My job requires me to work in a maintenance system called SAP. Some may be familiar with it. Well, to my point. Before we ever push anything to production we test it in a test environment. Why doesn't DB have a test environment to prevent these patch issues?
Umm, there is a test server, it's called Test. It's open to all players. You can copy an existing character to the Test server using the /testcopy command, and/or you can roll a new level 1 there. You have the same limit on # of characters on Test as you do on a live server, based on your account. Monthly patches are installed on the Test server one week before their scheduled live push date. In the test forum, you will see patch notes and bug/feedback reports from players. There are certain things which cannot be tested on Test, such as the server merge process; I assume they have some way of doing such testing internally, but it is invisible to the players. This month's patch is highly atypical due to the live server merges, which hasn't happened in at least the last few years. For new expansions, there is a separate Beta server, which typically opens up one month prior to official expansion launch. The Beta server is not open to the public, but players who purchase the upcoming expansion by pre-order are typically granted access to the Beta server when it is up.
The type of testing to which you refer on the test server is not remotely close to what the OP is talking about. Edit: To add, the type of testing (of the systems and size/impact of merge) likely would not be announced in a Test Patch Note anyway. Regardless, if such testing did occur, I am surprised that the issues yesterday/today caught them by surprise.
My point exactly. Why didn't they merge test copies onto the test server before merging them on the live servers. They could have ironed out the details.
Chill. This is a very small team on a very small budget, and it's (mostly) 20-year-old code at its core. They knew server merges would be difficult, which is why they've procrastinated it for so long. OP may be fairly new to the game, but the hassles of doing this round of merges have been debated in thread after thread for years now, with many dev posts contributed along the way. Might want to do a little forum searching before attacking the dev team right now. Personally, I consider us all to be very lucky we still have the game up and running at all, in the present state of the gaming industry as a whole. But.. if you would like to see Daybreak (they are still the publisher, after all) pull the plug outright, keep on flaming...
It's probably because Darkpaw/Daybreak work with significantly less/fewer resources than people assume.
All they need to do is figure out how to monetize player outrage via micro transaction in the Marketplace. Then...the resources for all this "testing" would be available.
Are we talking actual human player outrage or outrage as expressed via multiple free-to-pay, low-post-count accounts that only seem to show up during downtime? I mean either is good. Revenue is revenue. But if we're just harness the outrage of a few humans... it's probably not worth the R&D.
Something like...your class gets nerfed...you can buy a package that you open and some person in California pushes everything off the responsible dev(s) desk or something (video feed extra). People will pay real money for weird stuff.
The game is great. It's not luck that it's still up and running today. Most of us have played the other games in the industry and choose to invest in and enjoy this one. I'm sure it's tough as hell building on the 20 year old foundation, and I've never really heard people criticize the efforts of the games development staff moving forward. The original poster (OP I think the kids call that nowadays) just felt like maybe this could have been tested better, and I'd be shocked if anyone would disagree with that. But I digress, the wheels are off the bus, no Everquest, no NHL, no baseball bloopers on ESPN ( can you believe baseball players consider themselves professional athletes...) and even Monday Night Raw seems creepy without crowds of morbidly obese yahoos to help me feel more secure about my body. Oh and Canada has outlawed Assault Rifles, so if any Americans wanna take over some new land, should be easy pickins.
Easy Both beta(which is nothing more then the derv only testing server when beta is not active) and test servers are setup different then the live servers. Both are coded different then live. So stuff that works fine on test/beta sometimes don't work as well on live. This has been said a few times over the years by dervs.
Honestly that's more reason to have a way of testing deployment. When something goes wrong with deploying straight to production you're now overwhelming your limited manpower trying to correct it and every minute those servers are down is lost revenue. And however old EQ is has nothing to do with the matter of setting up a virtual environment for testing stuff like this. It's incredibly abnormal that they do it this way regardless of legacy software.
The problem is that the codebase is shared across the live, test and beta servers. Which is why there are issues that something from test 'leaks' to live, or something from beta 'leaks' to live'.
