The Publishing Plan

In some ways, the process for creating and publishing a game patch should resemble the initial development process discussed in Chapter 2, "Planning." Such a thorough process has not been the standard to date, resulting in unstable patches that crash games and nasty bugs that sometimes corrupt entire character databases. This often necessitates a rollback to a backup version of the game, which results in the loss of many hours of player in-game time and accomplishment. Now you know why players dread patch day.

A patch should be meticulously planned, developed using best-of-breed version control and CCPs, and thoroughly tested and debugged on a live test server before being inflicted on the subscribers. Patches published online to the player base won't be as large as the initial development, but they still need to be charted in a task schedule program by a project manager. And the live development team, like the initial development team, tends to bite off more than it can reasonably chew for a patch.