On Thu, 3 Feb 2000 jhenders@... wrote:

>
> Just a point but the actual claim was that Verant are liars when they
> claim they have someone testing the bard. I think this claim is valid,
> as we have way too much evidence to show that no testing is done on the
> bard before patching at all. Even testing of changes specific to the

I wouldn't quite say that. Most of the problems I've seen
with bard bugs have been due to secondary interations with
spells. So they could quite easily be testing what they think
a change might break, while missing some unanticipated
interaction. (The levitate bug was simply unforgivable
though.)

> Another interesting thing I haven't seen anyone comment on. Last
> (emergency) patch they said they had to put in some changes half
> finished when they put in the fixes for the network code, i.e. the necro
> pet changes. Don't any of the programmers on the list find it odd that
> they don't appear to have some kind of source control system that would
> allow patching of the currently running code so they didn't have to go
> live with partly finished changes?

You're proposing they bring down the servers again to repatch.
They may have decided that disruption was not worth the
benefit of temporarily removing a nerf to one of the strongest
classes in the game. OTOH, when the bard proc bug showed up
again, they did an emergency patch two days later.

Also, in large software projects, you tend to go with tested
executables rather than pieces. The executable they tested
had the necro pet nerf in it. Rolling back just that one
piece of code may have caused unanticipated and untested
problems in other sections of the code.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...