I would like to discuss how people envision the updates of the game. (I'm talking bug fixes! Not about expansion nor add-on schedules)
Some games do a scheduled downtime everyday. Others have a patch and you need to load it before you can enter the game. Even others require you to patch a minimum in order to be playable and it will download as you game, with some gameplay effects while doing so.
How do you think it should be?
Every day a down time of ...1 hour? So every day, the game gets worked on and you're not getting gigabytes of downloads in one go.
Patch and play along the way?
You can suggest anything, realistic or not. And what are the pro's and the con's.
I don't mind doing a minimum download and playing and updating along the way.
I'd say that a dynamic 'patch and play' would be best so that emergency/critical updates can be slotted in quickly. The last thing we want are criticaly important changes (dupe bugs, for example) waiting for some artificial pre-set patch cycle. The days of the daily downtime are, I think, well behind us. EQ1 needed it becausea they ran their own server farms. Pantheon will operate in AWS's, Google's or even MS's cloud so the daily maintenance just won't be a thing.
And realistically speaking, given the bandwidth of the modern internet, gigabytes of data downloads take a few moments. Only when expansions drop would you possibly see the tens of gigabytes of data needing downloaded.
The updates regularly in the lobby client is fine for me, though I think it can encourage companies to throw stuff out without much testing... It's better than having not much testing *and* not getting them often, though.
I'm ok with regular server restarts too, if it helps with performance and help with server resilience.
At launch, I would expect there to be daily downtime as hotfixes are put in place to fix major issues. Eventually I hope that we get to a monthly patch cadence with only emergency hotfixes in between. Expansions I would say once every 18 months is about right. 12 months feels too short, and 24 months seems too long.
bigdogchris said:At launch, I would expect there to be daily downtime as hotfixes are put in place to fix major issues. Eventually I hope that we get to a monthly patch cadence with only emergency hotfixes in between. Expansions I would say once every 18 months is about right. 12 months feels too short, and 24 months seems too long.
Hopefully with the right amount of testing launch will go smoothly. I can't expect a game that's been in development for 7 years to have too many bugs at launch, but you never know.
I know people like to hate on Blizzard, but I think their weekly downtime of an hour to maintain hardware (clean, repair, replace, upgrade, etc.) is pretty reasonable. I doubt VR will have quite as much server load as Blizzard, in which case I could maybe see them doing maintenance bi-weekly, or monthly.
I personally like how Blizzard schedules their patches on a weekly basis, with any game-breaking bugs being addressed in hotfixes as needed. I also like that Blizard offers a patch and play option for players who just can't wait, but personally, I rarely chose this option and prefer to just wait until patching is done. From my personal experience, patching while playing can sometimes lead to lag issues, frame rate drops, and disconnections.
Helwithe said:bigdogchris said:At launch, I would expect there to be daily downtime as hotfixes are put in place to fix major issues. Eventually I hope that we get to a monthly patch cadence with only emergency hotfixes in between. Expansions I would say once every 18 months is about right. 12 months feels too short, and 24 months seems too long.
Hopefully with the right amount of testing launch will go smoothly. I can't expect a game that's been in development for 7 years to have too many bugs at launch, but you never know.
I know people like to hate on Blizzard, but I think their weekly downtime of an hour to maintain hardware (clean, repair, replace, upgrade, etc.) is pretty reasonable. I doubt VR will have quite as much server load as Blizzard, in which case I could maybe see them doing maintenance bi-weekly, or monthly.
I wouldn't expect them to take the game down nightly to fix normal bugs. They would do it though, if major exploits or game breaking bugs were discovered.