tedious, and no content to actually play before fumbling through those 2 zones. Oh boy, I really, really, really bet the remaining zones are going to be well done content, uh-huh, no doubt. Next time DB pay a few hours OT and get server patches started on non-prime-time hours !
We've passed the +25% overtime point from the estimated downtime of lol 4 hours. 8pm eastern is +100%. Who's placing bets?
I honestly do not understand why DBG even bothers to make an "ETA" when servers will be back up. It is always hour (s) after it is supposed to be up and either they are WAY understaffed or have the most incompetent staff in gaming.
That's a great idea! I wonder why DBG didn't think of that. Lets extend the release patch by 4 hours to fix things that we don't know are broken yet!
They obviously do not understand how irritating and unprofessional it is to constantly put up an "ETA" for servers and never meet that target by hours. They should feel lucky that they have such a rabid player base that people are here and waiting to play, but instead they string people along with bogus information. Instead, just say the servers are coming down with NO ETA.. that seems more logical.
This just isn't even realistic. An expansion was just released, which was already released on the Test server. They tested it as thoroughly as possible there, but Test doesn't have the same kind of population as live servers. There are some things that just can't be thoroughly tested. They try to plan for it, but they learn with every patch. Without any background, I would guess something was either being exploited, or was completely borked. Finding those bugs is nigh impossible, and developing a fix is a significant challenge, as it has to happen on demand. We are still a long way from the 14-20 hour patches of the past. Having actually watched the team working towards a launch, I can promise you that everyone is heads down working on it. It will be fixed and up as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you want to see the patches get tested more thoroughly and effectively, try finding the bugs on the Test server when it gets released there. You DO have an account on the Test server... right?
Though I agree with you 100% on modern software, I believe that gaming development is a different beast altogether and so much harder to guarantee bug free on deployment. Not that enterprise software can not be intricate but with games like EQ it is very hard to fully test and dig out all the bugs in a given expansion deployment. also EQ is based on old code and technology, comparing it to modern software that has been designed to be easily updated and its data base structure is like comparing apples to the moon. Just to get EverQuest databases to the point you are talking about would be a lot of work and cost prohibitive. you are trying to compare modern software to Everquest so I am sorry, in this case because EQ is so old, still using old database architecture my statement stands.
Always seem to be my luck that server patches always happen on my days off. Id love to relax and play but instead I'm waiting. Wouldn't be as bothered if they could keep their their schedules times or at the very least update us on whats going on but as previously stated by others daybreak doesn't seem to care enough about their player base to let us know whats going on
Yeah, but you didn't this is the world we live in with EQ. You just implied all software development is like this.
