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Awesome patching
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
in Guild Wars 2
They can run patches without taking down the game.
Actually they forced people to to log off during the game when they ran a new client patch. But i think it can also be done without forcing people to log off. No more downtime for client patches, which is awesome
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
Yep, they did it in GW1 and I am happy they can do it in GW2 as well.
if you're in Ascalonian Cata with a party and a patch needs to be applied, when you log back in, are you still with the same party and the same dungeon progression ? im asking cuz in GW1, we ignore the new build announcement till we are done with the instance so we dont have to start all over again to apply the new build.
but yes this is a great tech that we enjoyed in GW1 and i dont understand why other devs never imitated this. and also there goes the argument that ANET can only do this because of the instanced nature of GW1, but they are doing it in the more persistent GW2
Have fun storming the castle! - Miracle Max
I believe they can't. ANet has got a patent on it.
Yeah. ~30 seconds logged out to patch, time determined entirely by download speeds and the size of the patch, is many orders of magnitude better than the typical maintenance cr@p we see with other MMOs. Rift often could do a patch in 10-15 minutes, which was much better than average, but no AAA MMORPG I know of comes close to matching the turn around for GW2.
It becomes pretty laughable to still see MMOs in 2012 that need to bring the servers down for three hours to apply even the tiniest of patches.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
During the BWE's, the group state never got altered except after the server wipe between BWE2 and BWE3.
I even was still in the same group with a mate when I logged into BWE2 as I was in when the servers went down at the end of BWE1.
In that timeframe multiple patches were applied and that didn't affect the group state.
Of course thise is BWE experience only and we don't know how it will be by release but basically my experience is you never get thrown out of your group unless you leave yourself (or get kicked by the leader), even if logging in after a month.
edit to add: I don't have any experience with dungeons in GW2 yet so I don't know if indeed like in GW1 you'll log back into the same session and the dungeon progress is remembered.
What sucks though is that if you're in the mini dungeon below Eternal Battlegrounds and for some reason get dc'd, you'll find yourself back in the PVE zone you were in before you travelled to the Mists. That can be very frustrating if you've made it pretty far into the dungeon like through the dark room part.
I wasn't aware of this! Thanks for the heads up! That would be frustrating indeed if you were more than half way through and had to start over!
Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
in GW1 if would not log you out so if you are in the middle of a mission or a run you can finsh it and then logou and get new update also some things can be updated in game with out haveing to logout.
now in GW2 it will log you out if you do not do it your self and i am not sure if they can update small thing yet with out have to logout like they can in GW1.
the only thing i do not like if the 3min count down to force logout. what if your are 1/2 trought a dungon run you knwo it going to take longer then 3 mins to get to the end and to have to be forced to log out and start over again.
I believe they did that because during first BWE people would have their character stuck in mists, unable to play it because the WvW servers were full. (And hence they couldn't log in to that character.) To solve that, they just made it so that when you log in to a character that was previously in the mists, that character will log back in at PvE.
Yep, there are like... 4-5 patents on various aspects of the technology as well as process and definition etc. etc. it's all legalease but generally speaking it is something exclussively Anet and I beleive Mike O'Brian is the patent(s) holder specifically.
It's quite easy to see how they managed it when you understand that the three founders of ArenaNet basically created battle.net for blizzard. This kind of patching technology isn't that far off of the kind of things they were probably working toward in the first place.
From what I understand is this only worked because there was no persistant world in GW1. With the amount of zoning you did it was easy to update with no server restart. GW2 is a different ball of wax.
Indeed, I remember being stuck unable to log on because both my BWE characters were logged out in WvW. That you get ported back to PVE zone upon login solved that issue (and also opens up a spot for the next in queue) and that works fine.
But I think they should treat the mini dungeon differently than the rest of the WvW maps, more as a real dungeon and log you back into your old session if you somehow d/c in there.
Never seen a MMO that could do that, that had a persistant world. Matter of fact even games that saved dungeon prograss for X amount of time and raid zones. Would get reset when servers reset. We used to try and get content done the night before a server reset so we could go back the next day to do it again.
Anets patching system is awesome as is not having to contend with a crappy auto logout system thanks to GW2s overflow system..
In WoW and all its clone games these days when you go to take a whiz and grab a beer you come back to the login screen because you were afk for a few minutes and it boots ya out...
Anet has some real class for not adding this afk boot garbage..
Thanks Anet!
Playing GW2..
Dungeons and raids are usually instanced and indeed are reset after x amount of time that no player is inside (in LOTRO this for example was 20 mins. IIRC, in order to reset a raid if something bugged out the group had to be disbanded and restarted with a new leader, then after 1 person had entered to start the instance the leadership could be passed back to the original leader) and on maintenance day. But I believe that raidlock mechanics was more used to prevent farming high end rewards for the weekly reset and to reduce required resources for the timed reset; than anything else.
The difference here is indeed the open world zones, so if the mini dungeon won't be treated like an instance but as zone (like it currently is), it should still be totally possible to appear in the same spot you were when logged out, your progress through the dungeon is only determined by the place you are, not objectives you have completed. Just means they have to make the mini dungeon a separate zone with it's own ruleset and not be part of the ruleset for the WvW maps (eg not kick you back to PVE land when you relog, or if the player cap for the mini dungeon has been reached offer you the choice to enter a queue or go to PVE land instead).
I would expect this to be less of an issue after majority of the bugs and connection issues have been sorted out. I cannot speak for everyone, but as far as I'm aware, internet connections are starting to be very stable in most places nowdays (of course there are expections), so I'm not sure if this will warrant any special treatment later on, after server side connection/crash problems have all been ironed out.
If they could patch in changes to landscapes and citys it would be another story though
Sorry, but...
"“We have a live team of designers and artists and gameplay programmers who are going to be flying over the game constantly, dropping content everywhere” Johanson says."
Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/28/guild-wars-2-designer-talks-post-launch-content-and-getting-the-community-to-play-together/
They also use the same patching method for GW1, and they can patch in modified landscapes and new areas so that you only need to close and restart your client.
this is one of the patents
selective distribution of information
http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/8075403.html
EQ2 fan sites
Then how is it DDO can't do it? DDO is entirely instanced based with public lobbies that is pretty much identical to GW1.
I have not seen it done in the BWE but they have the technology to make so that when they had a patch, they can create a new instance of each zone with the patch applied to them while keeping the old “not patched zones” for the player that want to finish something before patching is client.
From what I understand is this only worked because there was no persistant world in GW1. With the amount of zoning you did it was easy to update with no server restart. GW2 is a different ball of wax.
Yet, they confirmed they would be using the same type of patching that they used in GW1.
They patched the game a few times during the beta events, and on the stress test as well