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

[Tharkkun]

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...

The only reason to delay hot-fixes would be if it required WoW to be down for full maintenance each time. Since it's a hotfix and not a patch it makes sense to release the fixes as soon as they have been regression tested.

The only reason enterprise software company delay their patches to monthly or quarterly is to reduce the impact on the server infrastructure. For example, Windows updates at the 2nd Tuesday of each month. This way you patch once versus 14 times.

[elmoe420]

What is of concern though is Blizzard's continued reliance on regularly schedule downtime for 'maintenance'. The idea that you need to bring your service offline to do 'maintenance' is truely archiac in the world of modern software engineering.

Unfortunately the business model used for WoW (monthly subscriptions) provides little incentive for Blizzard to change this practice. Under a different business model (eg. pay per minute you play) you can be very certain that WoW would be hitting four nines of availability just like any other enterprise service provider. To be frank, if I suggested at work that we bring down servers for 'scheduled maintenance' I would rightfully no longer have a job hah.

[Vanaline]

What is of concern though is Blizzard's continued reliance on regularly schedule downtime for 'maintenance'. The idea that you need to bring your service offline to do 'maintenance' is truely archiac in the world of modern software engineering.

Unfortunately the business model used for WoW (monthly subscriptions) provides little incentive for Blizzard to change this practice. Under a different business model (eg. pay per minute you play) you can be very certain that WoW would be hitting four nines of availability just like any other enterprise service provider. To be frank, if I suggested at work that we bring down servers for 'scheduled maintenance' I would rightfully no longer have a job hah.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in the context of this game.

[Avada Kedavra]

so ppl bitch if they dont hot fix, and then ppl bitch of they do.

i just dont get why people think its necessart to bitch about something that has little affect on them.

I would rather updates and fixes be made than deal with a sub-par or broken game.

its people like the OP that I put on stfu island.

[elmoe420]

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about in the context of this game.

Care to elaborate on this statement?

Happy to learn more about why you feel modern practices in distributed system architecture do not apply to an MMO game.

[Thelxi]

I like that they are hotfixing frequently. Vast improvement if you ask me.

[Radish Spirit]

WoW isn't failing.

Daily hotfixes is an agile development methodology. My company is an agile development company as well, operating on a behind-a-week release on weekly sprints for one of our major clients (the one I am assigned to). I release entirely new versions of our software every week, sometimes with extra "hotfixes" during the week if emergency issues come up. This is normal.

I hate to pick nits. I agree in the sense that OP is misguided and that daily hotfixes are actually a sign of a healthy process, not a broken one.

However, having been trained in agile and used it to manage game development projects for years - nothing about the process suggests daily patches or hotfixes. Agile calls for milestone builds at the end of a sprint. If you're hotfixing daily during an agile project, then you're either not hitting your sprint goals or you're trying to meet mid-sprint milestones which suggests that you are using sprint sizes inappropriate for your project, or management is not respecting the process. The whole idea of the sprint is to let the team focus on development during the sprint instead of burdening them with daily "can I have a build?" requests from management or marketing.

[Lochton]

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...

Wait, you are complaining that they are fixing things? WoW... I swear not long ago, people had it with Blizzard not fixing things fast enough.

Some hotfixes might not have finished in time to make it with others, I am pretty sure if you look through the notes, you'll find a lot of single-line fixes. Nothing wrong with daily hotfixes, might mean they are listening to you guys.. You know, feedback. Or might have found other problems?

[Varabently]

Blizz is damned if they do, damned if they don't. Are we complaining that they are focusing on class balance too much now? What is happening? I'm really happy when I see hotfixes. It means the are listening for issues and correcting them. Remember when everyone was abandoning the shaman train a month ago? Don't they feel stupid now after the buffs.

[Caelia]

I'm not sure how anyone can view daily hotfixing as a bad thing.
Sure some bugs could've been fixed since beta but tuning etc is just good that they do with hotfixes rather than waiting for bigger patches.

[arcaneshot]

Care to elaborate on this statement?

Happy to learn more about why you feel modern practices in distributed system architecture do not apply to an MMO game.

Your biggest mistake is you think WoW is being run like Amazon.com. Nobody should even have to explain that; it's intuitively obvious.

[George Costanza]

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

[SlippyCheeze]

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

The software industry is rife with, uh, loose use of terminology. One developer calls it a hotfix if they don't touch client-side code, another calls it a hotfix if they release outside their schedule, a third calls everything a patch. In this case Blizzard use "hotfix" to mean "no client patch needed, out of schedule", and patch to mean "big code drop on a schedule".

Don't read too much into what "other" developers call the same thing. It just doesn't signify. Give it a couple hundred years, sure, and everyone will have standard lingo, but right now? Means nothing.

[Didacticus Syntacticus]

Would you prefer waiting for 6.1 for these changes?

Hunters and glad warriors would.

- - - Updated - - -

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

In general, a "hotfix" is one that can be put into production without a service interruption.

The term derived from "hot swappable hardware" which is hardware such as disk drives and power supplies in high-availability systems that can be exchanged without powering down.

[SlippyCheeze]

Your biggest mistake is you think WoW is being run like Amazon.com. Nobody should even have to explain that; it's intuitively obvious.

I see this a lot: people who are all "I ran a small web forum once, so why the hell are Facebook having so many problems with this?" or "Amazon do X, so clearly Google can also do Y the same way."

At large scale, especially world-leading scale, nothing is easy. Everything is invented from scratch, and the decisions of ten years ago *still* haunt you even though we have literally more computing power in an iPhone 5 than in the fastest computer in the world back when WoW launched.

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.

Guess who Blizzard could have talked too about that to find out ahead of time? ... yeah, nobody. Because nobody else builds an MMO with the same server, design, player volume, etc.

[Tharkkun]

Care to elaborate on this statement?

Happy to learn more about why you feel modern practices in distributed system architecture do not apply to an MMO game.

Server maintenance doesn't just involve applying a hotfix. It includes database maintenance, storage maintenance, replacement of failed or malfunctioning hardware (nic cards, processors, disks), upgrading or refreshing equipment with newer models, etc, etc.

The reason they take all the realms down during the process is because if they put say 30 of the 100 online then everyone floods those realms. This makes it unplayable for players native to that realm. So they keep everything offline until it's all ready.

[XDurionX]

Why delay changes just to fix them in one bunch? Doesn´t make sense.

[Doombringer]

WoW isn't failing.

Daily hotfixes is an agile development methodology. My company is an agile development company as well, operating on a behind-a-week release on weekly sprints for one of our major clients (the one I am assigned to). I release entirely new versions of our software every week, sometimes with extra "hotfixes" during the week if emergency issues come up. This is normal.

On the user experience side, this is a little more jarring for a game. When a hotfix changes how your class performs or a system of the game you've become accustomed to (over months or years) ... well, that just sucks. There's fixes and then there's changes. They're making both.

Also, many of the changes on the profession side hint that they did not iterate fully on their initial design, and they are receiving a lot of flak for what players are perceiving as "bad" or simply unenjoyable. Yes, jewelcrafting requiring herbs is more than a little ridiculous. Bandages requiring fish, also stupid. This is all in light of these systems having a 10-year precedent in many cases (mine and prospect for jewels, get cloth for bandages, etc.), with a sudden (and silly) change in WoD.

[Deleted]

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

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Daily hotfixes are more inline with an agile development cycle.

Sorry you're dumb though.

Infracted

Infracted, but true.
There is nothing "bad" about this. It means they are working hard daily to improve things.