I’m not so sure about that. Company I work for pretty much rolls out hotfixes every couple of days. I think it pretty much depends on how large of scope your hotfix/patch/version is shooting for. You can’t tell me if feature XYZ completely broke the game, that it would take weeks to get fixed because… that’s how software development works. Blizzard used to hotfix broken stuff within hours of a patch or release dropping. It’s not impossible, now matter how little someone knows about software development. This smoke and mirrors doesn’t hide, or change, the fact that there has been broken stuff lingering around for weeks, if not months now. Obviously, some are getting frustrated about it, and all the condescending responses sure aren’t helping things.
You all forgett Steam in you little mind games. I was testing stuff for a little dev studio and because Steam messed up the validation of one patch took 5 days ^^. On top of it do you remember New World when they said they are only alowed to patch once a week because of server contract stuff?
There are bazillions of reasons outside of EHG working crunch time ^^.
Wolcen had this exact same problem. I believe it was the AWS they were using.
Well, ofc nobody can know their contract, so maybe it was just a cheap way out.
I know an example that’s patching more often: Battlebit Remastered
They patched on 2nd, 8th, 9th (Hotfix) and 13th of october for example.
3-man Team doing a Battlefield-like game btw.
So the notion that only big companies can do this is total bs @BroncoCollider
This argument is most likely invalid again. 2 different games with two different scopes. EHG could change the colour of the left big toe of the shaman by a hotfix each day and nothing will be better.
Look at D4 for example. All hands on deck they needed months to change the behaviour of jewels. It took them weeks to add more stash space. They didn’t even care about a completely broken build that make the whole game trivial.
More patches != more good.
Which one was that?
True, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption that patches generally contain useful stuff (bug fixes, new content) rather than trivialities (changing the colour of the Primalist’s left big toe).
Yes, more info. Is this still being worked on? any internal testing done? etc
This would be a good example of doing an enclosed test where you get players to test these mechanics in basic form plus maybe even a simple league mechanic that lasts 2 weeks or something then after the items/characters go to standard league which also needs a name thematic to Last Epoch like ‘Perpetual Cycle’
To be fair, this is far more important than load times, or allowing people to enter dungeons.
Yes, Item Factions are still being worked on and are scheduled to be tested by those in the CT program prior to launch. You can read more about Item Factions here and then continued here.
LE’s version of standard league/non-ladder will be called Legacy. You can read more about Cycles here and then continued here.
Yeah but there have been enough patches in the past in a lot of games when I asked myself “WTF?”. There was still broken stuff ingame and they fixed store stuff… as an example ^^.
I would say where you could find (some small) info on it, but it’d just piss you off… Though Andrew’s done it so I don’t have to.
Why non-ladder?
Mind you, I don’t care much about ladders, it just sounds strange to assume Legacy wouldn’t have one, especially as we are in an infinite arena system. I think it would be interesting to see how high people can go when they don’t reset with seasons, compared to seasonal characters.
PoE does have a ladder for Standard (kinda pointless because everybody there is lvl 100, but it still exists.).
Not sure why but to me it sounds kinda pointless to have one. If, as is usually the case with most of these seasons stuff (from my limited experience with D3 ladders) the game gets changes during that season as the ladder at the end is sort of a snapshot. Then all those builds and stuff move to Legacy which would then just be a repeat of the season in terms of the ladder because they will all now have the best/newest gear along with the new changes.
Just my guess as it seems a bit redundant. Not that it would hurt anything to have ladders in legacy but I’m willing to wager they’d just be another iteration of the season that just happened?
It’s been asked before and Mike answered with “maybe”.
Not necessarily. Because they aren’t reset, more characters would be decked out in BiS/near-perfect gear. So pushing higher than Seasonal characters might be plausible. Kind of depends on the interest in the Legacy league, tbh. They aren’t the most popular thing in other ‘Seasonal’ games.
I take the wager!
Might be true for the first two seasons, but after a while I think someone playing the same character for many months or years would push higher than a character with a lifespan of 3 months. Especially in a game where all content appears in Legacy at the same time as in Cycles (as in, no cycle-only gear).
How much higher? Only a ladder could tell us.
I know…its on Discord but I dont go there at all for anything. It also has about million icons on the page and different rooms
Somebody just asked Mike in discord why we don’t have big fixes more often.
Here his answer :
2 main reasons and a bunch of little ones.
TL:DR every patch is a ton of work with a ton of pitfalls that just isn’t worth it to do little frequent bugfixes while working on the 1.0 patch.
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Every time we release a build, a lot of things need to be checked. Like way more than you would think. Oh I didn’t touch fireball, there is no way its texture could have been removed somehow, no need to check it…and that’s the story of how we had pink fireballs for a day. (pink is the default texture used when one is missing). This means that QA and the build/release team is occupied for a few days and can’t make progress on the next major patch. So each bugfix patch we release, reduces what makes it into the next big one, not because we have already released stuff but because less total stuff makes it in. So it’s short term gain for long term loss.
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Dependencies and Prefabs. Unity (and basically every other engine) uses prefabs to make similar objects in a preconfigured setup. These prefabs often don’t merge together nicely when multiple branches have worked on it. So, take some of our larger prefabs like all the passive trees or all the skill trees. Yes all of the skill trees are in 1 prefab. So as we are developing Warlock and Falconer, we make changes to that prefab on a development branch. That prefab is now “checked out” on the branch and can’t be changed on the main branch. If we want to then make changes to the live build that include any visual changes to a skill node or passive, we have to make a divergent version of the prefab. We are now doing the same bug fix on 2 branches at the same time. We then have to make sure that anything those fixes depend on or are depended on are managed correctly on both branches. Basically it’s a mess and can lead to little things getting missed that we have recorded as being fixed and then they completely fall off our radar even though it’s still a problem.
So it turns out Unity prefabs are non-standard YAML files with guid and numerical refs everywhere.
Merge conflicts would be an absolute nightmare.
It was a sad day I learnt about Unity prefabs