Conan is currently on quite an insane patch cycle – twice, sometimes three times a week.  Which can be seen a couple of ways – either they’re really devoted to the game and really want it to work, or the game is a broken pile of hooey that needs to fix Assassins now or player X is quitting and taking his whole guild with him.  As it was in MMO patchdom, so it ever shall be.

Some people on various boards have commented that Conan’s patch cycle, as insane as it is, is vastly superior to WoW’s current model, which is roughly ‘do a patch every 2 months, and then follow it up with a really little patch that fixes all the things we broke and can’t wait 2 months to fix’.  To which I can only counter with two quick and dirty points.

First off, Conan’s pace simply isn’t sustainable.  At some point, your programmers will demand to be let out of the dungeon,and perhaps eat something that’s not pizza, and just maybe go see their families and/or get laid.  Certainly, the weekend patches will slow first, then they’ll reduce to only one patch a week, then probably down to once or twice a month.  If they’re smart, they’ll find a good cadence and stick to it.

The second point is that there seems to be a belief that WoW should be able to deliver patches as fast as Conan — even at that slower pace — since WoW currently has a GDP that rivals that of some small African countries.  The truth is, the inverse is true.  The more money you’re making, the larger your team.  The larger your team, and the slower the patches come.

When 5 people are working on a patch, it’s comparatively easy to keep track of everything that’s changing, because the number of possible ways those things can interact with each other is comparatively small, and people in general know what other people are working on.

When 50 people are working on a patch, that’s no longer possible, and QA is constantly having to think about how different fixes overlap. The larger team can get a lot more done in terms of fixes and improvements, but the QA pipeline needs more padding to ensure that an unforeseen combination of changes doesn’t have a hidden iceberg.

There’s a lot more complexity to it under the covers, including the desire to keep the number of build environments low, to have a coherent, testable product on your Test server and to allow your community team to be able to track which fixes are in and which are not. But the general gist is: smaller teams are more agile, can be more responsive and can patch faster. Larger teams can get a lot more done, but if you get a patch a month you’re lucky.

So I do expect for Conan to settle for a patch schedule that is substantially faster than what WoW can manage.  At the same time, I also expect the degree to which the game changes in a six month period of time to be much more substantial in WoW.