They're still posted. Every single patch... For example, the last patch: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/game-update-notes-july-20-2022.284368/ Today was not a patch, it was backend maintenance.
Let me tell you a secret - nobody wants you (or me) to know exact details of what was done and why. And that is the best for everybody policy. Numerous times in my company we had to "patch" the software, both client and server side. And typical explanation given to users was "internal maintenance". However actual explanation, if truthful, should be something like "one of our dumb employees screwed something up", or "there is no excuse for an idiotic mistake we've made", or "some users proved us wrong in thinking our software is fool-proof, it is not, some fools are truly geniuses", or "how could we know that Microsoft employs people even dumber than us?", or "it's capitalism, baby, the cheapest bid wins, and not always delivers as promised" or some other really unpleasant ways to inform everybody that life is full of nasty surprises. Nobody would benefit from this information. It's better for everybody to just vaguely say it's maintenance. It's over. Dress up and go home. Enjoy the gameplay.
I replied to someone who said it wasn´t a monthly patch...and the downtime today just reminded me to go ask here in this forum, what actually happens during these monthly patches
This is what is happening during server downtime... Without food the servers won't run. "Nom nom nom"
There are many databases involved, not just at a server to server basis but even a per-server basis. A good start if your curious is to look into EQ , while they haven't replicated EQ exactly, they had to replicate enough of it that the client could talk to it. As such it will have similar, albeit not exactly the same structure to it. Depending on what database system they used, which IIR from an interview was MSAccess and then eventually SQL. They can even do cross-database pointers where it will traverse database boundaries to fetch data from other databases. Updates on something as big as EQ is a combination of updates to individual systems scattered across multiple systems on often dodgy connections. Between applying the update and verifying it, that would be awesome to see a vid walking us through a single update or some nice highlights from a group of updates.
Sometimes systems do just need updates. Sometimes systems need a hardware swap that requires downtime. We don't really need to know what backend maintenance consists of.
