[Speculation] The reason pre-patch has no date yet.

[clownpenisfart]

Oh ya, the team dealing with the server problem is not the same as the main dev/testing team so I imagine they are in the business as usual camp for production.

Except, you know, in case of a completely new database failure mode in which case the developers in charge of that would have to get involved in figuring out what happened and how to fix it.

We got a (relatively) small issue when deploying a live content patch earlier this year on the game I work on (just after we all went into confinement, actually), where a small, dumb bug would cause a small, dumb server side player data corruption for some players (which nonetheless caused the game client to bug rather spectacularly), and it involved 6 of us in the dev team (3 gameplay programmers, 2 online programmers, and the technical director) to fix it.

The people who manage the servers can only really fix deployment issues (hmm we copied over the wrong binary, or the wrong configuration file, or some service is not starting for whatever reason and such), and some common failure modes (mostly those whose fix involves restarting things, redeploying things, or restoring a backup). At some point when things go haywire in really weird ways you need the devs to come and debug it, and look at how the data was corrupted, and how to fix it.

And yeah it's understandable that they also don't want to deploy a completely new build (which probably involves a lots of database conversions, if only to convert the old character customization data to the new ones) if one server has its database in tatters at the moment. They probably can't deploy on every server but this one, and they probably can't deploy the new build over an already broken database without fucking it up even more (and without potentially losing even more data)

[munkeyinorbit]

I honestly don’t even think it’s just the server merges it could be a host of other things as well. Christ they are still in the early to mid beta stage in terms of things that need tuned.

They just recently revamped the shadow priest again and that hasn’t even barely been tested yet and the expansion is in a month. If they pushed out prepatch and something on them is broken we are all going to know it before we buy the expansion.

Lol. Most people have already preordered. I think that because of the crying prepatch was slashed from something to keep people interested to barely anything at all they want to make prepatch as short as possible. They know people are going to return prepatch. They don't want them cancelling sub because there is nothing to do.

- - - Updated - - -

even if it was ready, i doubt blizzard would release on a week starting with timewalking dungeons, these are a way to level a player final 10 levels. get gear and buy gear from vendor that would circumvent alot of SL start up

like right now if you have a 117+ player, its a way to go to 120, and get decent gear scaled to a fresh 120.

This can be all done faster after prepatch. The gear isnt going away. That sounds like a nonsense reason.

[Nyel]

If my memory is correct this technically happened all the time back in the day when wow was released. Granted the rollbacks were more like 'hours' or lost data or something on release but it wasn't near as bad as YEARS obviously. Just saying it has happened before.

As I said, I don’t remember. Doesn’t mean it never happened. Especially in the last years. I always remember being stuck forever in battlegrounds in Vanilla when their servers weren’t good enough for all the player loads right before TBC launch, but I don’t remember any rollbacks or things that happened on Khadgar.

[C20]

Are you a Software dev? I can see that it gets more difficult after the pre patch, or that this is a major issue and requires alot of people to fix?

Yep, for over 10 years.

More difficult is subjective. There'll be a lot of work to do and bugs might appear which need urgent fixes, but having the patch out there is usually a good motivator to push and get any last minute fixes done, or to fix up any issues that only showed up after the patch was released. Knowing that you'll soon be able to relax a little because the major work is done generally makes people start to enjoy work more. This applies more to developers than devops or DBA's though.

Devops, DBA's and developers will communicate on specific issues (e.g. "How does the client call this particular API on the server?" or "Can you tell me what data is in <table> in the database matching these specific parameters?"), but mostly, one team will figure out what the issue is and unless there's something required from one of the other teams, they'll generally be able to fix it without needing to bring more people in.

What we call 'epics' are the work that multiple teams will usually work on together - sort of like a major part of a project (e.g. the corruption system will have an epic). Inside epics, are stories. Stories are usually worked on by an individual team and group a feature-set of the epic (e.g. the visual effect of corruptions will have a story, or maybe multiple stories, while the negative effects will have a different story). Inside stories, are issues. Issues are usually work on by individual people or small groups inside a team (e.g. the twilight devastation pathing might have an issue on it's own). In some cases, a story requires help from multiple teams, or an issue requires multiple people to complete.

[Kathranis]

As I said, I don’t remember. Doesn’t mean it never happened. Especially in the last years. I always remember being stuck forever in battlegrounds in Vanilla when their servers weren’t good enough for all the player loads right before TBC launch, but I don’t remember any rollbacks or things that happened on Khadgar.

They had rollbacks due to server restarts and database issues, mostly. Few hours of progress lost at most, probably. It's been ages so I can't recall exactly.

I assume the issues with Khadgar have to do with some sort of database error dating back to the original connection between Khadgar and Alleria back in 2014. They probably connected back to an old version of the database somehow instead of the current one, or something. I don't know how it works, exactly, but that's what makes the most sense to me.

[arkanon]

They had rollbacks due to server restarts and database issues, mostly. Few hours of progress lost at most, probably. It's been ages so I can't recall exactly.

I assume the issues with Khadgar have to do with some sort of database error dating back to the original connection between Khadgar and Alleria back in 2014. They probably connected back to an old version of the database somehow instead of the current one, or something. I don't know how it works, exactly, but that's what makes the most sense to me.

I seem to remember it happening in TBC, and items were restored. Nothing im aware of even close to as severe as being rolled back multiple expansions.

[Tziva]

I certainly think they should fix the issue before dropping a patch, but I also don't think they were on target to hit the 29th even when the problem initially occurred.

[dialuspin]

Here's my theory about why some chars are experiencing a multiple years rollback, just because it's an interesting situation. No source or proof for any of this, just speculation.

They might be using some kind of Log-structured merge-tree database. Basically you add or update data by writing new entries that supersede old ones, and occasionally you do a merging operation to overwrite the old data. You may end up with several "runs" of data, ie multiple files (possibly stored in different places with different performance characteristics), and the same data (for instance, a character) may appear in several runs but only the most recent version is used.

This is a good system for write throughput, which is probably what wow needs: if you think about it, your character is loaded from the DB only when you log in and when you are transferred to a different game server, zone etc. - but you update various aspect of your character (and quests etc.) continuously while playing and that needs to be written back to the DB often enough that you don't get rollbacked too far in time in the event of a server crash.

So assuming all this, maybe they have years old runs of data stored away on servers with cheap and slow storage, and more recent and active runs with newer data on faster storage. That too could very well make sense: it would leave tons of old, unused or otherwise abandoned characters (there must be a LOT of them) on the slow storage where they don't pollute the disk caches and such, yet they are still ready to be pulled out and written back in a recent run on fast storage if people ever play them again.

Now in a situation like this, what happens if some storage server(s) have some spectacular failure that results in the corruption or loss of some recent(s) runs of data? You may end up using the most recent available version of the data and that could be one that's several years old.

[LordVargK]

Likely due to balancing issues. Even now it was terribly balanced if you were lower level to where you struggled more than if you were in the max level area. This way they can balance it around conduits/covenants as everyone will have access to it. Currently they were tuned for Azerite and such so if you didn't have them you felt the difference. You can still level up 50-60 so they have so use in that department.

As for timeline queues I couldn't get it to work on Beta and always had the "BFA Dungeon one" and on one toon trying to talk to Chromie gave me nothing. Will probably try again after the wipe. Because I was hoping they didn't remove the Group Finder satchels (still needing some items).

I'd prefer it if they just had a "Chromie Timewalking" where you could be thrown into any expansions dungeon and you just select the satchel you want. Same could be done for 50-60 (after you hit max once) and it just syncs you to 50.

I never experienced any balancing issues in timewalking dungeons that were cause by having to play a low level class. There were overtuned encounters (the klaxxi boss with the army comes to mind here), but overall most dungeons were doable with or without azerite traits. Sure, you could not pull the entire dungeons, like you were able back in the day with overpowered gear, but that's not what you're supposed to do in timewalking anyways.

I could not get timeline dungeons to work on PTR as well. And your suggestion seems pretty reasonable, since it would allow me to quest in a specific expansion while not being limited to the player pool of that timeline. Because most likely the newer ones (cata and upwards) will have many more players than TBC and WotLK. Also having a choice is always the best option for a player. And SL was announced as the expansion that gives players agency back

[AwkwardSquirtle]

If your character you planned on maining was deleted would you want pre-patch to land?

Yes. I couldn't play it on my main either way. Other people could play it, and I could play it on an alt if I wanted to.

[Queen of Hamsters]

If this really is the case, then I'm quite sad that they don't trust the community to handle it like adults and thus, are keeping it a secret.

Because the community would absolutely NOT handle it like adults.

At this point, as long as the release date remains, I couldn't care less when pre-patch comes. It's already established that it's a fart in the wind compared to the Legion one.

[Unholyground]

I was just talking to some people from Khadgar and a lot of them are saying they are still missing stuff and in some cases characters.

[Mosha]

I was just talking to some people from Khadgar and a lot of them are saying they are still missing stuff and in some cases characters.

I’m actually curious what the fix is if for whatever reason they are unable to get those characters back

[arkanon]

I’m actually curious what the fix is if for whatever reason they are unable to get those characters back

Only blizzard know, if anyone. The most likely scenario is lost data - they cant revert things back because they have nothing to show the correct state. Im not a programmer, wont pretend to be, but it makes sense to me. Blizzard obviously dont know the fix/solution, or i suspect it would have been implemented.

[Mosha]

Only blizzard know, if anyone. The most likely scenario is lost data - they cant revert things back because they have nothing to show the correct state. Im not a programmer, wont pretend to be, but it makes sense to me. Blizzard obviously dont know the fix/solution, or i suspect it would have been implemented.

No I meant like I wonder what the compensation would be for the players. Like they use to give out free months for game breaking bugs and outages, I wonder what they will get if they just simply can not get their characters back.

[arkanon]

No I meant like I wonder what the compensation would be for the players. Like they use to give out free months for game breaking bugs and outages, I wonder what they will get if they just simply can not get their characters back.

I remember getting a few DAYS of game time, but i dont remember ever getting a month? Could be wrong, but a few days was during TBC iirc, and maybe once during WOD during the garrison glitch were people got stuck flying out?

[Terminatrix]

Unfortunately with the botched merger of Khadgar, Medivh, Alleria and Exodar they had no choice but to push it back if they were panning on pulling the trigger. I was in contact with multiple GM's and they locked transfers off of those servers until they have "successfully" merged which has been going on for like a month now as I am trying to transfer to Area 52 and they keep telling me I have to wait. I assume this put a wrench into their pre-patch plans because tons of us cannot transfer off now so it would look really bad if they pulled the trigger before people get their characters back and can be on the server they actually want to play on as well. It is multiple things holding it back now for sure.

You will not see a pre-patch date until they have fixed Khadgar and the merger has finished as they could do more damage trying to force the pre-patch on a potentially broken/corrupted database.

Mark my words they are staying quiet about it until things are fixed as they don't want people to lose their shit. Soon as things are connected and smooth we will get the date.

well by past experience in the past 16 yrs. they have set in stone the shadowland release date and as with past releases xpack even if its not polished or still have bugs they will still release it, bug the crap out of everything and fix it in a patch after launch release.

[cuafpr]

if true that's possible.. i would not push a new version of my software out when there is a major problem with some servers on the current version (Exception if the patch would fix the issues but not likely here).

[Azerate]

We will see, if they announce the date after they announce the successful connections of those servers we will know I was correct

Not really. The prepatch release date is probably coming very soon, just like the fix to rollback issues. There's a high probability of it being a coincidence

[Mosha]

I remember getting a few DAYS of game time, but i dont remember ever getting a month? Could be wrong, but a few days was during TBC iirc, and maybe once during WOD during the garrison glitch were people got stuck flying out?

They have for sure given out free months, not sure about how widespread they were but they have. I got a free month for being falsely banned before, also got a free month when I wasn’t rewarded a glad mount in wod after some weird glitch.