Oh what a glorious day, patch day | EVE Online

Oh what a glorious day, patch day

2004-08-10 - By CCP Oveur

I started the day off with going through the latest defects assigned to the Release candidate where there was a defect that was critical I cancelled the patch deployment. Since we had such a long downtime planned, I decided we'd do the database preparations for the patch and some maintenance meaning when we deploy the patch we wouldn't need 4 hours of downtime.

An hour into the downtime the critical defect was fixed and confirmed that it did in indeed fix it. Since the database preparation had started we could still hit this on schedule (albeit 30 mins late) so I gave patch deployment the green light again and summarily cancelled the cancellation of the patch. All good and well I thought, we have need to get the TL 2 turrets, cloaking and cruiser bonuses out.

Well, shortly after going up, we discovered that since the proposed missile changes has damage split in two attributes coinciding with a last minute update allowed the these attributes, and only one of them got out on Tranquility. Great, missiles useless. But hey, we can't have only one big bug. Nooooo. Factories and lab slots suffered a code check in messup resulting in that you can't use the bluperints from the corp hangar. It's a feature, not a bug. No wait, that was something else.

Well, since we couldn't possibly only have TWO things going bonkers, we had to have a huge exploit there too. Yup. Big one. It's fixed, don't worry. We did that in the time between I announced the hotfix for Missiles and Factories and when we finally took down the server. Well, 1 hour to fix an big exploit, at least one good thing happened today. And that is where I am right now. They are all three fixed, the patch is out, the TL2 turrets coming through research agents, revised cloaking out, second cruiser bonus and drones fixed.

Well, there is one more thing. Ship humping bug went totally haywire today. This was a direct result from the solid reduction in ship loading time that the patch contains (excessive ship humping ruins that a bit). There are very good reproduction cases so there is a client patch coming out tomorrow addressing that. It's caused by a number of cases and we got most of them. Some remain, but hey, progress is progress and the #1 bug in EVE will get squished. So help me EVE.

Oh, and to finish this off, I'd like to give my eternal thanks to the ISD Bug Hunters, this exploit could have gone much worse than it did. 5 devs have come from ISD, where of 4 from Bug Hunters, most recently, we welcomed Hammerhead and Valar along with a third long standing EVE player (2 into QA and one Game Designer.)