On the big patch day, I can kind of understand the first delays that were all related to the server merges that are hardly ever done anymore. But the last delay, the one without an ETA given because of the "live patch" where something went wrong... This game has a Test server that is up all the time. Why wasn't that patch actually tested on the Test server so that it could be relatively polished with those kinks worked out before it was brought to Live? Just seems like properly utilizing Test would have saved us several hours of additional downtime.
Because they can't replicate the conditions of the live server on the test server? There will always be enough differences between a test and production environment where unexpected things will pop up no matter how much you plan ahead. They posted an update that said they had unexpected issues with new hardware which is likely the cause of the overall delay.
Simply not enough log into Test to even test a portion of a new patch, let alone thoroughly run it to determine what bugs or glitches might be there. If you don't care enough to log into Test, then in my mind, you don't have the right to complain about the lack of patch testing.
The first part of your post would have made sense if the servers had actually come online and players were a factor in the testing. These issues arose while everything was Locked. My point is, Test server should have received these hardware upgrades first (since it's standalone and doesn't even come down when Live does) and troubleshooting could have happened there, better preparing them for the Live upgrade. It didn't even get to the point where players were a factor when these problems were discovered. If they'd just applied the update to Test first, whatever issues they found should have been discovered then. The Test server has a dedicated playerbase that only play on Test as well. (And for what it's worth, my guild also regularly gets onto Test to test content together.)
I think you missed the overall point. The amount of data and hardware needed is vastly different between the test and live servers which means that there are things that can't be properly tested on the test server during the patch. Also not sure what the issue being found while the servers were locked instead of being found by players after the fact is supposed to mean. To me that is a good thing as it shows they are doing some testing as part of the process and finding issues prior to players discovering them and having them become bigger issues that are harder to fix. The big issue here is that even after the extended downtime some issues still managed to slip through which caused the need for an emergency patch.
Sometimes you do get "the perfect storm" where through no fault of the team a series of coinciding problems all take place at or around the same time. Or as Sir Terry Pratchett once said: “Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
