EVE-Online Trinity 1.1 Boost Patch Deployment Completed
Well, after a day and a half of problems it seems EVE-Online’s developer, CCP, have sorted the problems they created with the latest upgrade to the EVE-Online service.
First, they announced that the patching would take place on 11th March at 02:00 GMT. The day before the patch was due, they noted that the patch was delayed 24 hours and would be deployed on 12th March instead, starting at 02:00 and ending 16:00 GMT.
Patch day came, and went, EVE was very much not online the whole day. I wasn’t around when it came back online, but the ‘downtime news’ page still currently displays an estimated restoration time of 02:00 on March 13th - a full ten hours of extra downtime.
When it did come back online, many of the missions recently added to the game were pulled temporarily, this was due to database issues and an incompatibility between the old and new. Seems absolutely stunning to me that this wasn’t picked up on in testing, but as usual, it seems the testing CCP required was to be done by the paying customers, rather than the developer. So, on the normal scheduled downtime at 11:00 on March 13th (just nine hours after the last downtime ended), CCP pulled those missions.
Finally, at the scheduled downtime on 14th March at 11:00 GMT, the missions were restored and apparently - everything is working.
As usual, CCP’s errors are frustrating to a paying customer. It’s frustrating in one way because CCP currently does not have any competition, there is no game of this type that’s any better and however many problems EVE-Online might have, it still kicks ass in most aspects.
The patch itself is a good one, with some fantastic improvements to gameplay that although small things, should make big differences. You can read the full patch notes, but the things I like the most are:
1. When undocking, you are set at a random angle and at full speed. This should stop people who undock - then forget - from getting in the way of other players trying to undock from Space Stations.
2. The tutorials and help are greatly improved - I wonder though whether any new players will actually bother to use them.
3. “Drones will no longer sometimes shoot the ship that they were sent to guard.” - Enough said.
4. The overview has been greatly improved. I was delighted to see all the changes made here. It has made warping into a high security Ice Field just SO much easier now that my system doesn’t have to list all those Secure Cans (even though I had them turned off previously, it still displayed them in space)!
Tags: CCP, EVE-Online, Patches, PC Games, Trinity