Okay, now first the 1.2.1 patch introduced some good stuff, but as far as I can tell of this writing it has not outweighted the bad stuff. The stability of the servers went south along with the client. I have not had so many issues with Warhammer since Closed Beta. Right now, the servers can hardly handle the load of oRvR, if at all, without crashing the zone and taking nearly an hour to be restored. I have had challenges trying to do my mod updates as /reloadui seems to hard lock Warhammer requiring a manual shutdown. Doing a /quit also seems to crash the client. I actually left it for 20 minutes yesterday allowing it to try and shutdown and it FINALLY shutdown.
To add insult to injury, the downtime today is unacceptable. I know the EU people are dealing with this every patch and that is absolutely unacceptable as well. A rule of thumb for MMOs is to release patches not on a weekend day (e.g. Friday), but on a start of the week, such as a Monday or Tuesday, which reduces the impact to peak times on the weekends (e.g. gives you time to correct major issues encountered before the weekend or to roll-back a patch if necessary). Right now the servers are down for NA, again I know EU deals with this constantly which is absolute BULL SHIT.
Ok, done ranting...
Mythic, release smaller patches, faster, and do it at the beginning of a week. If you can't make the patch deadline by noon on a Tuesday, then release it the following week unless its critically important. Realistically, any major patch should never be released on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday as those are peak days for most players. And if you have to release one, do it around 4AM Eastern. For EU, do it during the appropriate time period for them, not during their peak time as its absolutely ridiculous that anyone should pay $15 a month for a game they can't play during the weekends.
Note: I do realize not everyone has a 8-5 Monday through Friday job, but the vast majority of people play during the weekends, so realistically have to consider them as priority.
First ever blog comment on MMORPG! I have to agree, cumulative patching would make far more sense, it'd also increase the time GOA have to test the patches that Mythic is handing them and in addition allow GOA to have any secondary patches that must be applied too. From my time on Mythic servers, they time to release a patch then haul servers down again once they realise they've messed something else up. They do it at far more convenient times than GOA though.
The problem is that a lot of EU players whinge if GOA don't keep right up to date with Mythic, whilst it's desirable to do so, I think there was always and advantage to be had for EU players when there was a gap between Mythic and GOA servers.
Sun Apr 19 2009 5:01PMWoot, virgin no more! :) Agreed, just makes sense across the board to take time in testing and evaluating issues that can arise with patches. Possibly even deploying them over 1-2 servers at a time and seeing the effect before going nuts and deploying it to all servers. I still feel bad for EU servers as its like this nearly every patch. :( Hopefully some happy balance will be found.
Tue Apr 21 2009 9:01AMMMORPG.com writes:
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