Announce an incoming major update 2 days before

It would be awesome if you could announce that a major update will hit Live at least 2 days before it does. That will give people time to log in, make sure all their buildings are refreshed and, in general, “batten down the hatches” in preparation for any possible problems with the upcoming update.

Regardless of what people think about the acceptability of major bugs, the fact is that they happen. When they do, there is always a significant number of people caught “with their pants down”, e.g. with their buildings 48 hours from decay or something similar. A timely announcement would, hopefully, help people put everything in order and avoid unnecessary frustration and anxiety.

EDIT: To clarify why I’m proposing two days instead of one, it’s because of time zone differences and the fact that not everyone can log in from work, even when they’re working from home.

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I second this, very easy to implement, will save a lot of people a lot of aggravation later. Please incorporate this idea yesterday :joy:

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second that (even tho Im on Xbox)

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i also think that communication to the modders would be very helpfull.they work for free and keep a large number of players interested.If funcom would send the data to these modders before an actual update they can start working offline before the update hits and probably give good feedback on bugs and issues that may occur upon launch.

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we have received the devkit update already a couple of days before the game update but when a patch hits the live servers with such an impact you think twice if you really should update your mod and draw all the server owner attention with every single base game bug to your mod.

and the live service issues are not really something you can test in the devkit. the devkit did not need the live service to run or play in the editor

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sounds easy but from my experience (I work as a developer) it is sometimes not so easy

a release date is often not really set in stone. it’s more a planned date which is flexible if last minute issues pop up

so it is most likely that we will see something like this if we have a 2 day delay of an update:

01.01. update scheduled for 03.01
02.01. update postponed because of last minute issues -> effects still unknown -> no new upadte date
03.01. issue fixed -> update scheduled for 05.01. (2 days delay again)
04.01. update postponed again because…

and so on

not sure if such a release “plan” will work and is such a big benefit.

it’s ready when it’s ready and then you shouldn’t leave it lying around unnecessarily. software is not like wine, it doesn’t get better the longer it lies around :wink:

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Yeah, I know, I also work as a dev, although not in game industry anymore. And since we’re both devs, we both know that it might not be as easy as it sounds, but it can be done. There are processes that can be adopted both when it comes to development and decision-making in general.

At some point, we have to stop lowering the bar, you know. Not so long ago, the prevalent sentiment was “Funcom could improve the quality of their major releases if they tested them enough on TestLive.” Now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re saying “Okay, maybe Funcom just can’t improve the quality of their major releases, so how about they let us know beforehand so we can prepare?”

Are we really saying “nah, they’ll screw that up, too”?

Code-freezing the release candidate branch is a standard practice: nothing goes in unless it’s a bugfix. I guess it all boils down to whether the process in the studio is so broken down that it can’t be fixed.

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and definitve also for funcom

and this will produce the timeline from above. after a bugfix the codefreeze and test interval starts new. in my opinion it’s not really helpful if we have a 2 day delay which is stretched to 10 days.

I don’t think it’s broken. announcing releases 2 days ahead is only an additional constraint I would not add to my project. there is a good reason for not announcing hard release dates. expect the unexpected.

I… don’t know what to say to that. I mean, it’s not like I’m saying that this game is super important in the grand scheme of things in life. I’m simply talking about the quality of the releases.

If you can look at this release and several other major releases that had problems of comparable severity, and still say that the process is fine, then we have an irreconcilable difference in our ideas about product quality.

This really doesn’t seem like it would be too hard, especially when I’ve seen a different developer announce exact dates for patches at least a month (sometimes longer) in advance. That is for major patches, for smaller patches however, they always announce the date for minor patches at least a week before it’s due out and not once has the patch been delayed after the date for it was announced.

What I just described is something that developer has been doing for one of their games for years now, so Funcom shouldn’t really have any difficulties announcing patches 2 or even 3 days before.

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Although my server host doesn’t auto-upload game Updates so we have time to do backups, this warning ahead of time would be a great service. Even if it’s just a heads up that an Update or Patch is scheduled for , it still allows Funcom to reverse if there are unforeseen issues/delays. Perhaps this is one of the things planned to be able to do with the new overlay to Steam?

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