Who gives the final go [to push a patch live]?
TL;DRFor routine patches Erin Roberts gives the go-ahead from the UK, with production making the call in LA, but for the 3.0 live release he explicitly left the decision to Chris.
Typically, if we're just chucking out another patch, the way the process works as we're going through the year is we'd basically have a meeting and say, okay, are we good to put another patch out for the PTU? And typically I'd be in the UK time zone and I'd say, okay, if this is all good and this is working fine and we feel this build that's going to be tested in Austin is good, because I'll be in the UK at this time, then you've got my go-ahead to ship. And then it'll be a production call in the LA time zone, which wouldn't really involve senior people, because it'd be like, hey, that sounds good. So when it came to the live one, I basically explicitly just said, okay, Chris is going to make that call.
I've been here for a number of these larger patches and this one definitely felt a little different. This one felt like the accumulation of a whole lot of work.
It was really one of those where we've been working on it for a long time. There's so much going on under the hood that it was really important that we got it out there, because now, having it out there and having information from that, we have a great roadmap of all the stuff we want to do going forward, not only in terms of features and content, but in terms of all the work we need to do on optimization and other stuff, because we have this feedback. Just going a bit off question here, but a lot of the stuff that happened when we went live over Christmas, we hadn't really seen before, even though we were with Evocati and on PTU. It's when people got in and started doing stuff in certain ways and playing that these issues came up. Now, fortunately for some of the worst ones, because we have our backend side, we can actually make changes on the server side.
Like the interdiction.
Exactly, all that kind of stuff, to fix those issues without having to do a new build. That's great for us, because doing a new build, as we've talked about, is a big process. It requires people to go in, you have to do a new build, you've got to test, you've got to look at this stuff. But on the backend side, we can just tweak parameters or turn things on and off. So that helps a lot.