Is Blizzard so bad at hotfixing that they have to release daily hotfixes now?

[PrairieChicken]

Daily fixes are not bad. The real thing is how much they have to fix after launch because they rushed everything

[Blupparen]

I rather have 10 hotfixes every day than 100 every 10 days. I don't even see the issue here. It's not like you have to download a patch or something.

[McTurbo]

much perfer the quick fixes than long time with no fixes

[huth]

Want my guess why they had so much performance trouble at launch? It wasn't just popularity, it wasn't poor planning, it was literally an unforeseen consequence of an innocent sounding server-side change -- instead of batching up actions between actors (players, NPCs, etc) and running those every 600ms, they run them as soon as possible.

So why did that make everything so much worse than last release? Why did they disable the toy train set to help with this? Because now every action that crosses players is *vastly* more costly and, worse, every action that triggers another action (like you getting hit by the train emote, then emoting, causing others to see your action) triggers exponentially more server-side activity. Ouch. Easy to get into a meltdown in that state, as I have seen happen in other large scale distributed systems, but honestly wouldn't have predicted here.

Which is probably why they waited 10 years to do it. Though i think it was 400ms, not 600.

[Earthrot]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

I'd rather have this than how the devs of for example Battlefield 4 are doing it... there you have to wait for 2-3 months before game breaking problems are fixed.

[Kuntantee]

Daily hotfixes are more inline with an agile development cycle.

Sorry you're dumb though.

Infracted

Hotfixing has nothing to do with agile development.

[Chain Chungus]

They aren't bad at hotfixing.

We are in the beta still basically.

[kritisk]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

What a ridiculous post. I suppose you'd rather wait months and months for little things that can be knocked out with hot fixes? it actually shows an agile development team that is on top of what needs to be done and rather than hold it back for point releases and major patches, they get the important things out to their customers.

Perhaps you'd prefer the old way that companies would sit on fixes for months, sometimes a year or more, in order to push out features and fixes as the same time? I remember waiting months and months for apps like Photoshop, Quark, etc. to fix major issues.

[Alvito]

How is this worse then waiting and doing a bunch at once?

[Danifilth]

Daily hot fixes have been happening on every expansion launch i think it started on wrath

[Sinyc]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

Clearly you have no development talent or you would know that LOTS and LOTS of companies are adopting this model.

[leviathonlx]

It's their QA department that has been completely useless since the last 4 years.

Nah the QA team finds those issues but they are marked as 'non game breaking for release' by the developers. Unless the bug is massive and crashing the game it will always be marked as something that can just wait till later to be fixed via hotfix (or patch). On one hand it's an annoying way to develop for players sometimes but if they went to fix every problem that's found before releasing the product we'd never see the game get released.

[Mosotti]

This is not agile development, because it's not development. Development means that you create new features. This is support/maintenance, when you create patches, containing bug fixes. Those can be whatever the fuck you want them to be. In case of critical applications, it's a matter of hours...

In agile development the tendency is to have zero bugs at the end of the sprint, we have for each sprint some time reserved for bugs from that sprint. Of course it's not really possible to be bug free, so everything that's discovered later is prioritized and it goes to the support team. Our clients usually get quarterly releases for bug fixing, unless there's a big problem and it needs a hotfix. Obviously WoW is a different beast and there are many more bugs that have to be addressed asap. I think it's great that they deploy fixes so frequently, it shows that the subscription money is going into the right direction.

[Destruktion]

The OP's only post in this thread was the OP.
Just saying...

[Varabently]

Is there any other Developer that "hotfixes" things instead of just "patching it?" I certainly don't know one.

Maybe hotfixing is easier? It depends on what you change obviously. A lot of the game is client-side, but maybe they choose to only tweak those things that are server side, which makes the hotfix process easier? I dunno, seems like semantics.

Why do you say "just patching" as if that's the easier or better option? Can you explain the difference? I always assumed hotfixes were done while the game was online and patches were done offline. I think patches tend to be less frequent also. But you're implying there's a problem doing it by hotfixes.

[GoblinMage]

Poor blizzard man. I've been there for people crying about not hotfixing fast enough. Never did I think I'd be witnessing people complaining about them fixing things too fast.

[ihyln]

It's not like a few thousand beta testers are actually going to find EVERY single bug in the game, especially things that might only show up when MILLIONS of people start hammering it in un expected ways. And I say a few thousand beta testers, because that is really all there are. The vast majority of the rest of the people in beta are more intersted in scoping out the upcoming changes and trying to get a leg up for when the game goes live then actually beta testing.

To be honest a lot of the bugs that went live were reported on the PTR.

[xanzul]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

Oh get out of here. Are you seriously bitching that Blizzard is fixing their game? Really?

[Einzweidrei]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

I like quick fixes.

But I've gotta admit that when they are hotfixing to get rid of hotfixes (loot changes, trinket changes, more?) ... you know that there is just 1 dude coming up with shit and a few other guys saying "yeah sure, push it live tomorrow" and then reacting when there is actual feedback for the stuff that never got tested or even thought through.

Also kinda sucks that they seem to be so random with their hotfixes. Certain seemingly trivial things get fixed. Or one big thing gets fixed but 40 other things that most people agree need a change go untouched. Etc.

[xanzul]

Daily hotfixes are more inline with an agile development cycle.

Sorry you're dumb though.

Infracted

Why in the fuck was this infracted? This thread needs closed rather than infracting people for responding to a troll thread.

- - - Updated - - -

There are only so many hours in the day and so many developers working on things. They will have a priority list that is constantly changing as well as things being added to it as they occur. They can either release daily hotfixes which increase players enjoyment on a daily basis, or they can do it all in one major patch during the downtime. Since the hotfixes do not need downtime, how on earth is it failure or poor development to get fixes to players as soon as possible?

You do understand threads are supposed to be closed when they involve nothing more than insulting and demeaning Blizzard employees right?

- - - Updated - - -

It's not like they didn't have 14 months to work on this and test or anything

The fact that a bug is known doesn't mean it is something that can be or should be fixed the second its discovered. None of you work for Blizzard and none of you know the inner workings of this game. If you think you can do better go apply for a job and show them how its done otherwise shut it.