[2021] It's Friday, guys!

No patch planned for today.

I can very much appreciate the meme though so full credit to you there. :)

It may be helpful explaining things from our side:

Ideally we aim to patch on a Thursday or a Tuesday - that's the base aim. And it has been on all games I've CM'd on to date (8ish years of CMing overall).

With Outriders, as you well know, there were and are still some hot button issues. We have never denied them, and we have always worked our hardest to identify their root cause and resolve them.

So we find fixes, we compile a Patch Build, we run that Patch Build through QA. QA works that build through their regular process and regresses fixed issues (i.e. they confirm that the fix has worked) or they don't (in which case the fix has not worked and we go again, so a change/fix could get pushed out another week).

That's a very rough explanation of the cycle, but lets say (for the sake of argument) that a Patch passes out of QA successfully on a Thursday UK evening and the issue it resolves has already been in the game for far too long.

So we have a patch with fixes ready for the issues that many players are facing, but our ideal release window is still some way off. Players will continue to face these issues until the patch arrives.

The best game-led decision would most likely be to sit on the patch, let players continue to suffer from the existing issues through the weekend and then release the patch on our own terms.

The community and player-first decision would be to release the patch ahead of the weekend so that players can benefit from the fixes sooner.

An alternative would be to announce the patch release date for the following week, but that in turn would likely receive demands that we release it sooner and that we are letting players unnecessarily suffer.

The fact that the previous patches had major issues is of course not something we anticipated, or we would not have released the patches with the issues they introduced.

So the options are either:

1. Release something at a sub-optimal time (Friday) but that will, as far as our tests at this point in time indicate, be beneficial to the greatest amount of players.
2. Play it safe, let the existing issues and associated community anger continue to exist, but still release the same patch, with the same benefits and risks days later.

We picked option 1 twice because, to the best of our knowledge, it seemed like the best possible option for the players and the community.

We are now far more likely to err on the side of caution.

No problem! As an aside, as it is topical, I've just shared the latest news around the damage mitigation issue in the gather thread.