When is the Monthly Update?
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=188
When is the Monthly Update?
By AC1 Live Team
| What is a Monthly Update? Within each month of the year, Turbine introduces new or revised features and/or content into the world of Dereth.
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Every month we see questions from players who are anxious about the monthly update.
When is it? Will it happen? Will it be late?
Is there some sort of delay?
Will there be an announcement?
When will there be an announcement?
Why can't the update be announced earlier?
Unfortunately, predicting the day of the monthly update is not an exact science, and just as with the weather, unexpected chaos can throw off all our calculations. But there is an underlying method to the madness, even if it isn't always apparent to players. So, to give you a better understanding of how we end up propping on one day and not another, let's take a look at some of the behind-the-scenes factors that lead up to patch day. We'll use the March update as a concrete example.
At the beginning of our monthly cycle, the AC Live team has a pretty general grasp on when the update will eventually go live. We start with a target week in mind, but we know that the chances of this target changing during the month are high. At various times in the past this target week has been the first week or the second week of the month; right now our target is generally the third week. For March, that meant the week of March 17 - 21.
| Terminology: What is a prop? Turbine often uses the word 'prop' internally - 'prop' is short for 'propagate' and refers to the process of taking the updated files from our internal development and testing and getting them propagated out to the players. We use this word as a verb, a noun, and an adjective - we prop the prop on prop day; we are propping tomorrow. |
So our monthly schedule is laid out assuming that we will be propping during our target week. As the month progresses, however, things can come up. For instance, during March we were faced with server instability problems that needed immediate attention. We also had one of our core team members on vacation for a week. One or the other of these circumstances probably wouldn't have affected the monthly update, but both at once caused us to re-evaluate our schedule. This meant that our new target week was March 24-28.
Now, a week or so before the update we enter our "freeze" period. By this point, all of the new content and features have been through preliminary testing - and any bugs that were found were fixed and retested. During freeze, then, the development team is no longer making fixes; instead, the test team is busy with heavy-duty concentrated testing to make sure they didn't miss anything major. If a major bug is found we "break freeze" - and sometimes breaking freeze can mean delaying the update, so we won't break freeze for just any old bug. But if the start of freeze passes and everything is going well, we can start planning which day of the target week will be our prop day. In March, we hit freeze on schedule and so started talking about updating on Tuesday, March 25th.
Unfortunately, sometimes big bugs do rear their ugly heads after freeze. March serves as a graphic example of this: the day after the beginning of our March freeze period we discovered a tiny issue with the script we were using to rebalance creatures. It affected a relatively small number of creatures in seemingly small ways (which is how it had been missed during preliminary testing) but - the implications of those effects were major. Yes, game-breaking major. So we broke freeze and fixed the bug immediately, but it set us back enough that we decided to slip one day on the update. We were now looking at propping on Wednesday, March 26th.
| AC2 vs. ACDM updates We chose to move our target date back to the third week when AC2 started its monthly updates. There has been some confusion about our reasons for preferring to update AC and AC2 in different weeks. The main reason has nothing to do with personnel - there is no overlap between the AC Live team and the AC2 Live team - but everything to do with our fans.
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But we weren't ready to announce the day of the update yet. We don't announce updates, generally, until test has signed off on the files - and they won't do that until they have completed the entire concentrated freeze testing. Although we usually don't run into major delays after freeze, it can happen, and we've found that it is best to wait until we are fairly certain that we are good to go. It's better to have a few days of low-level anxiety while players wait for a prop to be announced than to have days of anger and recriminations when we slip an announced prop.
And in March, this strategy proved itself. Two days after we broke freeze for the rebalancing issue, test found another major bug. Part of the testing that is done during freeze involves testing the server and client on a variety of configurations that mimic live conditions. One of these test configurations exposed a subtle but important bug that had the potential to keep the master servers from starting. No master server means no playing, period. Luckily, using the crash dumps from the test farm we were able to quickly identify the problem and get it fixed within hours. Unfortunately, those hours meant pushing back the update again, to Thursday, March 27th.
So test continued with freeze testing; no other major issues appeared; test signed off on the update; and we announced the prop. March was unusual in requiring us to slip the prop date three times, but it does serve as a good example of the variety of issues that can arise in a month. As always, we would much rather delay things for a bit than prop with game-breaking issues.
So in closing, let's take another stab at some of those questions that we see from anxious players every month. Will there be an update? Yes. When will it be? As soon as it's ready. When will you announce it? When we know it will happen.