J
Johnny Bravo
Guest
As per my post in thread entitled Patch....here is the developers comments.
A Patch Story
This is the story of a patch that was supposed to bring happiness to the world but ended up being a Trojan for the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse.
At 11:00 GMT on May 13th we decided to issue a rather extensive patch to both client and server. This patch has been in the making from launch. It addressed many of the bugs that have been rampant since then as well as including a few new features and game tuning. We had tested it much as we could, though our dev servers have been rather empty since launch, as people obviously are more interested in playing the game, so large scale testing wasn't really in the picture. Finally yesterday, a green light was given, as the patch seemed to pass all tests.
Oh, how naive we were.
Soon after the patch was out there, the first problems started to flow in the petition queue. The pirate tuning seemed to have gone terribly wrong. The rationale behind the pirate update was to make the low security systems more of a challenge. This issue had been raised by numerous players, and it was clear from the early start that we needed to beef up the pirates. Obviously, if we had started with them like that, nobody would have really been bothered, as word of mouth would quickly have asserted that going into those regions was definitely not for newbies. The main problem with the update was with systems with only one stargate. The NPC logic made it such that in those systems, the pirates ended up camping gates continuously. This made it next to impossible for most players to get out of this situation alive. Many good pilots lost all their belongings and some their life in that battle. We have since remedied to this, and we believe that this pirate update is a good and necessary one. They give a good challenge for higher level ships, and drop much more interesting loot as well. But obviously it also means that these regions are off limit for most low level players. Also, we are planning a slight change in ore distribution, which will harmonize nicely with the pirate levels.
But as this problem was overwhelming customer support, other petitions started trickling in. Skills seemed to have been upset by the update, some skill points going into negative territory. This was quickly hotfixed on the server, but a lot of players needed help from customer support to restore their levels.
If this wasn't enough, market problems started showing up. People were getting charged twice for certain things. Blueprints bought were charged for, but didn't seem to appear on the player's hangar floor. And to make things even more difficult, a change in the market notification mechanism started spamming people with order matches, while at the same time player's lost all traces of where their order had been matched, as e-mails were no longer sent.
At this point, we knew that even though customer support could remedy to most of these issues, we had seriously stretched the patience of our customers. This is when we started considering rollback, but on the other hand there were many bugs that _were_ fixed with the patch that was kind of a pity to lose.
But we talked about the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse at the start, remember? Well, the fourth guy wasn't far away. From our accounting systems we suddenly saw that a bug in the insurance system had doled out billions of ISK to some users, that instead of reporting it, stripped the market and then went on a killing spree. This bug had actually been in the system from the start, but only emerged at this point.
So what can you do? Well, we could have tried to correct all the backlog of petitions, restoring ships, skills, etc. And then also follow the money trail of the exploit and restoring, while all the same time players in general had a lousy game experience. On the other hand, we could also rollback to the situation before the patch, and then take some serious time in addressing the issues with the patch. This options has already been suggested by many of you, and we feel that overall, it is the solution that puts everyone at a level ground. Maybe those that would be most affected are new users that have registered after the patch, but at the same time their first experience has really been shadowed by all the bugs, and they would not have lost anything.
This is why we have decide to rollback to the state right before the patch. In principle, you should be back to exactly the same point you were, though your skills will probably have evolved for an extra 12 hours, which we are sure you don't mind. To compensate players for their lost time, we will also give out to everybody a lump sum of 200.000 ISK.
We are truly sorry for the inconvenience that we caused, and we will certainly make it a lesson for us.
CCP Devs
