For awareness, we believe the NPC fix we mention in the patch notes is the main reason why servers are garbage right now. We want you all to have a good weekend, so it was important that this fix went out before hand.
Servers are up now though (a little over an hour of downtime start to finish,) so feel free to jump in.
No need for apologies man. I wish I had been a little wiser in my teenage years and pursued a career in the tech industry (because I find that stuff pretty interesting these days), but my no means am I unhappy with where I'm at.
I'm also really glad to hear that you guys get a little bit of pull in the industry. I think that often people have a pessimistic view that game companies are being 100% dictated by the business suits who have never touched a console or gaming PC. From what I've seen from SOE/Daybreak through the years, it genuinely sounds like a pretty fun team to work with.
Dev teams tend to have pretty good clout and control over a lot of the facets of their game, but the higher-ups are the ones who make the big decisions about what games get made and with how many resources and with what kind of timeline. Good decisions happen when the Deciders council the Devs to make sure the opinions and market knowledge they're basing their decisions make sense.
Players must deliver Tempest from Anomalies to the nearby Data Buoys in order to score points.
Wouldn't server performance testing still require more than the 1-5 ppl that habit PTS normally? How about an organized playtest? Or are these fixes too small to warrant such?
More players do offer a more practical test yes, and we will take all we can get. What we usually get from larger groups is a larger range of behaviors to find any strange edge cases. And we are confident the changes we made will improve performance as these are based upon profiling we do on live servers when the population is at maximum for a continent. Its more of making sure those changes didn't break anything or cause a crash of some sort. Hope that all makes sense.
How exactly are we supposed to test any of this? Can't really deduce server performance with low populations, alerts rarely trigger on PTS and we can't cause "maintenance," etc. Is there a playtest coming sometime?
We will be manually triggering and ending alerts. But just having some random behavior tested out on PTS would be good to catch any potential server or client crashes. So far, I have not seen any crashes. We will of course review the /bug's but that doesn't guarantee they get fixed with the next hotfix depending on the severity of the bug.
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