Not what is said in the patch notes or through reading what even Ci~G are saying, not to mention folk who actively play the game...I think you're reading in way too little, simply not understanding what's happening or being disingenuous to Ci~G as to the reasons behind the rushed 3.18.1 PTU release. We all knew 3.18.1 was coming, originally intended to add or improve newer or existing features already present in the 3.18.0 release, yes...but which spectacularly failed as we are all well aware, despite your irritating penchant for spouting contentious nonsense suggesting otherwise.
The current PTU release of 3.18.1 is a major bug fix patch more than anything else...they had no 3.17 branch to go back to in the event of a failed release, they couldn't release the planned 3.18.1 onto a completely broken build so it's a hastily released compromise patch to get players back into the game instead of looking at and/or persistently crashing out with server side error messages. Nobody is playing the broken live build, not because we don't want to...but because in the majority of cases, we simply can't. We're all over in PTU testing 3.18.1 so it can be fired out as a live patch sooner rather than later
Its kind of funny.
In an Agile environment you make discrete releases where each patch adds something new that is feature complete. And of course, i don't think anyone will argue that new patches can come with bugs, so you might need a patch or two to fix the bugs in the patches.
In most software projects there would be a route back, but that falls apart when you need to roll back a live database with live player data. Change the DB for a patch, now the old version won't understand the DB's structure, so rollback simply isn't possible. It will just cause more problems.
And this is the corner CIG have painted themselves into. By marketing it as "playable now" it sets certain expectations. People expect that they can play, and even if there are bugs, they can make some sort of progress.
But the patches break things, and the DB goes wonky, so they have to wipe, and wipe again, and then there is a new patch, which may add new features, but that ship you had, no, forget about that, its gone.
Of course, it doesn't help when things are so borked that players can't even enjoy their time, even if all their progess is wiped. But that's just another example of how CIG don't actually do Agile development (as its written on the tin). Whatever is added shouldn't break what was there before, but CIG do this all the time. (and if we are doing whataboutism, we can say the same about FD or several other companies), and i suspect this is because most companies give lip service to Agile, but when crunch time is upon the devs, they do whatever they have to in order to ship some code, and who knows if those changes break something else, there is a Jira issue that needs solving, so they will damn well solve it.... and if that breaks something else, that's a SEP (someone else's problem).
But the codebase is now so huge, and CIG has so many employees, that nobody really cares if their changes breaks something else from another team. All that matters is the fix.
So they report to Jared (or whoever) its fixed, and a new patch is released, and now people suddenly find they can't wear trousers... ooopsie, not my problem!
. They were animated and would crawl around if set free.
