What exactly happens during a patch downtime?

i responded to wrong one, was ment for bobkin

Ah, that makes your response make much more sense!

Original post asks for a dev name to respond to inner workings.

Thread creator goes back to Vet Lounge, sees blue DEV by thread title

Thread creator gets excited to read about the inner workings on patch day!

Thread creator reads dev post

While we still don't know what happens behind the scenes, at least we know you all are excited

This isn't Santa's workshop; the devs aren't actually doing coding during the patch. Yes, there were sometimes glitches in the middle of the night, but it isn't like the whole crew had to stay up each month.

Whose night? or maybe you don't understand time zones with a global game.

I didn't say that it impacted the entire team and just because it doesn't impact the entire team doesn't mean that it doesn't impact members on the team. No matter what time of the day they do the patches they are going to impact the play time of some of the players. As I stated in another post the patch time got moved to better work with the schedules of the people running the patch who didn't want it in the middle of the night.

I assume it means the middle of the night for the people running the patch and for people in (or align with) American time zones.

Nah, you never do changes like this at night or Fridays. Nobody wants to be up all night trying to fix something that went wrong or spend all weekend working on it. Also, if you need external support those are only open during regular business hours.

This actually would be a great thing to post out. I wish we had an AMA coming up. Since we have no facts I will make some up. Someone rolls a 10 sided die and it lands on 6, then someone rolls a 6 sided die and it lands on 2. It becomes known that the patch will take 6 hours but really run 2 hours late. Everyone heads for breakfast at Day N Nite and then an intern turns the game back on at 2pm. Other than that its very technical and you wouldn't understand it.

The downside of doing patches in the middle of the night (which would probably be anywhere from 9pm to 4am Pacific) is that it's 100% opposite a normal schedule and we'd have minimal staff if Stuff Went Wrong(tm). We'd also completely mess with 4+ people's schedules consistently, and no one is happy when they go from day to night to day shift, especially if there are any meetings the previous/next day.

Generally the patches happen now about four to five hours before a programmer's regular shift (unless it's me, because I'm normally the first one in a few hours before everyone else). This adjustment is MUCH easier to manage. It also means that our volunteer designers come in about one to two hours earlier (they don't need to be there for the servers coming down, we like our designers to be well-rested) and our QA team gets to come in at their normal time.

As for what really happens...I can't get into specifics, but I can give a general idea. Prepping for the update is a process that takes about a week. We push changes through our internal environments, testing things every step of the way (our QA guys are the best!). This generally takes two to three days (or more) depending on how many changes come in that need to be included. We also have meetings to go over scheduling (who's going to be running the update, who's backup, are there any backend upgrades/changes/dinosaurs happening, do we need to do anything special while servers are down, etc.) and patch notes. Then the programmer in charge of the month's update gets everything built and prepped for our Ops team. The two days before are spent making sure that all of the steps were run (it's so easy to miss a step when you've done this process a million times) and that everyone has been properly notified.

The day of, the programmer gets in and follows along with the steps our Ops team is running. Because it's early we like to make sure that two to three people have eyes on the process. The process itself is not completely foolproof and sometimes things pop up (like a world refusing to shutdown) that we have to manually solve. And sometimes we have to do other things, like update windows or swap out hardware, which requires coordination from other teams.

Finally when servers are up and still locked, we jump on for more testing. This includes programmers, designers, and our QA team. We all have our own set of things to check out before we okay the unlock. When everyone is in agreement that things look good, we unlock

Thank you for the transparency and information! And all of that while being upbeat is fantastic!

FIFY!

(Just kidding, I know there's always a big sense of relief that the team can get back to normal routines after a patch!)

So much this. Not to mention that if other resources need pulled in, you want them online and pre-caffeinated.

Such good. Much strong. Thanks for the glimpse into your world!

They break shi* and extend it 2 more hrs ?

We all know what happens during downtime the hamsters finally get a break!

All yall trying to convince them to do it late in the night clearly haven't seen Chernobyl. You do NOT do the critical testing and infrastructure with a skeleton third shift crew.

Kool and the Gang also wrote these classic lyrics:

Jungle Boogie...
Jungle Boogie... Get it on...
Jungle Boogie...
Jungle Boogie... I'm gonna get down...

A mantra for when you are PLing in one of the more lush EQ zones.

And BTW, there was no MTV in the '70s.

Well, when code and a dev love each other very much, adult bugs are eliminated to make space for new baby bugs to give them a chance to grow to maturity.