[AnotherGoodName]

That’s a very big assumption that they do code hotpatching.

It would seem far more likely they seperate the stateful (database) and stateless layers (game logic) and they just spin up a new instance of the stateless server layer behind a reverse proxy and spin down the old instance. It’s basically how all websites update without down time.

[diath]

A website that just proxies to another server does not need to do much to restore the previous state to make it look seamless to a user, the client will just perform another GET request that triggers a few SELECT queries, it's far more complex in the context of a video game.