[2023] Hotfix #4: Redeployed

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone,

Yesterday we had to rollback hotfix 4 because of a rare compiler issue. To avoid this from happening again we’re changing the way we deploy patches.

Players who had downloaded hotfix 4 were unable to continue from their hotfix 4 saves once we had rolled back the patch. While this is not ok, rolling back the patch in order to diagnose the problem and limit those exposed to it was the lesser of two evils. We truly appreciate your patience & understanding while we worked to understand the problem.

This situation is remedied now with the re-release of hotfix 4 but we recognize the frustration caused by this and want to apologize. That’s why we’re changing things up.

All of you should now be able to continue your adventures, but essentially, here’s what happened:

Hotfix 4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn’t cause crashes to - you guessed it - cause crashes.

Since compiler issues like that are extremely rare, we weren’t prepared for it. We should’ve been. We messed up.

It didn’t help that it happened at the worst possible time of day but luckily we have studios in multiple countries. Overnight (for Europe), our teams in Canada and then Malaysia worked to diagnose what went wrong, so that work could begin on redeploying a fixed version of the hotfix

To avoid this from happening in the future, we’ll make sure that any change made to future version candidates - no matter how small, or innocuous - will always go through our full & comprehensive QA pipeline, which include a global in-house QA team, automated testing, unit tests, and save-game compatibility testing.