Completely sympathize, but our goals right now (and that after any major release) is to quickly address critical issues that are impacting large numbers of players or issues which could pose a risk to the long-term health of the game if not swiftly addressed. We feel that pushing out these critical fixes sooner ultimately makes our players’ experience better instead of holding all for 1-2 weeks.
Alas, we do not currently ~plan~ to patch over the weekend. So tonight should be the last for a number of days while we work on a larger, weekly QoL update.
Time to do some mass-responding! /rolls-up-sleeves
Totally understandable, and we don’t like needing to push out the conclusion time either.
We have our processes and deployment tools pretty knuckled down at this point from an operational standpoint, but these recent hotfixes in particular have also included some atypical work that is going on concurrent to our game build pushes. We are also updating some backend configurations, running database scripts, and also deploying updates to what we call “Services” (backend APIs, etc., that aren’t quite game servers but game features do depend on them).
Even with dry-runs on our internal Staging environments sometimes execution on Production systems take longer due to the sheer amount of data or sometimes there are other technical issues that arise that need to get investigated in real-time. Once we get out of the launch period for the Brimstone Sands update our “deployment complexity” should lower which should also allow us to shrink our outage times back to normal as well. I hope that context helps you all better understand the work that goes on.
Same answer to the above.
We have flexibility when working with client-only or server-only updates, but as we have 1 launcher (Steam) and everyone Globally downloads the same client, global downtimes are unfortunately a hard dependency for us currently for most updates. And while we try to be as minimally intrusive, someone somewhere is going to be unable to play. Sorry!
They have ruined my own personal log-in playtimes too. But I’d rather have players able to get loot and complete some broken quests. I can play during another window for a day or two.
This is a highly exaggerated statement. Nonetheless, enjoy your weekend as we currently do not have plans to patch for the next several days.
This guy gets it. You get a Dev Gold Star for educating your fellow community members!
Not everything is caught there. Or can be easily reproduced based on the reports provided at the time or the data present at the time. Or could be fixed in time… there are dozens of reasons, but no game will catch every issue and we don’t get nearly as much “real time testing” on the PTR versus when it gets to live (by magnitudes of thousands).
Great find! This actually breaks down our backend pretty accurately, and even gives further insight into our “Services” too (which I hinted at prior)! Definitely a good read for those technically inclined on MMO/AWS infrastructure.
devtrackers.gg
I hope that context helps you all better understand the work that goes on.
But I’d rather have players able to get loot and complete some broken quests. I can play during another window for a day or two. 
You get a Dev Gold Star for educating your fellow community members! 
