What happened to the updates?

[WNxSpectre]

What happened to the updates? When I first picked up this game, the updates were comming fast and furious, with about 2 updates to download a week or at least 1. Lately, they have slowed to a trickle. The momentum appears to have dropped considerably. This has me worried for the future of this game. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done on it to justify the price tag it carries.

 

[Noschkov]

You should never compare the release of a game to its later EA-development. Sure, in the first weeks they updated pretty often but if you look an the content of this updates you see that this were mostly fixes for bugs and exploits. And of then also only the ones that were easiest to find were fixed at the beginning.
Now the team has shifted from fixing the easy stuff and the worst crashes to producing real new content(Rebellions, Keep battles, battle terrain system, ...). And this development take more time because you don't just change a few lines of code to fix some silly spawnpoints or something you have to create tonns of new code, scenes and so on.
Sure, they could still try a weekly update but then it would only annoy people because their Safegames get messed up all the time for perhaps 20 lines of patchnotes that include basicly nothing outside of one new helmet and two villages.
I will not say that TW ist very efficient with their updates, but it is logical that we will not see the same pace we saw a year ago.

 

[WNxSpectre]

You should never compare the release of a game to its later EA-development. Sure, in the first weeks they updated pretty often but if you look an the content of this updates you see that this were mostly fixes for bugs and exploits. And of then also only the ones that were easiest to find were fixed at the beginning.
Now the team has shifted from fixing the easy stuff and the worst crashes to producing real new content(Rebellions, Keep battles, battle terrain system, ...). And this development take more time because you don't just change a few lines of code to fix some silly spawnpoints or something you have to create tonns of new code, scenes and so on.
Sure, they could still try a weekly update but then it would only annoy people because their Safegames get messed up all the time for perhaps 20 lines of patchnotes that include basicly nothing outside of one new helmet and two villages.
I will not say that TW ist very efficient with their updates, but it is logical that we will not see the same pace we saw a year ago.

I think I led you into a misconception. I should have specified that I picked up this game in the winter that just passed.

 

[Noschkov]

I think I led you into a misconception. I should have specified that I picked up this game in the winter that just passed.

Ok. I thought you only counted major patches and not hotfixes

The reduced amount of hotfixes is explaind in the fact that they have changed their patching routine. As far as I know some time ago they decided that they would include most bugfixes that are not totaly critical into their large updates instead of releasing a hotfix nearly every week. You can see this in the support section. When anything gets solved now Madra always refers to the next major update instead of any Hotfixes.
I think this could be because they wanted to improve testing for the major patches after some pretty bad releses(around 1.5.7 or so) and one way to get better testing is by not having a part of your QA-team working on some minor patches all the time when they could also be used to test the larger stuff.

 

[five bucks]

Some people have expressed the opinion that they like larger gaps between patches for three reasons

1: people can give more accurate feedback when staying on the same version longer
2: mods break less often (quite a few people complain about updates coming out and breaking their mods)
3: people with slow internet, which is still much of the world, don't have to download as many ridiculously large 60gb updates

so it seems TW has opted for longer breaks between updates for these decent reasons