In the last year, what patch was the most challenging for you on the back end?
TL;DRMost of the team named 3.0 as the hardest patch because it was the longest in development and brought new everything, while one found the 3.9 stream and workflow changes challenging.
I'm thinking 3.0 for me, because the patch before that was so far, right? And to echo what Ahmed was talking about in terms of DevOps philosophy, if you don't deploy for a long time, then you forget how to deploy, right? And so 3.0 was the longest running in-development patch of Star Citizen, I think, that we've had, right? And launching that touched on everything. Everything was new. It was the first for everything. So it's like a brand new game. And so for me, that was by far the most difficult to get across the finish line. And that's when going to quarterly made it a whole lot better, because now we can deploy more often, which is how you get this rhythm going, right? And keeping it going. It also means, to be fair, the more you deploy, the more you break stuff as well, right? So there is a risk there. Don't touch it. It's working. Don't touch it. It's good. But yeah, 3.0 for me by far. I don't know for you guys. How about you, Miles?
My problems are very different usually. I'm more heavily involved at the beginning of the cycle, less at the end. 3.9 was actually pretty challenging to transition to, as far as getting the new stream set up and making sure all the changes were integrated to where they needed to be. We definitely had a good time with that one.
There's a lot of workflow changes in 3.9 for sure.
For me, it's a difficult take between 3.0 and 3.9. 3.0, definitely. 3.0, we rolled out a new hypervisor, a new generation of virtual machines, and a lot of new things, and it was in a very critical time. I think we have an episode of one of our shows, that I'm not very good at keeping up with, where we talk about what happened in 3.0. In 3.0, there was a chat between CR and Tony and us. I still remember a very, very dear message to me, when Tony said, I got to go put some gifts under the tree and come back real quick. That was 3.0. And it was a lot of fun. 3.9 was a lot of fun too. It was like Fleet Week. Wow. We are spoiled by our player base. Our player base are actually developing this game with us. And I'm not just saying that, because you really see that. And 3.9 was a lot of people doing a lot of things. We were learning a lot. We cannot stop learning from what happened. One of the main ideas in DevOps is to measure everything. Testing a game is challenging. It's relatively doable to test RPCs or API calls, but the immersion, how the game runs and everything, that is difficult. In 3.9, we had that. They're testing everything everywhere. They're doing everything. And we were receiving all this data and digesting and reacting. I do not have an accurate number, but the number of hotfixes that went in that week and a half was really, really high.