As I sit here, unable to play, worrying about my in game mail expiring, I have to wonder about your patch procedures.
A sensible software engineer, would make a snapshot copy of a live server/servers and test the patching system on the copy. These delays and constant breakages on patch day, seem to indicate that either the speed of the migration caught you by surprise, or you’re debugging on the fly on live servers. Both cases are really bad. With proper patch development strategies and practices, I can’t help but feel even these larger patches can be pushed out with a lot less pain in a few hours, rather than the 24h overtime crunch and angry customers you regularly subject everyone to. Your processes need re-evaluation, and the people responsible for the processes that lead to these regular delays, really need to pulled into the office and have a heart to heart with.
It looks like you’re making the following mistakes:
- you didn’t set up the infrastructure to test the upgrade path scripts
- hence, you’re testing and fixing the upgrade scripts and debugging on live realms.
- you have an announced date, and not willing/able to do an emergency rollback and revert if things go wrong, and try again later after fixes are complete and tested.
These are all longstanding management issues that hurt the player experience and your company image.
So, since the game has been down effectively a full day longer than planned (which was already too long - especially for your era customers), are we going to see some kind of game time credit? Maybe a financial cost to these messes would help push the necessary changes?
9 Likes
Would probably worry more about the entire database(s) confirmed as being lost.
2 Likes
People have been asking/suggesting for time credit’s and similar things forever. I can’t recall a time they ever have. I would love to be corrected.
I have lost gold items and characters on patches
1 Like
Pretty sure they did a few times in the beginning years, but back then Blizzard actually cared and had employees… and the employees they had weren’t full blown activists.
4 Likes
When we had extended downtime in Vanilla they gave everyone 2 full levels of 200%
If theres any oldies that still remember that.
When we had extended downtime in Vanilla they gave everyone 2 full levels of 200%
If theres any oldies that still remember that.
I played in OG Vanilla as well. I must’ve forgotten.
I assume that even the current batch of developers must have backups. If they don’t, then that borders on criminal negligence.
1 Like
Apparently they were incomplete or somehow also corrupted.
They gave plenty of time out in Vanilla, but servers were also randomly down a ton more.
i dont remember that at all and started in 2004
I started in April of 2005. So, it was after that
At least they confirmed their database backups were invalid.
in the way old days the servers would go down alot. once they went down for a few days said it wouldnt happen again and 4th day went down we got a free week….
1 Like
ive worked for a big company and small company. both got hacked and both lost data. trust me. should and actually are two very different things
Dave here,
pizza party was going great then I spilled the 2L of dr pep pep on the server. Sorry guys.
There’s a difference between a one time event, and a snafu every single time they make any sort of serious update. This is unfortunately not a rare event.