What's the point?

[Wrapye]

I'm looking at the Test patch notes from April 16th.  Four of the items deal with raid zones - Veeshan's Peak (memory leak from flying boulders), Venril (timing of his AEs), Overking (loot table) and Shard of Hate (drop rate of item from sisters).  Patches to the Test server tend to be applied around 7:30 PM Eastern time (4:30 Pacific).  This patch is being applied to the Live servers at 10:00 AM EDT April 17th (7:00 AM Pacific).  That means the patch will have been on Test for all of 14.5 hours before being applied to the Live servers.Does anyone honestly expect that any of that will have been tested on the Test server in that time?  Then why bother put it on the Test server in the first place?  Nothing is being accomplished by this, other than keeping the Test server up to date.

[Brook]

There is a very good reason for this.It allows them to see if the code changes effect anything else in the game such as broken chat, mailbox's crashes, etc...Sometimes changing one thing has unexpected effects on things that make no sense.

[Freliant]

Also, they do have an internal team to test this stuff out. Test doesn't have a strong raid population, so it would be kind of pointless to make raid changes there and wait for feedback before putting it out.

[Wrapye]

<cite>Freliant wrote:</cite><blockquote>Also, they do have an internal team to test this stuff out. Test doesn't have a strong raid population, so it would be kind of pointless to make raid changes there and wait for feedback before putting it out.</blockquote>That is my point.  Why put it on Test in the first place?  Just push it to Live.Even if Test did have a raid population and they hopped on the problem immediately, by the time they would have any feedback or bug reports everyone in SOE offices would have gone home, and the patch is pushed to Live before anyone comes to work in the morning.  There is no time for testing of the direct impact of the changes (those listed in the notes) nor for indirect effects (changes that impact other systems of the game).  It is a mere formality.  About the only thing that would stop a patch applied with that schedule is if it prevented the server from coming up.

[Freliant]

<cite>Wrapye wrote:</cite><blockquote>snip... <p>  It is a mere formality.  About the only thing that would stop a patch applied with that schedule is if it prevented the server from coming up.</p></blockquote>yep, it is, and yes, you are right.