Why not rollback when problems arise?

[nomatale]

"Sorry about the above. As I said, feel free to ignore it." (lazy for quote)

no way i can ignore you. i smell close way of understanding with me.

i always think blizzard,funcom,sony etc huge companies running/maintaining huge systems like these mmorp games, terrabyte infos, hard to keep up always. well they are paid off at least.

there are always people among customers who will raise their ideas, and will sure be and must be for sake future of games.

well. patience i say once a great jedi master said.

[Kajukenbo]

I have patience. I get paid for doing other things when AO is offline. However this sentence disturbs me just a little:

"It's not always possible for coders, server admins or the designers to just look at an issue and go 'oh yeah, that will take X hours'"

It IS the coders job to prevent these types of slip ups from happening. Its the job of the designers to double check with the coders as well. Its not like this is the first time it has happened, nor will it be the last, Im sure. What really bothers me is that there are multiple coders working on this, and none of them caught a trivial mistake (or worse still, mistakes) This leads me to believe that the coding staff is not as extensive as some would think. I would estimate about 2 people doing the actual coding with a group of possibly 3 or 4 designers, not including the coders. Then <insert amount here> administrators that have 0 idea of programming or coding surrounding those.

I am well aware that people make mistakes, but programmers/coders aren't paid for "oops". Whoever is leading this needs to hire some quality control staff that have experience in programming, coding, game design, etc.

For those of you who are wondering, I have 17 years backing of active programming experience, both with custom applications as well as game design and programming.

Please.. take a few deep breaths. Take your time.. and lets try again. This time without the "oops" if you would.

[ZenWon]

Just dont get how this didnt come up on test server..would like to see more testing before a HUGE patch release?

[Geekdom]

1) The client cannot be rolled back,

Why? If you can do "diff a b" you can also do "diff b a"

[Abalz]

Sadly, they do "test" the patches on the test server. However, almost all of the people that are seriously involved in doing the actual testing have had their chars boosted to 220 [and stats boosted beyond normal 220 limits] by GMs. A bug like this one isn't one that a bunch of 220s are going to notice.

And to complete the tester's transformation to god mode, they get to be adventures also.. !

[Graxster]

Ok, fine. So the client has already been patched, and you don't want your customers to have to d/l and install a "patch to remove the patch", or patch back to an older version. Rollback is not attractive with the way this game is coded. I still believe that there is a better way of doing things than patching the live servers, having customers patch their clients, and then taking all the servers down when there's a problem, until that problem is resolved (unless, of course, it happens to be a *huge* bug or exploit). In this case, it was simply a few quests giving negative SK. Why don't GM's have the ability to remove NPC's from an area, so players don't have access to them?

The problem could have been found and fixed while the servers stayed up (doing the finding and fixing on the test server), with the message repeating every 5 minutes not to take any of the new quests. Take the servers down to perform the patching to the "fixed" code, and put them back up. I have played many MMORPG's and can tell you that removing and/or disabling quests, NPC's, and similar things while a solution is being worked on is a common practice. Servers are not shut down during the process. Perhaps this is not viable for some other reason I haven't thought of? Regardless, my point is: Funcom *can* come up with a way to preserve server up-time when problems with a game update occur. They just need to put their minds to it and invest some time and effort. Heck, I played an online game once where one of the coders came up with a way to keep all the players connected to the game during patching. You were frozen in place for a few minutes, but you didn't have to log off and log back on later after they patched and rebooted.

At any rate, this was meant to be a constructive suggestion thread, and not merely another thread created out of frustration while the servers are down. I have plenty of things I can be doing other than playing AO. For the sake of uptime and customer satisfaction, it's my opinion that a new system needs to be put in place for the way updates and update-related problems are addressed and resolved, which minimizes server downtime.

[Mithrandyr]

NO....MANY of us have been pushing FC to release the patch for a while, i rather deal with a couple hours of downtime then 2 more weeks of delays for the patch. Patience FTW!

This patch gives no desireable content as far as i have seen now... so better wait 2 more weeks or month and have a well tested and working product.

[Khalem]

Why? If you can do "diff a b" you can also do "diff b a"

Because Funcom does __not__ have a system in place to allow for it.
You need to question funcom on why they do not have a solution that allows patches to be built that downgrades. But in any case, creating a patch, QA'ing the patch in addition to doing a rollback would in just about all cases mean it's faster, cheaper and more efficient to just fix the issue in the first place.

[Iriche]

This patch gives no desireable content as far as i have seen now... so better wait 2 more weeks or month and have a well tested and working product.

rofl then you havent tried inferno missions
so damn nice