seriously questioning SoE policyFollow

Psssssssssssssssst. Its Emergency down time. That means they didn't expect, plan, or desire to do this right now. Sorry man :(

Allow me to wildly speculate here:

The patch was intended to be a short patch this morning, if I had to guess it involved fixing the XP exploit in a certain high level area. It looks like something went terribly wrong, and now they are just trying to get the servers back online. BTW estimated uptime is 4pm EST which is right about now.

Dont these guys think of TESTING any of these patches? Is it just me or do patches seem to come in pairs...

"whoops, we did it again...
...we screwed with the game,
...but it doesnt work,
were so incompetent"

it was nothing wrong with the patch itself. they had a power outage.

Perhaps before spending the time in a mindless rant about how somebody else sucks, one should learn basic English spelling and grammar.

Sorry, but it is pretty obvious when someone for whom English is not their primary language is writing, compared to someone who speaks English as their first (and very probably only) language and writes like a five year old.

Welcome to Software Engineering. I'm a professional software engineer for a major (read "second largest") defense contractor in the world, so I'm very familiar with the full lifecycle of software development. You can test code until you are blue in the face. That does NOT mean that all is going to be well when the code is deployed. No matter how "identical" systems are (the test bed, the staging platform, and the production box), we're not dealing with toaster ovens here. We're dealing with highly complex, sophisticated equipment by any standard. And that equipment doesn't always "behave" the way the development team wishes, or the QA department believes.



That might be true in Retail or some other sector, but let me assure that testing in the software development world most definitely does NOT come after release in a major development house. Maintenance/"bug fixing" of ANY software system comes with a price tag that weighs in at 80% of the overall cost of development of that project. You heard me right. 80%. Postponing QA until after release of a software product will guarantee failure.

Again.... A lot of people here do not understand the QA cycle of a software product. Just because it works on Test does NOT mean it's going to work on Production. Until computer systems get either more simple, or so sophisticated that they can fix themselves, this will ALWAYS be the case.

The failure of Sony has nothing to do with their process. It has everything to do with their Customer Service.

1. You don't schedule "Planned Downtime" 3 hours in advance.
2. When you do have to take the servers down in 3 hours, don't just post the message to a web site. Broadcast a system message (many claim no system message was broadcast...I don't know since I wasn't online at the time).
3. NEVER (I can't stress this enough) NEVER give a "true estimate" of your downtime. If you're a developer, and you *think* the system will be down for 2 hours, you NEVER tell the customer it will be down for 2 hours!!! You should KNOW BETTER BY NOW that you WILL encounter something you weren't expecting, blowing your estimate right out of the water, and making you the "bad guy". When you tell the customer that their service will be down for 4 hours, and you bring it up in 3, you get a lot of attaboys. When you tell the customer that their service will be down for 2 hours, and you bring it up in 3, you are definitely the "bad guy", even though the work was the same and took the same amount of time.

SOE needs to fix their customer service, NOT their development staff.

I think we all need to give SOE a break. Funny thing is, I can recall back to the very early days of EQ and the same complaints were heard. People always saying what SOE should do to change or fix the situation and then complaints when they actually do fix the situation.

EQ is never going to be perfect for everybody, and it is highly unlikely it is perfect for anybody. But they do a pretty god job of keeping things moving.

As for the language thing...if you can make out what the person was trying to say, deal with that and not their spelling or use of grammer. This is comming from someone (me)who will cintinually transpose letters because I am typing fast and because I am in my office, I often have to send without proofing. lol

SOE normally does a pretty good job with scheduled patches, but has a very sorted history with emergency patches. Corporations adhering to the principles of structured change management normally undertake three levels of testing before rolling into production: development testing, performance testing, and end-user acceptance testing.

Development testing checks to make sure the code compiles correctly, does not generate run-time errors, logic testing (making sure the code does what you think it does), and exception testing. Performance testing is usually done on a lab box, and through the use of load simulators makes sure the code and system are stable under heavy utilization. The last phase is typically the most important: user testing. Groups of highly experienced users run through the code on a lab box and look for anomalies that may not be readily apparent.

With scheduled patches SOE normally follows all three phases of testing and certification. Emergency patches typically will skip one or two levels of certification, and it is here where we see SOE shooting themselves in the foot (sometimes causing a bigger problem than the one the patch intended to fix). SOE does a good job in being able to roll-out the rogue code and return the system to a known point of stability. One can sometimes question if the “emergency” is significant enough to warrant bypassing standard testing & certification procedures. This is always a judgment call and one hopefully SOE managers are being held accountable for.

Ok this thread seems to have gained a momentum that has nothing to do with my blowing off steam due to a frieday evening patch. My main complaints about SoE are as follows

1. Patching at stupid times, i.e friday afternoon when they have to know that if something goes wrong most peoples primetime playing will be effected

2. Customer support in the chat room has no way of contacting Tech support. i cannot understand why since 90% of tech problems could then be sorted in 30 secs with 1 phonecall.

3. No tech support for GMT , No Guides for GMT , No anything for GMT

4. Tech support if you ever do manage to get through to them ALWAYS disconnect if the problem you have is remotely complex.

I don't care what time they patch i am willing to except that if they patch on a tuesday i can't play that evening. not got a problem with that. i just object to weekend patches.