Istarian Terminology - "Deltas"

When the servers go down, there’s usually one of two reasons - one, it is Tuesday at 5am PST, meaning that it’s time for maintenance. If the servers are down for maintenance, it will usually be a period lasting two to four hours before they are rebooted for play. Maintenance is announced every week in the Facility and Maintenance forum.

The other reason is that the servers are receiving a Delta. A Delta is a database update usually filled with content and various database-related changes. This includes but is not limited to

• New or updated quests/questlines
• New or updated NPCs
• Changes to the world’s geography and world objects
• New or updated mobs or resources

Deltas, depending on size, range from taking an hour to an entire day to apply to the servers. If the servers are down for a delta, expect a long delay before they return live.

With how Istaria’s databases work, we cannot push selective parts of a Delta live without the other bits going with it. This means that if there was an issue with a quest on Live, we cannot fix it until a Delta is pushed to Blight with the fix and then Live. This proves an issue if we are in the middle of adding new content. The content cannot go Live without testing on Blight and it also cannot be pushed to Blight if it’s simply unfinished. This causes issues that may seem simple to persist for perhaps months at a time.

The only way to fix an issue with data in the database, but not with a Delta, is through a hotfix. A hotfix is when someone manually checks if an update can be applied and manually applies the change. Normally this is only done if the issue is extreme enough, since there can be other issues caused by the hotfix, and can cause problems with a future delta applying. More minor issues, like typos or unclear directions, are left to wait until the Delta goes through the usual process.