CCP & Eve Online’s Patching Problems
For a company to make so many mistakes is unbelievable. Eve has 3 environments, 1 live, 1 test and 1 developement which are available to the public. Who knows how many other smaller instances they have.
Tuesday 11th March was planned to have a Trinity 1.1 patch rollout. Trinity is a version of Eve like Gutsy Gibbon is for Ubuntu 7.10. The patch was delayed for a day for more testing. Already this is ringing alarm bells. Why would they be doing such testing that would delay it for a whole day? Surely if they were testing it would only be on small problems not show stoppers.
Wednesday came round and they decided to roll the update out at 02:00. Servers went down and was scheduled to come back at 12:00, same time as the daily down time. I woke up on Wednesday getting down to some university work and checking Eve’s status. The time got extended to 14:00 and then 16:00. Finally they admitted there were problems.
Later on (about 2-4 hours) CCP said they were having problems with the database and had to pull data from the backups and it was taking longer than usual. At this time the IRC channels were going crazy. They stated Eve will come back between Wednesday evening and Thursday afternoon! That’s almost a whole day and half lost. Eventually Eve was opened to the public around 14:00. At this time I was on my way to bed after listening to TLLTS live streaming podcast.
Waking up to Thursday was another announcement from CCP. There were problems all over the place. This was to be expected because no upgrade goes 100% without a problem nowadays. The new patch broke the new tutorial missions which they claimed would be fixed in the next down time on Friday. Again they are rushing to fix giving themselves only one day to work on a fix and test it. They’re calling it a hot fix so it is unlikely it will be documented. They also had broken other things in the eve client and there are claims that they have “nerf’d” or removed items within the game but CCP had never said they would.
CCP needs to get their act together and get their QA process in order (assuming they have QA). They have been runing Eve Online for over 5 years now and they are still making mistakes which I made in my first month of testing in my university project. A regression testing session wouldn’t go a miss either.
I think players are now hoping CCP will reimbursement. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t looking at the way they are handling the situation.
