10 years ago pretty much everything was different. What you did, how you did it, your life/job was not done the same then as it is now. (probably) You are using a different cell phone, TV is digital, PCs are capable of 128Gb ram, we have 6Tb HDD, 1Tb+ SSD, etc. In that time there have been many updates, even to php/MySQL which is used on this forum. The Devs a decade ago wrote the programs, or designed them, others maintained them. Almost all, if not all, are gone and have been for some time. There is a difference between a maintenance programmer and a IDK creative/design programmer. The programmers working on tHC NOW were at best in high school 10 years ago and probably have no experience with previous versions of code. College/university is a sterile environment not real world, not real users.
IMHO to fix this they are gonna have to find an old guy/gal, someone who was programming 10 years ago, to be able to convert the early reserves to new code, or at least change the band-aids. It seems to me, and I have only been playing a couple of years, that the new stuff breaks the OLD stuff. The newer stuff works OK, it's the stuff from the past with band-aid after band-aid that breaks. The ERR is a good example of changing current code without any idea how that will effect existing code or code written 10 years ago. You can't change scale and expect everything (bait barrels, xyz coordinates, etc) to remain the same. There are the things you know you don't know, but one should be aware that there are things you don't know that you don't know. You can plan for what you know you don't know, but there will always be something you don't know, you didn't know. OR, in other words, you should be prepared for a surprise every time with every change. But EW seems surprised that they get surprised. As a tech guy who has been doing this prior to Microsoft DOS V1.0, 10 years is a helluva long time in tech years. To quote Bill Gates ca 1988-90 "I do not ever foresee a need for more than 640Kb of RAM!"
Example of what you
knew then vs what you know now.
They have testing, lots of people on this forum have been Beta and/or Alpha testers but it's such a short closed window that you don't have time to test everything AND it's in a controlled environment. My suggestion would be something I've seen in other games. EW puts a test server online, copies all code & database (yes all of it) to the test server. Users apply and if accepted their character with all skills, equipment, etc is copied to the test server. ALL equipment is free or gm$ only on the test side, nothing from the test server per character is carried over to live. Every update is placed on the test server prior to being released and AFTER EW's internal testing. Limit the test server to 300-500 users or whatever is reasonable for the size of the user base. Let real paid members
play on that test server for a week or more and most of these issues would be caught before release. The test server should match the live server in ALL regards, the only exception should be the beta release/update being tested.
It's a small expenditure (one test server + bandwidth). Copying user data could/should be automated, the criteria for testers could be automated. The idea is to have users playing at the level they are used to with the equipment they are used to and anything done on the test server does not count towards anything in the live version. NDA required, separate forums limited to those users. My 0.02$ or maybe 0.10$.