Patches during the evening

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Rook Strife, Apr 5, 2019.

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  1. Traveller13

    Traveller13 Bug Hunter

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    They lost one forever in me with the last QA release and a reaction to a bug post I made about it.

    As for this one. I read about the patch to fix the graphics was out while I was in the game. I took a break, received the patch then went back in. There was no problem. If I didn't wan the patch, I wouldn't have left the game.
     
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  2. Woodchuck

    Woodchuck Avatar

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    Yay! hope it fixes the BSOD crashes i'm getting all the time when playins SoTA and also watching streaming video simultaneously.

    [​IMG]
     
  3. Rook Strife

    Rook Strife Avatar

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    When population is generally lowest

    A small amount of people will be inconvenienced.


    You consistently patch at a specific time so everyone knows what to expect
     
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  4. Net

    Net Avatar

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    The only real off hours are Thursdays with new release. The rest of patches is pretty much optional if you are already in the game. You may have to patch to get in party with someone else, but those patches are usually rather small.
     
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  5. Arkah EMPstrike

    Arkah EMPstrike Avatar

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    Friday was overall a lower active player count than other days last week.

    Cant find anything showing activities at specific times tho
     
  6. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    As a European player I often find that I have to deal with the frustration of events, etc. being scheduled around the Central Time US because that's where Portalarium is. Release patches almost invariably interrupt my prime time. Release parties / events are always far too late for me to attend and be able to function at work the next day.

    It sucks, but that's how it is. And if that's where the devs are, and when their workday is, and where the bulk of their audience is...then, well, I just have to deal with it. Not something I'm going to get upset about.

    I'm absolutely certain that Portalarium has some sort of metric in place where they can see online player concurrency and could choose to disrupt the smallest audience possible.

    I'll also say that this is the only game where I see a lot of patching happen without actually needing to take the server completely down - hell, it doesn't even interrupt what you're doing you just get a message you need to change scene in the next hour. In most games, everyone gets booted off even for small, quick patches. I think they're ahead of the curve, here.
     
  7. Elwyn

    Elwyn Avatar

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    Also, many patches are not forced. You may see an "instance is closing" message and be bumped into an instance run by the newer server with your old client, but nothing more. You can upgrade when you are ready. I do not know how that works with Steam though.

    The main problem is when it happens during an event, some people will exit to patch right away, some people will have just logged in via the launcher didn't know how to (or that they would need to) bypass it to use the old version. And it is fundamental to the game design that different patch versions can not be in the same scene instances, which is a problem for events. More than once a Friday night patch has come in the middle of a dance party.

    You can see the hours used by Steam players, though I recall hearing a long time ago (before persistence) that Port is not allowed to report their own online user counts due to their agreement with Steam. Yes, that's right, Steam won't let them, even if they wanted to.
    https://steamcharts.com/app/326160#1m

    It has been suggested that if they allow streaming of QA (now that it isn't pledges-only), that might encourage more players to play in QA. The current QA rewards aren't very inspiring, and the previous automatic rewards just encouraged gaming the system, and almost any rewards that would apply to Live would probably get abused. The only real incentive other than altruism is a chance to see new stuff and try dumb things. Maybe allowing QA streaming could encourage more QA play if Port was willing. But I'm not going to go nuts about it if they don't. I haven't been doing QA much lately simply because I haven't had enough time to devote to it.
     
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