Patch 8.1.5 Hotfixes - March 12, 2019, Blue Posts

[chaud]

Patch 8.1.5 Hotfixes - March 12, 2019

Dungeons and Raids

• Battle of Dazar’alor
  
  • Lady Jaina Proudmoore
    
    • Jaina’s health reduced by 5% on all difficulties.
      
    • Jaina’s Tide Elemental health reduced by 35% on Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Jaina’s Chilling Touch damage reduced by 10% on Mythic difficulty.
      

Textures and Animations

• Fixed several visual issues such as missing targeting reticles and Hunters’ Barrage, which again has its intended visual.

System

• Applied updates to improve realm performance, which are rolling out over a period of a few hours. No downtime is expected. We continue to monitor latency as these updates are applied.

Blue Posts

Missing Hotfixes
Not to worry!

Several changes that were made in the Tides of Vengeance update in December got misplaced with today’s update. We’re working on a hotfix that will carry them back into the live game. This includes a damage increase for Marksmanship Hunters, as well as Equipoise and Replicating Shadows. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Action Bar Paging Change
The Key Bindings for selecting a specific action bar page (shift+1-6), paging forward (shift+mousewheel up), and paging backward (shift+mousewheel down) have been reset. These can be re-bound in the Action Bar section of the Key Bindings menu. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

[Kangumosa]

Ok

/10chars

[Tatakau]

Fix the lag, fix the game. Jesus what on earth are they playing at.

[majesta]

How is it even possible to misplace hotfixes in a patch that contains the cumulative updates to the system unless... OMG... their internal builds are not running whatever hotfixes they push out

[nakigara]

How is it even possible to misplace hotfixes in a patch that contains the cumulative updates to the system unless... OMG... their internal builds are not running whatever hotfixes they push out

Careful or you'll get called out for being unnecessarily toxic for pointing out obvious flaws.

[Sulika]

How is it even possible to misplace hotfixes in a patch that contains the cumulative updates to the system unless... OMG... their internal builds are not running whatever hotfixes they push out

It's surprisingly easy to do so in a large software project. Blizzard could have hundreds of different versions of the codebase under active development at any given time. There isn't only one current build of wow. Right now they will almost certainly have builds for live, builds for 8.2 ptr (probably multiple variants), builds for internal experimentation, builds for MDI, builds for upcoming PvP events, builds for 8.2.5, 8.3 and beyond into the next expansion.

So lets say a bug comes up on live. Some dev in Blizz creates his own copy of the code and figures out a fix for it. Once he is done his change get sent to testing and is approved and someone higher up decides this fix is important enough to hotfix. So a new production build is made featuring the changes and sent out.

Now you have all these (again, potentially hundreds) of internal builds, some are just experiments, some are testing, some are future raids etc. This fix needs to be included into all those builds. Almost certainly it is going to cause problems for a few of them. So lets say his hotfix conflicts with something they are working on for 8.2 (say it fixed a bug with an Azerite trait that was scheduled for deletion in 8.2). So the guy maintaining the current build for 8.2 decides the hotfix isn't needed. Then a week later someone comes up with an idea to make that trait interesting again, they revert the changes that deleted the trait and it's back in the game. Except that guy probably never even knew about the hotfix, it was written by a different developer and the maintainer who decided the hotfix wasn't needed in the new build never even mentioned it to him. Fast forward a bit and 8.2 hits the ptr and the hotfix is gone missing.

That's how it happens in a relatively simple scenario where you just have live, live+hotfix and ptr builds. Multiply it by hundreds of different versions all in current development and all in various states of integration with each other and rather than being surprised that it happens once in a while you should be amazed that it doesn't happen far more often.

[Tatakau]

6gb patch, it is literally like downloading lag.

- - - Updated - - -

It's surprisingly easy to do so in a large software project. Blizzard could have hundreds of different versions of the codebase under active development at any given time. There isn't only one current build of wow. Right now they will almost certainly have builds for live, builds for 8.2 ptr (probably multiple variants), builds for internal experimentation, builds for MDI, builds for upcoming PvP events, builds for 8.2.5, 8.3 and beyond into the next expansion.

So lets say a bug comes up on live. Some dev in Blizz creates his own copy of the code and figures out a fix for it. Once he is done his change get sent to testing and is approved and someone higher up decides this fix is important enough to hotfix. So a new production build is made featuring the changes and sent out.

Now you have all these (again, potentially hundreds) of internal builds, some are just experiments, some are testing, some are future raids etc. This fix needs to be included into all those builds. Almost certainly it is going to cause problems for a few of them. So lets say his hotfix conflicts with something they are working on for 8.2 (say it fixed a bug with an Azerite trait that was scheduled for deletion in 8.2). So the guy maintaining the current build for 8.2 decides the hotfix isn't needed. Then a week later someone comes up with an idea to make that trait interesting again, they revert the changes that deleted the trait and it's back in the game. Except that guy probably never even knew about the hotfix, it was written by a different developer and the maintainer who decided the hotfix wasn't needed in the new build never even mentioned it to him. Fast forward a bit and 8.2 hits the ptr and the hotfix is gone missing.

That's how it happens in a relatively simple scenario where you just have live, live+hotfix and ptr builds. Multiply it by hundreds of different versions all in current development and all in various states of integration with each other and rather than being surprised that it happens once in a while you should be amazed that it doesn't happen far more often.

You actually believe what you typed don't you? I only say because Blizzard are still trying to pass a beta release as final code, they've been doing it for years.

[VanishO2]

It's surprisingly easy to do so in a large software project. Blizzard could have hundreds of different versions of the codebase under active development at any given time. There isn't only one current build of wow. Right now they will almost certainly have builds for live, builds for 8.2 ptr (probably multiple variants), builds for internal experimentation, builds for MDI, builds for upcoming PvP events, builds for 8.2.5, 8.3 and beyond into the next expansion.

So lets say a bug comes up on live. Some dev in Blizz creates his own copy of the code and figures out a fix for it. Once he is done his change get sent to testing and is approved and someone higher up decides this fix is important enough to hotfix. So a new production build is made featuring the changes and sent out.

Now you have all these (again, potentially hundreds) of internal builds, some are just experiments, some are testing, some are future raids etc. This fix needs to be included into all those builds. Almost certainly it is going to cause problems for a few of them. So lets say his hotfix conflicts with something they are working on for 8.2 (say it fixed a bug with an Azerite trait that was scheduled for deletion in 8.2). So the guy maintaining the current build for 8.2 decides the hotfix isn't needed. Then a week later someone comes up with an idea to make that trait interesting again, they revert the changes that deleted the trait and it's back in the game. Except that guy probably never even knew about the hotfix, it was written by a different developer and the maintainer who decided the hotfix wasn't needed in the new build never even mentioned it to him. Fast forward a bit and 8.2 hits the ptr and the hotfix is gone missing.

That's how it happens in a relatively simple scenario where you just have live, live+hotfix and ptr builds. Multiply it by hundreds of different versions all in current development and all in various states of integration with each other and rather than being surprised that it happens once in a while you should be amazed that it doesn't happen far more often.

That kind of mistake only happens, when it happens, on indie/small/mobile companies. In Blizzard's case, it's really a huge mistake that shouldn't happen if they had any type of version control/ team management like any big company with big teams and big projects do have. This is a 10yo+ project from a big company with people working on it for some good time already (no new company took over blizzard's projects and need time to get used to their working methods).

But Ion already used the indie excuse card for why patch notes were that bad.

[Sulika]

That kind of mistake only happens, when it happens, on indie/small/mobile companies. In Blizzard's case, it's really a huge mistake that shouldn't happen if they had any type of version control/ team management like any big company with big teams and big projects do have. This is a 10yo+ project from a big company with people working on it for some good time already (no new company took over blizzard's projects and need time to get used to their working methods).

But Ion already used the indie excuse card for why patch notes were that bad.

It happens with every large software developer. Yes there are great tools to help manage merging the various changes but at some point a human has to decide if a particular change needs to be merged into whatever version of the codebase they are working on or if it is no longer relevant. As long as there are humans making those decisions there will be occasional mistakes. It is actually far less likely these problems will occur for a small development company since they tend to have much simpler development timelines. A team working on a simple mobile game for example probably only has their current release fork and the current development fork active at any given time. When changes only have to be integrated into two forks it is pretty easy to do it correctly.

The notion that the project should have no mistakes because they are a large company is just silly. You won't find a single experienced software developer worth their salt who will claim they can be totally eliminated.