OK, so here's what happened.


We knew we needed at least two weeks between Crucible going live and us patching in the change, so people had time to sort out their logistics.

We can't safely do the switch between ~Decembec 17th and ~January 15th due to various key people leaving the country for Christmas, and the need for a clear run-up to the patch.

We had the patch on the 14th scheduled primarily to do this switchover, as it's effectively the last possible date before Christmas to safely do this (we don't patch later in the week because it means fallout drags into the weekend, and particularly in this case a lot of people are getting on aircraft that weekend).

Our original test plan would've seen us squared away weeks ago, but a series of various unforeseen events meant our critical "upgrade test" (requires a spare "full-sized" test server) got repeatedly bumped back in the schedule.

We finally ran the test earlier this week, and the thing we were most anticipating breaking, broke. The fix is relatively straightforward, but it requires us running another upgrade test to confirm that the fix works.

WEe weren't expecting the second test to be ready until today or Monday, and in the unlikely event that that didn't go smoothly it'd leave way too little time for you all to sort your towers out. Therefore we made the decision to push the deployment of the change back.

As above, once we miss the 14th we can't safely patch for at least a month. Given that we already had a small post-Crucible tidy-up patch scheduled for the 24th, we opted to bundle the fuel switch into that patch rather than running two "serious business" patches (ie, full client/server patch) less than a fortnight apart, because it's safer and causes less overhead.


It's not the way we wanted to do it, but it's the best option we have available to us right now. We're obviously very sorry for the trouble this is causing.