The EVE Online Software group has pinned the blame for its Windows-breaking patch on a lack of "enough time to test the graphics content upgrade thoroughly."
Under certain conditions, it seems that the original patch caused users' boot.ini file -- a file used by Windows during startup -- to vanish.
According to Dr. Erlendur S. Thorsteinsson, head of the group, after the issue was discovered,* E**VE's* "developers were called back to work in the middle of the night to investigate and fix it. Since then we have been working hard around the clock helping our customers that were affected by this problem, quickly establishing phone support and even making arrangements for external support technicians, such as Geek
Squad, to assist our customers when necessary."
So, let's recap: EVE developer CCP Games creates a patch they don't fully test, and releases it to the public. The public unknowingly installs the patch, and many computers are broken as a result. CCP
makes up for this by sending Best Buy's most highly trained teenagers to people's homes to fix the issue, presumably at great cost to themselves.
It seems this should be a lesson to developers, publishers and everyone in the industry that creating impossible deadlines has a tendency to be more expensive in the long run.
About the boot.ini issue [EVE Insider Dev Blog]
