Question for Randy: For patches with the type of fundamental changes expected in 2.4, does the Live team do anything special in preparation or is the hand-off from the PTU and Q&A basically the same?asked by Far-seeker

So, this one right here – as mentioned before, every single- [laughs]

[raises hands]

...every single release- I know right-MA: If you don't know, we're being held by gunpoint with a Nerf gun.

We really are – and those things shoot fast too.

They do.

I've been put off on a tangent.[Both laugh]

So you're like..

That's our stay off tangent machine.

So every single release there's really no live team, there's basically everyone and then based on the release they kind of pull from the resources and like I said before, basically Art, Design, Engineering – everything, they're kind of like "this is what we want to do, this is the goal for this release" and then we pull the people who are in charge of those features and charge of that release and then they'll do most of the work for each individual release and when we do handoffs, we do a handoff every day.And a handoff happens between the UK and here in the US and UK takes care of the stuff in Frankfurt as well, so they'll have all those mix of bugs and then Alex Marschal over there will communicate with all of the producers over there and that way there's main points of contact for each individual studio and then we'll have meetings every day and now pushing out to live, or for pushing out to the PTU and stuff.Then what you have is more meetings because we'll have our no-go- go/no-go meetings and we'll talk with QA and we'll talk with the main leads and be alright, "Is this good enough to go to PTU?" and sometimes it's been completely crap but we needed to test some stuff, "hey, we just put this fix in, or we just put some debugging in" but we need to push this to PTU now" – so we'll ask for a build and then QA will do a dirty-test of that build and then we'll push it out to PTU anyways so just the people are on PTU they help us out and they go through and get everything situated so we can keep testing.

It's like, "I know this is going to break this, but we really want to test that".

So sometimes we've even disabled Arena Command so for like 2.4 stuff we're testing on the PU right now, we don't have Arena Commander working yet-MA: It's only Crusader at the moment.

Because we want to really test the shopping, we really want to test that stuff and there's enough crashes and breaks without introducing more things in there.So, yeah, no, we definitely do a handoff and it's every day and it's the communication between the different departments in QA and QA is really leading the charge in telling us what's broken and what's not. So I'm going to get shot.

I'm waiting, I'm just waiting. He's waiting for us to get comfortable then he'll shoot one and we'll be like "What?!".

I'll do my girliest.. [gestures with arms flailing]

[Also gestures]

That's not cool. Blocks the..[Shot fires]

Oh geez.

Where'd he get you at?

I don't want to say.[Laughs]

Right in my soul.

Oh no.

Alright, next question.

[Sways left and right] Ha! [Gets shot] Ugh..

Ah, in ma squiggly spooch.

[Plays dead] He got me right where it hurts.