I have to add my voice to this, as well, and I am often a Blizzard apologist (mostly in support of the devs who work so hard on this game).
I’ve been playing the patch, and I’ve seen the issues (particularly around the anniversary event). I’ve been watching videos from knowledgeable community members such as Omegal (author of DBM) and other streamers. I agree with what is generally being said:
The quality assurance state of the game right now is terrible, and possibly in one of the worst conditions I’ve ever seen it.
The management at Blizzard is pushing the content out faster than the devs can properly build and have it tested with the resources they have. This comes from people who know devs there, not just armchair development and Internet theories.
All of these promises for more content faster do no good if the content is of poor quality, which is what is happening.
Their ideas are good. I think the direction of WoW from a design perspective is better than it’s been in years. I stand by that. It’s not perfect and they still have much to improve upon, but it’s solid.
However, the rushed content is causing strain on the developers and literally destabilizing the game (and I do mean that literally, as it’s crashing more than I’ve ever seen WoW crash).
This situation needs addressed. It’s damaging our trust in the long-term viability of the game when content is continually released in a buggy, unstable, and generally unreliable state. At the same time, it’s causing developer burnout and turnover, which then makes the problem worse. This leads to a downward spiral of content quality over time until the codebase becomes nearly unfixable garbage. (I don’t know where they are at along this spiral, and I won’t pretend to, but I hope it’s still in a state that can be fixed.)
I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for events to work, and for bugs to be addressed reasonably quickly. I’m asking for appropriate levels of tuning and testing before the content goes live.
This isn’t up to the PTR players to figure it out. It’s not up to paying customers to do the job of QA for Blizzard. It’s public acceptance testing, not alpha or beta testing.
Now, folks at Blizzard obviously know this is a problem. However, we as customers need to shine a light on it and make it as public as possible. The only way that the business case will be made to improve things is for the PR situation about poor quality to outweigh the push for faster content.