For this Dev Diary, Missy Hatch prods Bruce Maclean, Development Director for WAR, to write a bit about Patches and how they are produced. Patches, Updates, Hotfixes (or is it Hot Fixes)... we should have a Dev Diary on what each of these exactly means.

This week’s Dev Diary has a funny story. You see, I (Missy) usually give our devs at least two weeks of lead time for their diaries, to make sure they're not rushed or stressed. A Dev Diary is an important window into the studio and how it works, and so it’s my opinion that a dev should feel relaxed and at peace when he or she sits down to the task. I asked Bruce to consider writing this Dev Diary on October 28, and have been gently reminding him about it ever since.

This week, though, I finally clubbed him over the head with our resident giant squig (yes, the one you’ve seen in Podcasts). Unfortunately, I apparently chose the absolute worst week to lay down the Missy Smackdown. This Dev Diary is a bit loopy--but that’s Bruce in a nutshell! Without further ado, here's an inside look at the creative craziness that keeps the rest of Mythic sane!

Dev Diary: Bruce Maclean - Development Dr.

I love MMOs!  I bet you do too, since here you are reading our Dev Diary.  Why are MMOs awesome?  Because they are constantly being worked on, and a subscription based MMO grows even as you play it.  We here at Mythic love our player community, and your feedback has helped us craft our patches to most directly impact the issues that you care about the most.  Most games get a patch or two after they come out, and those patches are limited to bug fixes with no new content.  Not so here!  We live for patches!  We love them!  Have you been counting our patches?!  (I’m talking about patches here, not the little server maintenance thingies or the crazy run of performance improvements we’ve done this week.)  We’ve put out ten as I write this. 

‘Damn,’ you might say.  ‘Curse you Mystix!  Why do you always have to make this game better?  It’s already great!  I love it!  Just let us play!’  Well here’s the problem.  We play the game too.  We love it too.  You post about a performance issue, a balance issue or a pesky bug of any sort, and we don’t just read about your pain.  Oh no.  We feel it.

Now, we could have not given you ten patches.  We could have saved them all up and pushed up all the fixes in one big old pile in the future.  Or so you might think.  There’s two big problems with that though.  First problem, and it is a doozy, is that we already have a TON of stuff going up in these patches.  Go back and read the patch notes for 1.0.6 and 1.1 if you don’t believe me.  Actually don’t do that.  That would take forever, and you could be spending that time out trying to get your BattleBrew backpack from the Keg End event which is live on the servers right now!  I want to get mine, but I have to write this Dev Diary first!  

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the second problem with lumping all our fixes into one supermassive patch.  And that is: our excitement.  You see, here we are, with AWESOME! HOT! FIXES! and SEXY! COOL! NEW! FEATURES! ready to go.  They are just burning a hole into our deployment server, crying for release unto the yearning masses.  There you are, fighting a desperate war against the enemy realm, having a blast and gaining in power and recognition with every battle.  And while fighting this war some pesky issue crops up.  Something pesky that we could just up and fix right away.  So what do we do?  We fix it.  We have new content, an awesome event, a great new feature ready?  Then we deploy it!  We are so frickin’ excited about these gameplay improvements we can’t keep them from you.  We love you.  And then there’s the matter of the fresh recruits.  Have you seen them?  New players are joining the WAR all the time.  Fresh meat you say, but they could grow into invaluable allies in the realm war.  We want them to love our game as much as we do.  So what do we do?  We get our AWESOME! HOT! FIXES!and our SEXY! COOL! NEW! FEATURES! out right away.  It’s okay if that moves you a little bit.  Go ahead and wipe that tear away.  I just did.

           

Okay, I think that’s enough words for Missy!  Tell her thanks for not hurting me for getting this to her late.  Assuming she doesn’t hurt me, that is.  Just one more thing I’m going to say before I go:  I can’t wait for you to see what we’ve got in the works.  The WAR is only just getting started.  OH YEAH, THIS IS GOING TO BE GOOD.

Click here to view the Dev Diary at WAR Herald.