2002-12-10: FYI - State of Service...Report from Mr Tact 10-12-02

FYI - State of Service...Report from Mr Tact 10-12-02

Just a couple of quick comments on everyone's favorite topics: the 0-damage bug and houses.

Krum has found another permutation of the issue he fixed last time (which I had dubbed the "1-damage" bug). We're pretty sure this is the primary cause of the spells that do 0-damage. This will hopefully roll out this week, it's in testing right now.

We have a fix coming as well for the house placement bug. I don't want to go into details about this, since I can't rule out the possibility that it could be used for an exploit. Those of you who have been bitten by it know what I'm talking about. This should also roll out this week.

Phase III rollout: The engineering team completed their database optimization last week. This deployed on Thursday. We had a minor hiccup on Friday, which was why the housing server was down for a couple of hours, but we caught this pretty early on and had it fixed the same day.

Testing for the new version of the housing server is slated to begin tomorrow. After that, QA gets to bang on it a bit. I don't know how long those operations are going to take. The best case is, both will be a day or less, in which case we would be able to deploy Phase III on Friday. The worst case is, we find a serious showstopper bug which has to be fixed before we go live, which will mean further delay. Needless to say, I'm hoping for the former.

Finally, a reminder: we have decided NOT to deactivate house claiming with the launch of Phase III. It will now be a permanent feature of housing. Please remember to use this power only for Good.

MrTact