Patch affects groups

"luthienrising;15385963" wrote:

"Chazzzy;15385709" wrote:
I wonder what's taking long to fix this.

It's been less than a week so far. For a bug to get fixed, first it has to be narrowed down and defined; then the cause has to be found; then the fix has to be coded; then it has to be tested to make sure it works, ideally in all those saves that QA collected from players experiencing this, and in all the situations described; whatever the code was meant to be doing has to be recoded for and tested. Then the whole thing has to be compiled into new code for patching, and submitted to Origin for distribution.

A fix in a week would be super fast, not long.

SimGuruSteve gave an explanation about patches and fixes last June and in particular he explained what happens when something goes bad with a patch, lots of steps involved and work during the weekend, to release it in time for the pack. I don't know if this bug is considered critical enough to have the team works during the weekend, but I'm glad they have managed to reproduce it.

Previously in the early days of Sims 3, we would release both the basegame patch and the product at the same time. 10:00am. Early enough that the team was all in office and ready to test.

However, this causes a few issues. If players in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc bought the physical copy, they were fine - there was a patch on disc. Not the most updated patch, but one that brought the basegame to a compatible version. If players bought digitially, however - they needed the coordinating patch to move the basegame to a compatible version. Buy the game on release day and not play it til later? No good.

Also, if the patch turned out to be bad (rare, but has happened) we were scrambling to fix it - especially because again, digital players wouldn't be able to play their game.

So then, (I think after a particularly bad streak of patches) we decided to release the patch early so we could have QA verify everything went well. We realized it solved a bunch of the above issues and players got excited to see the basegame changes through the weekend.

We also used that emergency time in at least one case. We had a bad patch release on Thursday, rolled it back and engineers fixed it that day, generate patches overnight, test on Friday, run it through certification and additional testing Saturday, submit patches to be hosted on Sunday (while testing more just in case), and release the patch on Monday at 10:00am - a day ahead of the official release, and just in time for Asia.

So we stuck with that schedule. End of the week for patches with products coming out on Tuesday. It's not set in stone, but I think it works for everyone.