EVE General Discussion

We normally hotfix the server 3 days a week; Tue, Wed and Thu; and sometime patch as well. Patches are more frequent shortly after expansion deployments and after point release deployments (such as Odyssey and Odyssey 1.1). It can be difficult to find the right balance, but I would want to error on the side of players complaining about too frequent patching rather than complaining about us not fixing or not deploying the fixes we have made.

Scrum doesn't entail that you only release at the end of the sprint, it only entails that at the beginning of the sprint you commit to a certain set of stories and you can not be interrupted or priorities changed during the sprint and you must deliver all the stories no later than at the end of the sprint. But there is nothing preventing you from committing to a mix of feature and defect stories and deploying the defect fixes during the sprint as you fix them. I would even say it's the preferred way of doing it when possible.

They do? Ive been playing for 8 years and haven't had this happen yet.

Of course individual experience will vary depending on your net connection and hardware, but by way of comparison I live in the US with a modest rig and cable speeds of 2Mb.

I had not logged in for a few days but my entire patch process took well under a minute yesterday, so yes you might check your true download speeds and/or RAM or CPU usage.

Truthfully though, as I said before, it wouldn't bother me if it took longer for a few days after a major update to the game. I've been playing EVE since the days when bug fixes took several days and covered a large number of items. Being stuck with a major bug for days is no fun, and if the fix went wrong you knew it would be several days more of broken game play before they would try to correct the issue.

It was a far more frustrating experience in comparison.

So that is your choice. A couple of minutes before starting your game play for a few days, or potentially weeks before you can play normally again. From my point of view the choice is pretty clear.

I see what you did there. You are only talking about the install time.

You also have

download time,
checksum
unpacking

before the install happens

But yes even if it takes 3 minutes to finish this process, people get hours of enjoyment from a product that takes countless man hours to maintain and keep in working order.

Also for those that may not be aware, some old games like eve have legacy code. Whats this mean, you touch 1 part of the base code and something might change in a manner that you never intended to happen.

Given that this is the patch that finally (FINALLY!) fixed the "random freeze" bug my alt account had, I gotta say:

Complainers get out. It's too bad we don't have an emoticon for "get out" here.

This makes no sense, you are full of assumptions and have no facts to back this up. It is just as likely the Devs and management don't want to do the extra work.

I do have facts (case-stories) to back it up: I am professional IT developer and have had customers that complained about downtime during our updates. They did not see our updates as more important than their work, and their complaints went so far up in the hierarchy that we were eventually forced to invent an update method that didn't bother our users so much.

Another case-story is Windows: Once upon a time, operations & users were buried in patches. Patch this, patch that, and all too frequent. Since then Microsoft has strengthened QA and also implemented an update that run in the background (most of the time). Why did they do that ? Not because it "made no sense" or because of "assumptions" but because it mattered to their customers.

It is also makes sense if you compare to other products in our life: When you turn on your TV, your car, your lightning, you expect it to work. Immediately. It often takes longer to start EvE than to boot your operation system.

I can see that CCP have planned updates Tue, Wed, and Thu, and also extra updates after a release, which probably sums up to what was my impression, that there have been a new update almost every day since 1.1 . Most people posting here seems to be happy about that, so I don't think CCP have any incentive to improve on the situation. But in my mind, EvE stands out as the slowest thing to come "Online" amongst all the other appliances or applications in my home.

Bawww. Poor babies. I ***** about it every time I log on and there is a micro-patch, but then I realize, better that then being locked out of the game for a week again.

Suck it up.

Apples and oranges.

1) No one is working here. We are playing a game. And just because your customers bitched, does not mean they were right. Or maybe your system was not as good. Either way, you seem to defeat your own argument here

2) Eve is a game - not an OS or some productivity software. A game relies heavily on critical real-time communication from an external source in a way an OS and most productivity does not even come close to needing. As an IT professional you should realize the difference. However, since you mentioned it, even Windows does hotfixes multiple days in a row all the time, especially when it comes to things that affect security and communication between servers. Sure you get the chance to install it when you want so it is less annoying, but that does not change the fact that they release it on a daily basis sometimes.

3) "Our Life" TV - Car - lighting. Really? You are stretching it here. Those don't traditionally get updated like software does. When they need updating, we usually call it "broken" and need to update it ourselves. Besides, the fact is those thing increasingly DO require patches. SmartPhones, SmartTVs, Smart Cars, even smart lightbulbs, all take time to boot and have software to patch now. Your argument is as dated as it is irrelevant.

4) Yes, CCP DOES release major things on typical dev schedules (usually tuesday) if you have been paying attention. All of the expansions and major patches have been on those days. You are comparing patches to fixes. Again, as an IT professional you should know the difference.

5) YES, most people seem happy about it because most people like having a product that works and many of us ALSO work in technology and development and understand things that go on around us as well.


Thank you for proving my theory that, just because you have been doing something a long time, it does not mean you were doing it correctly. The "in my mind" portion of your rant is the most honest part of it, you may need a hot-fix of your own. I would do it myself, but I don't want to upset you on a Thursday

Don't be so bitter.


Love, BoBo