Ok, I respect that personal preference, but then that’s what you should be saying in your posts instead of arguing about whether it can be done. There is a world of difference between saying, “They can’t roll it back” and “I don’t want them to roll it back.” You certainly have a right to your personal preferences, but they should be phrased as your preferences, not pronouncements of what can or can’t be done.
As do we all, including the people you’ve been arguing with (which includes me, we’ve argued and yet I agree with your statement).
The catch is that moving forward is not always an improvement, and when it’s not an improvement there needs be an honest acknowledgement of when it should be rolled back. Rolling back a release does not mean permanently, rolling back a release does not mean lack of improvement. It means accepting responsibility for a failed rollout, rolling it back, fixing it and then rolling it out when it can be done properly.
There is no contradiction between these two sentiments - rolling a releases back vs. wanting to move forward with improvements. Sometimes a rollback is necessary in order to move forward properly.
Agreed, but only if it’s done properly.
Likewise, rolling back a deeply flawed release, and going forward to have an improved experience are also not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to take a step back in order make progress the right way.
A patch that caused hundreds of thralls (or maybe even thousands, I don’t know how many poeple play the game on all platorms) to be killed by werehyenas is not an improved experience.
A patch that caused people to get stuck in their bases, which in turn caused them to lose valuable materials or have to tear down part of their base is not an improved experience.
A patch that caused people to fall into holes in the mesh, losing all of their inventory and getting thralls killed, is not an improved experience.
If going forward is not an improved experience, then they shouldn’t be going forward. It must meet the requirement of truly being an improved experience in order for going forward to be valid.
Mind you, there were aspects and elements of the Chapter 4 rollout that were good. I’m not arguing that all the ideas in the rollout were all bad. Some of them were bad and should never have been attempted (the inventory nonsense) and some of them were good. But good ideas don’t make the patch good, and if the patch isn’t good then it should be rolled back, fixed and done again when it can be done right. Some of the unintended consequences of the rollout were terrible. The good ideas can always be implemented later, after the negative consequences of a flawed rollout have been fixed.
This is why rollbacks exist, sometimes a software rollout has so many negative consequences that it must be rolled back to be fixed, it is only after being fixed that it can become an improved experience.
For example, I like the Hunt, but that doesn’t mean I’m ok with tons of other players losing thralls because of flawed werehyenas.
Also, I like the new event areas, but that doesn’t mean I’m ok with tons of other players losing characters and thralls being killed by holes in the game mesh.
We largely agree here, but where we don’t agree is I don’t think this release had “rough edges”, that’s not a strong enough description to match how bad it was. I think it had terrible negative consequences for many people, probably even a large majority of their player base. I think of it pseudo-mathematically. When we add up the total negative value of thralls murdered by werehyenas, terrible inventory changes, people and thralls getting killed by the mesh, people getting stuck in their base and having to lose stuff or destroy part of their own base, the various items in the BP/Bazaar that were not ready and caused a variety of problems, and more… the negative value of all of those problems significantly outweighed the positive value of the good stuff we got from the patch. When the negative value of a patch outweights the positive value, a rollback is how a company acts with honest and integrity, taking responsibility for their failure to deliver a net-positive release.
Yeah, there could be a long and interesting discussion about who’s fault this is, maybe Tencent forcing things on FunCom, maybe FunCom having their own internal issues, maybe other stuff, but in the end none of that really matters (to me at least).
What I care about is that we, as paying customers, have the right to call out FunCom when they deploy a failed release (and by “failed” I mean net-negative, with more negative consequences than positive improvements) and have the right to expect them to take responsibility for their failures by rolling back and fixing them. Every single deployment should be a net-positive, there should never be a net-negative deployment of any patch in the game.
That was the problem with Chapter 4, no one’s saying that everything about Chapter 4 was bad, but on the whole it was a net-negative release, which is why it should have been immediately rolled back and fixed before rolling out (or, as you have hinted at, roll it out in smaller bits and pieces). But now matter how they rolled it out, each and every time they roll out new content it should pass the test of being a net-positive release, otherwise it should get rolled back and fixed.