Server Merges Pushed Until Week of 29 November 2010
Amnerys posted this today on the Everquest2.com forums:
As of yesterday afternoon, the decision has been made to hold the merge until next week. We want to be sure we have full staff on hand to make everything goes smoothly.
Commentary: Some of you are probably wondering what the heck is going on with the merges and thinking that if they’re pushing it this many times, this probably isn’t going to end well. From what I understand, they needed to give people 30 days notice of the upcoming server merges (not sure exactly why but sounds like a good idea regardless). So I’m guessing that they asked their devs/engineers when they thought would be the earliest that they could be ready for the merges and they said Nov 16th if all goes well and we don’t run into any hiccups. So they announced the merges would take place starting on Nov 16th. When Nov 16th rolled around, they were down to the final rounds of testing the process and hit a few hiccups. They are now in the process of working through the final hiccups in their testing environment before inflicting running the merge scripts on the live servers.
I’m personally glad that they are taking the cautious approach to make sure as few hiccups as possible make it to the live servers. In the software industry it’s all too often that management forces devs to push something out the door whether it’s ready or not just so they meet the deadline that was announced. I’d much rather have quality pushed a little late than bugs pushed on time. These delays are a good thing. It shows they are taking their time to get it right rather than rushing it out the door. Even with the delays, I’m sure some things will still go wrong, but hopefully it won’t be very many.