Monday 4 October 2010

Optional Patches

the_stupid_it_burns
So we had an optional patch recently to fix some issues that some folks had with a previous patch to that.  I must say I had little of the issues that others had, the only one I saw was in the LP store the descriptions were not showing up.  One of the advantages from the patch before the optional patch was the speed increase of PI, that helped as I’ve had a love-hate relationship with PI for a while now due to the click fest it is.  It seems to have sped up the initial exploration of the extractor and then you can choose the time period cycle, 23 hours is my usual.
So getting back to the optional patch, why release an optional patch?  All you do is get questions from thousands of users who have no idea if they should download the patch or not so they ask question upon question in the forums and probably also petitions to the GM’s to find out if they need the patch.
If a patch is released make it mandatory like every other patch, if a user has an issue it will hopefully fix it, if they have no issues then with luck it will not do anything.  Optional creates too many questions and breeds uncertainty.
The optional patch process was done differently to the non-optional patches, it was done in game and didn’t require the external torrent like program to fetch the file and then install it.  Two advantages to this was the process is faster, and it also worked on my Ubuntu machine without having to manually download the patch file and install it under Wine.  That was a nice surprise.

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