Doing this doubles costs and certification time for the console patches and it’s very likely blizzard isn’t willing to spend more money and run through the process twice instead of mushing them together to save cycle time and console certification of their patches?
If they owned the consoles it’d be different, but this is basically through 3 other large companies software distribution systems who will NOT just passthrough downloads to their users machines. It needs to run through their verification process first and that’s also probably not free.
Also if you’re thinking of releasing all the data at once they also likely have concerns about datamining. While there are a lot of people who don’t care about how “surprising” the skins are, or other leaks… Blizzard seems to care a lot and does their damndest not to have information released early.
Why would that be the case? they won’t be releasing 2 different patches, just scheduling the event to activate on december 10th just like they do all the time with Overwatch league special skins. They just suddently drop on the menu screen without any patch or anything and then you can buy them.
It’s always THREE weeks wait time for a PTR patch to go live. This isn’t anything new. Meanwhile, HotS brings a PTR patch to live always in a week and often has a lot of changes in the live version.
For the balance changes no, not unless they involve changes to the animations and effects or add a new ability or something. Assuming they have those values only calculated server side or could patch a single client side ruleset file or something which who knows their exact implementation of their net code and such.
But remember this patch also contains workshop updates, the “while you wait” feature, and multiple bug fixes too some of which do impact balance slightly like the Roadhog fix. Those definitely require client side code changes.
I don’t blame Blizzard for not releasing last week during Thanksgiving. But it would have been nice if they released this week and just extended the winter wonderland event. Now, if they don’t release next week then we riot.
If the leak is true… they are probably wondering if the changes are reasonable to also end up going live for the eSports scene (e.g. OWL). I imagine that has much more consideration than what the community thinks or the chaos the changes may or may not generally cause on the live servers.
I AM SO FREAKIN MAD!!!
As an hitscan main that swap to PC right in the double shiedl meta…
IM ONLY GONNA BE PLAYIN ON THE PTR LIKE WHAT THE HECK! IT AINT HARD AT LEAST DROP THE WHILE YOU WAIT ALREADY, CANT CLIMB QUEUING FOR DPS AND GETTING 2-3 GAMES A [Removed] HOUR!