How "normal" developers do it: - Several weeks prior to patch they post patch notes so people can see and discuss the upcoming changes. - Patch notes contain full list of changes. Not just major and new things. Everything. - About a week prior to patch they launch a dedicated test server so people can try out new things for themselves and inform the developers if there's something wrong with it - A couple of days prior to patch, it will become available to pre-download, so the load on servers on release date will be reduced. - Patch is deployed after extensive testing and feedback by players. How SOE does it: - Few hours prior to patch, patch notes will be posted on MHigbys twitter and on Reddit. On official forums patch notes will appear after some hours or even days after patch is released. - Only the major changes will be in patch notes. A lot of "minor" tweaks will not be mentioned in notes, so the players will have to find out what exactly has changed. - No public test will be performed. SOE is overconfident at what they do. The patch will go directly live servers. - Due to simultaneous downloads from thousands of players, SOE servers will suffer from great workload increase, causing slow download speed. - Because no massive testing was done for the patch, some or all servers will crash shortly after patch released and will continue to work very unstable for about a week, as SOE will desperately release a ton of hotfixes to make their stuff work.
Nicely said. This one made me laugh, sad that it's true. "Only the major changes will be in patch notes. A lot of "minor" tweaks will not be mentioned in notes, so the players will have to find out what exactly has changed."
Yeah that gets to me - Matt shouldn't be releasing them on anything but the forums first! And you are right - they should contain a FULL list of everything that has been fixed or changed, even if the number of items is 200+ (Plus raydarx's comedy is gold!) This is a good idea and should be followed - while SOE does have pre-testing of "builds" & the patche or build passing QA, nothing beats live testing. PS1 had test servers for this reason - why not PS2? Actually no - their downloads don't work like that - its like a DC hub and its sent out to download servers in different parts of the world. Quote for truth
Yup, even Firefox has a Nightly version to let Firefox user to test it first, and report to BugZilla for any bug cause by any patch. So it has a few month(3 month) until the release version of Firefox to prevent any issues, and let add-on devs to ready for the change. --- "Only the major changes will be in patch notes. A lot of "minor" tweaks will not be mentioned in notes, so the players will have to find out what exactly has changed." This, yes, but don't too over, as there are more small patch to become a big patch. So just say which it has been changed/fixed, like the voice chat has been fixed for can't test the mic playback.
To be honest this is SOE we're talking about....I keep forgetting sometimes when I except something that most other developers would do.
I don't get mad about delays, but what you said is the truth. I think SOE should reply on this thread and make sure they'll give us a full patch note, so we can see what's changed. Full patch notes and test servers should be priority.
One should add to the list that Higby was working on Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2 and Free Realms so far. None of these games is remotely close to a first-person-shooter. The word "mismatch" comes to my mind. One could also call Planetside 2 the attempt to create a first person shooter by the makers of rather unsuccessful MMOs.
Patch notes should come from the forums/PS2 website way before ar atleast when the patch is released...Twitter and Reddit should be left for Flames, kitties and PP pics.
At first I thought you were commenting on Everquest! I can't remember a patch that didn't fubar the servers for at least a day from 2001 through '07 or so. Apparently a decade hasn't taught them anything, that doesn't bode well for us and the state of the game.
