Who in their right mind was going to log into 3.24 with 4.0 sitting right there? Who drives up to Disneyland and, with Disneyland right there, goes to California Adventure instead? Was anything gained by doing this, really?
TL;DRA fairly large group of players stayed on 3.24 during the break, partly as a fallback from launch issues, and the speakers concede they wanted both preview concurrency and an escape hatch, which beat releasing 4.0 live.
Yeah, overall, throughout the break, during the 4.0 preview, there was actually a fairly large contingent of players still playing 3.24. Now, it might have been because of some of the issues at launch, right, so they fall back on the 3.24 patch, which was a bit the kind of the safety net that we wanted to provide. But you're right, of course, we were banking on the fact that people would go on the 4.0 preview to give us that concurrency, but at the same time, we wanted to give them an escape hatch.
Sounds a little bit like we were trying to have our cake and eat it too.
A little bit, but I think previously we would have just gone with the 4.0 live at the end of December, which would have been a major issue and a lot of players wouldn't have been able to play during the break.