Dishevel, on 12 February 2013 - 03:05 PM, said:
If you work at matching development and production environment it happen rarely.
Here it happens often.
Often is bad.
No matter what you do, it can happen, there is always risk in any patch or change that unforeseen things can happen, that was my point.
In real world environments, often a true match for production in all of your dev - pre test (build) - test - model test - production environments in your process takes more money than is normally available, and testing all aspects of a release 100% is not always realistic due to money involved in the number of testers project hours / server time for those tests, thus many times small changes you can only test that change and do a smoke test for basic testing then do an integrated test in the end.
I also doubt that PGI has the funding to get a full set of dev - pre test (build) - test - model test - production systems, and there are scaling issues, etc that are hard to test for under all cases without that type of set up.
In a perfect world, they would have hundreds of testing / dev servers and testers to toss at every change, however often, that costs much more money than can be supported by the product, and even with it, you will still have occasional have issues in production that you didn't foresee.
In the end, this is a game, a great game IMO, and not playing it for a couple of hours (or even days / weeks) is not big on my list of concerns in life. =)