As title. Instead of doing big patches with loads of bugfixes would it be possible to have small daily/3day/weekly patches. Psychologically it should improve player satisfaction if they see things improving steadily instead of in huge leaps. even

thoughts?

Would cause more downtime though, how about a weekly times downtime in which patches will happen.

This game needs some more order, management wise, in order to distress players less.

10 mins downtime when server pop is lowest us worth it.

EVE players happily put up with daily hour long downtimes until recently.

so long as downtimes are scheduled regularly they aren't a problem

Yeah that's what i meant, schedules downtimes.

great idea
everyone will know when its down so they will avoid it

mrdna set us up patch wednesday already...whoops that was forgot after the first wednesday

I got a better idea. We already got lots of downtimes, so it would be better to just make the server tell you to update whenever it has crashed.

not constructive...

one of the biggest reason we dont patch as often as i would want to, is that everything depend on everything. Combined with the fact that doing a patch is extremely time consuming (3-4 hours at a low player time which also happen to be the time i usually sleep ! ).

Right now, i still have at least 5 bugs that are too big to just wait next patch, to fix/in process of being fixed, but due to that, i cant do a server update till then.

Even something simple like, the test client is a lot of work to maintain and update.


I really wish i could convince jeff and the others to move from our current clumsy repository to a branch based system. but its a lot more complicated for the dev's to work with not to mention, a lot more overhead to generate the patch, merge everything etc.

What is the most time-efficient system you can think of?

well, first of all, would need to dump the current balance sheet format since they dont support merging (damn you xls), then it would only be a matter of creating a branch for every features, and only merge them back in once tested/working.

Although while creating a branch is not overly complicated, it can quickly become hard to do for people who are barely used to svn to begin with.

I really liked the patches that were like once a day, they fixed stuff, added stuff and were fun. Now its just kidna boring, I dont know why but the game is boring atm, yes its nice the features and stuff but its boring...

So it would be a completely modular approach where nothing relied on anything else in terms of sheets etc.?

reasons those patch were quick, was because the bugs were quick to fix (that and i was working 20-22hours / day to do them ! ).

I'm doing my best to get those patch in. but when i work only about 10-12hour per day, spending 33% off that time to do a patch isnt really productive.

and biggee, its not so much as having it modular, but as separating the features in the subversion repository. even if something depend on the rest, if its not in the server code it doesnt matter .