Where's HK IA?

[Biomed]

This has been covered earlier in this thread:

I am not referring to the size of the patch man, I am referring to the lack of substantial changes in the patch.

[Omedon]

I am not referring to the size of the patch man, I am referring to the lack of substantial changes in the patch.

Which could very well be all under the hood stuff. That's what I was referring to.

[Hewi]

I am not referring to the size of the patch man, I am referring to the lack of substantial changes in the patch.

Wasn't it announced, and mentioned in this thread, that the majority of the time was going to be taken for maintenance?
Their other option of course, would have been to make this patch a quick one, and take the shards down again at some other point to do the maintenance they needed to do.. which would have annoyed everyone.

It's not really fair to try and say a certain (or minimum) number of features being introduced justify a certain amount of downtime. Some minor changes may have huge consequences and some major changes may have small consequences. You said you're not a dev, but you were happy to estimate the amount of time it should have taken someone to fix? WTF.

I can tell you from personal experience that making changes to an application (even on a small scale) ranges from something that's easy to fix and push out a change for, such as find something, fix it and push the change out the same day or overnight, to something that's easy to identify but takes a while to fix and test before it gets pushed out. That's on a small scale, and absolutely nothing compared to the scope of what developers are working with here. On top of that, I'd imagine that in the majority of situations, there are multiple people responsible for their own 'section' of a feature, kinda like a group project if you like, and they all have to get their parts done before it can be tested and the update pushed out.

I have no idea what goes on in 5-hour updates, but if the shards are already coming down for an update, that's the perfect time to do whatever else you need to do, doesn't mean you need a changelog a full page long to justify it.

[Biomed]

Which could very well be all under the hood stuff. That's what I was referring to.

What under the hood stuff could it possibly be? Did they make changes to a soul they aren't telling anyone about? Did they adjust loot drops in HK so that 85% of the cleric drops arent Spell Crit without advertising it?

I appreciate the fact that you are just so content with under the hood changes that aren't announced but for a game I put a lot of time and effort into, I like to know whats going on.

[Biomed]

You said you're not a dev, but you were happy to estimate the amount of time it should have taken someone to fix? WTF.

So if you dropped your car off to a mechanic, and you yourself are not a mechanic, and they tell you 12 hours for an oil change you would just so OK because you are not a mechanic?

[Omedon]

I appreciate the fact that you are just so content with under the hood changes that aren't announced but for a game I put a lot of time and effort into, I like to know whats going on.

Sure, that's your right to feel that way, and RIFT's not entitled to your further patronage, so exercise your right to leave, vote with your wallet, or wait and see like the rest of us.

Personally, I'm playing other things while RIFT further tweaks the content that draws me to them (Instant Adventures), when it works, I'll play more, until then, I have other stuff to do.

Maybe you need a game rotation? I don't know.

[Biomed]

Sure, that's your right to feel that way, and RIFT's not entitled to your further patronage, so exercise your right to leave, vote with your wallet, or wait and see like the rest of us.

Personally, I'm playing other things while RIFT further tweaks the content that draws me to them (Instant Adventures), when it works, I'll play more, until then, I have other stuff to do.

Maybe you need a game rotation? I don't know.

Or exercise my right to voice my opinion and feelings like you are? Yeah I think I will continue doing so.

[Salvatrix]

Outside of a major content update, most of what most of the team is working on will never be reflected in weekly hotfixes. Most of the team is not focused on weekly sprints.

[Omedon]

Or exercise my right to voice my opinion and feelings like you are? Yeah I think I will continue doing so.

Oh of course, I'm not saying otherwise, I just often see, not just in this game, but in others, variations of "HEY tell me everything right now!" And there's an implied "or I'll..." Or you'll what?

I'm not saying that to antagonize, but to point out that you've stated that you're not happy with their communication, so... you'll communicate at them? What's the ultimate end here?

Anyway, do what you will, I'm just thinking out loud.

[Biomed]

Outside of a major content update, most of what most of the team is working on will never be reflected in weekly hotfixes. Most of the team is not focused on weekly sprints.

Where would it be reflected?

[Crithappens]

Where would it be reflected?

Major content updates... you know, that stuff that takes a lot more than a week to do?

It would not surprise me at all if there are already devs working on 3.4 and even 4.0

[krug]

Exactly - for example, I'm working on content for the next couple of milestones, but was sent a player-generated bug on the Planebreaker Chronicle, so I paused to fix that. Though we'll often add new features and content in between the big milestones, more often those patches will be minor bug and quality of life fixes.

[Slipmat]

The longer than usual 'patch' times either with or without extra items or fixes added was addressed back in Rift 3.2 Hotfix #9:

* We've begun a lengthy process of optimizing game data, which will result in improved load times. Due to the scope of this change, we'll be spreading out this change over the next few months, which will lead to patches being larger than usual

Source: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...25-2015-a.html

[Hewi]

Where would it be reflected?

They don't have to write down every single thing that they're working on and let us know, just in case we're not happy with it. If everything was written down, there'd be more QQ on these forums about "all this useless information that doesn't affect me at all".. Knowing what's going on is one thing, but complaining about an update duration that you don't think is justified, then expecting to know everything the team is doing is a bit over the top.

As far as your oil / mechanic reference goes, you're introducing your assumption of how long things will take into an argument, never mind the fact that these two situations are pretty different. In this case, the mechanic didn't say it'd be a 12 hour oil change, he said "we have to change the oil, as well as perform a whole bunch of maintenance tasks that may as well be performed at the same time, and the total duration of all of these things put together will be 12 hours".

Don't get me wrong, I'd love the updates to be really quick and sometimes it'd be good to know more about what's going on, but at the end of the day all you're really asking for is enough information to make yourself feel better about the length of the patch.

[Archonix]

What under the hood stuff could it possibly be?

From time to time we also perform maintenance on servers which requires extended down times. This week being be one of them.