So after this last patch, I think the next New Live should be a Dev Only server. Or a Dev should log into a Live server or three and make sure everything is actually working. Not saying they don't now, but with everything that I've seen, and with the last patch supposed to be 24-hours and it was back up ahead of the 24-hours, maybe some of this could have been fixed before they were all brought up and released to players. I'm thinking specifically of the Regen heals and some of the Overseers not working. A test environment (non-test server) will always act differently than a Live environment. Simply a fact. The more load you put on a Live environment, the more chance you have that something will not work as it did in a smaller Test (non-test server) environment. Simply a fact. Test server does have real players on it to test, but there is another test/developer environment that most companies use prior to release of anything. This will always act differently no matter how anyone intends it to act when things go live. On a good scenario, things will go as expected but taking that last step, might prevent what we are seeing after the last patch. And yes, I worked for many years in a world such as this.
Its not as big of an issue if we find the bugs or they find the bugs. The only way they can get a large enough base to find bugs is to release it to live. What the issue is right now is the fact they were made aware of the spell spamming issue almost immediately and still could have used some of the left over patch hours to fix it with little complaint from players and yet here we are 4 days after and still getting spammed.
But a 5 minute log into a live server before we were aware they were thinking it was a go to release to sign in - oh hey we have spam that shouldn't be there - lets fix that we said 24 hour downtime - would have saved the posts there was a problem.
But thats the problem the spam from dots is not what was changed, the change was to heal over time spells, the bi product is that it has now messed up dots. How much of the game should they/can they test in those 5 minutes? Years ago they fixed the doors in Kedge not working correctly, bi product of that was it broke the bridges in SolA. No one would think of something unconected breaking when something else is fixed/changed. EQ is an old lady who doesn't like change and will do something unexpected if you keep interfering under her skirts!
What exactly would you expect them to do at this point? Should they roll back the patch which will keep the servers down longer? Should they keep the servers down until a fix is in place? Should they just continue as it doesn't prevent players from playing and work on a fix? Sure there is a lot of spam from the messaging changes but that doesn't prevent people from enjoying the game. While I am not sure exactly what the issue is with overseer that you are talking about it also isn't preventing anything else from working and no reason to keep people from playing because of it. While it would have been nice for these bugs to get caught sooner and not go to live in the first place none of them have been big enough to warrant keping players from playing.
I think the expectation would be to have a test environment that matches your production environment. They’ve mentioned before the dev servers, Test, and Live/TLP are all different. It’s often why they can’t reproduce bugs on their dev server.
The have also mentioned that, at least, live and test servers share the same data, which is why occasionally stuff from test 'leaks' across to live servers when there has been no patch. (Personally, that's is a completely insane concept.)
Test usually has 2 patches a month, 1 to add the new stuff to the server before it goes to live, 2nd to change it to the same build as live has (adds any additions that weren't in the original patch), you can see this from reading the test bug/discussion threads. Test and Live should match most of the time. But the main problem with test is it doesn't have the same stress as live servers due to the lack of players. I remember in the past it being requested for as many players as possible to log over to stress test things. EQ seems to be lacking in Quality Control, someone should be checking things better, even if that means things stay on test for a month or so. Lots of things would have been caught by them or by players if they stayed in the test environment longer, the new hunters for example, filter changes and Overseers. Star Wars equivelent to Overseer was on their test for for months if not a year to make sure it was running correctly.
I assume they said 24 hrs to give some padding and better to be early than late. As for overseer it already lets you level up without actually playing the game. Even if it's not perfect what more do you expect from it? Can't comment on regen heals, I have not participated in content they were needed since the patch (I'm sure I'll find out soon) Actually, that's not true. I did a Tantor raid on Thursday and did not have an issue, if anything things felt better than normal.
