That is NOT what every MMO does. I've never seen that in any MMO. I have seen you be able to patch some point mid-way through maintenance, but not as soon as they go down.

Reason: you want to make sure that the servers take the patch before you push it to the clients, otherwise you may have mismatches between the client and the server.

First, this isn't a "patch". This is a content release. An entire new zone, with new instances, dungeons, quests, NPC's, etc., were all released in this download.

Second, there is no way any company would be stupid enough to allow a download of a release before the release is actually live, and no company, every, anywhere, does this.

With companies that have staggered server releases, meaning that the patch is rolled out to many different servers, at different times, yes, because they have already done the work involved and they know that the release doesn't need to be rolled back.

No company ever that has a mega server would ever do this.

The content needs to be rolled to the server, then tested. If there is a problem, then they roll back the servers to the prior state and remove the release.

If the company allowed downloading the code before rolling the code to the server and testing, if there was a problem, there would be a massive issue, since it is NOT possible to undownload code.

When ZeniMax is sure that the release is okay, and testing is done, they enable downloading while they work to bring the servers back on line.

Sometimes the download is done before the servers are back up, and you are good to go as soon as they do.

Other times, like with this release, when it is a HUGE amount of code that is released, it takes far longer to download the new code than it does for them to bring the server back on line. This means that many players are still downloading the code after the servers are back up and can be accessed.

Because of the nature of ZeniMax's Mega Server environment, patch/release code will never be available for download as soon as the servers go down.


(edit: blasted typo's)

chrismattarrwb17_ESO wrote: »

Totally Wrong.
Not arguing if its "content" or "patch" or big or small, because in both cases we're getting them when the servers are back. The point is to make it convenient for people to download, especially people who do not have the luxury of a good internet connection, I for one, wont be able to finish this download until tomorrow.
Without being an mmo expert at all as you seem to be , I can tell you that SWTOR does this very well, with patch and/or content updates (sometimes immediately sometimes a little into maintenance time) been playing that game 3 years now and both SWTOR and neverwinter have the additional option of downloading large parts of the patch in the background while u play. And I'm pretty sure many others do as well. So no idea where you heard that nobody ever did this.

It's also worth mentioning that the patch/content was available for download on the US megaserver earlier, and If im not mistaken it is the same exact file as the EU one, not 100% on this but thats what people have been telling me. If that's true then they can easily allow you to download that patch independently and apply it when the servers are back up. (For us on the EU server at least)

JessieColtub17_ESO wrote: »

First, this isn't a "patch". This is a content release. An entire new zone, with new instances, dungeons, quests, NPC's, etc., were all released in this download.

Second, there is no way any company would be stupid enough to allow a download of a release before the release is actually live, and no company, every, anywhere, does this.

Again, as I said, there are companies that can do this based on how the releases are rolled to their servers.

My comment about no company doing this ever is in regards to releasing untested code to users before they are sure that the code actually works.

Keep in mind, code for the European Servers is going to have differences compared to the code for the NA servers to some extent because of localization differences.

Code release also suffers throttling issues. There is only so much bandwith available to feed the update to the user base without the downloads slowing down to a mind numbing crawl.

Staggered release of the code to the users for download helps to keep the servers from being overloaded by thousands and thousands of users all trying to download the code at the exact same time.