Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

I have a lot to say about that. Everybody kind of has a recipe for fixing login issues, right? A lot of them involve disconnection, shard hopping, loading into AC, rebooting twice, printing a document, I don't know, right? That is actually one of the things that we've identified as missing in our testing process. So we do some load testing before we launch a patch. And so we test with clients logging in and logging out and everything's great. What we're not testing is launch client, Persistent Universe, Alt-F4. Launch client, Persistent Universe, AC, Alt-F4. Client, Persistent Universe. A lot of the issues that we've seen in the 4.0 release came when we put in the persistent hangar flow, for example, that allows you to log into your hangar. The system for this needs to move your player, we call it unstow, your player into the shard. It also needs to unstow your hangar. Now, when players are constantly logging in and out of shards, now you've got multiple shards doing this process for you and they need to complete that process. We've identified a ton of concurrency issues with this in 4.0. Elements that we didn't test for, because you test the load, not the repeated concurrency. And so that's one thing we've identified that we absolutely need to add to our testing process. Because it's one of the other things, I've talked about this before, the difference between PTU and Live is like a 20x increase. That's also one big difference, is that on PTU players don't shard hop that much.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

If there's a double-edged sword of PTU, and there are many, this is the one that's always amused me. People are more patient on PTU than they are on Live, because they recognize that they're helping us, they're helping the development of the game, they're doing a job, and that patience is necessary and wonderful. But it doesn't make for an effective test of Live. And it's yet another reason we have to go to these live environments sometimes, and we don't discover these things until live environments, because Live is where Hyde comes out. So many people in PTU are Dr. Jekyll.

Benoit Beausejour · Chief Technology Officer

That's one of the key differences. A lot of the issues that are plaguing us right this second are still remnants of that. We are tracing a lot of them. I spent a lot of time on Spectrum during the break, during the workation, actually digging into a lot of those, to be able to make sure that when the team would come back we'd have some traction on some of those.