The original comment about why we don't hotfix all the time got deleted, but I'll post my reply here. I'm not gonna let a wall of text go to waste.
I'm no expert, but here's my understanding:
We have a limited amount of time post-update where we haven't introduced the content for an upcoming update. So for example, right now we haven't added the first iteration of the next update's map into our development build to work on it. Since we haven't done that, our development build is pretty much the same content as the update that you guys downloaded. This means we can patch out issues etc. and mess around with the files.
In a month or whenever the bossman decides, we'll "lock in" this update and add the map files etc. to the dev build. This lets map maker A work on the buildings while level artist B makes textures for the walls or w/e, while objective guy C does objectives and programmer D does code stuff. Any changes we make are now shared across all devs, instead of one dev being the only person who can make permanent changes (otherwise you'd overwrite stuff).
If it was just a map that was being added, we'd be able to keep a second version (branch) of the game that was the exact same as the current update and hotfix all of that - but the thing is that a lot of stuff in the game is interconnected. So if we fixed some exploit or bug for the current version of the game and did a hotfix, there's no guarantee that we could just copy/paste that code onto the development build that has the new map on it. It might work, but realistically it won't - at least not without bug testing and fixing a lot of issues that pop up.
This means to put a hotfix out, we'd have to be working on two separate versions of the game at the same time, and the fix for the current version of the game would need to be tested and then released. After it's released, we'd then essentially scrap that and have to implement a different solution - do the work twice, more or less.
Is it possible? For sure, it definitely is - and some studios do things differently with different version control software or whatever. As for Mordhau, we don't have the manpower to do on-demand hotfixes with our current system without drastically halting development. Also, swapping to some different type of version control is theoretically possible, but not efficient (it'd murder development progress most likely). We're kind of stuck with whatever we decided on when we first started work on the project.
Hope that helps - like I said, I'm no expert so I definitely messed up explaining that somewhere, but I hope that sheds some light on the situation.
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