Yes, tuning is currently a mess.
Yes, there are a lot of bugs and issues.
Yes, there is a lot of maintenance.
They made fundamental changes to the way the game behaves. For some of the changes, they had to change how the game was built or intended to work. It is a 20 year old game with years and years of content changes. This was bound to happen.
All things considered, I dont think it is even that bad. There are other games to play and things to do, if this game isnt in a great state. They will work on changes and tuning, but I dont see everything being shiny and perfect by expansion launch. It will be buggy. The tuning will be off. And I will still play if I enjoy it. If I dont, I will play something else.
If this mess is “bound to happen” they might as well just stop doing Beta testing and the PTR…obviously neither of them are an effective way for Blizz to make sure they release a functional product
If it was just tuning, that would be one thing. But, right now, we have multiple systems broken and disabled which is unacceptable
I want to say that just kinda happens to anything when they release it to production, where I work we just switched to a new system, our testing environment for it worked fine, but on launch there were many issues, most of which weren’t existent in the test environment and some were just “how did anyone find that” found out by one of many people suddenly using it.
As Tora said. The testing environment is not the same as the live environment. They are basically trying to change the tires on the car while its moving. And you can play the game, so it is functional. Not everything is working. But, for all intents and purposes the servers are up and you can play on them. So it is functional. Specific systems are not functional.
And again. If this is unacceptable to you, I suggest you demonstrate that by playing something else, until the game is in an acceptable state for you. Nothing wrong with doing that.
Do both help address some issues. But they are different than live servers. There are unexpected interactions. Things happen. WoW has been, by and large pretty good about this. But, historically it is one of the largest issues with MMO’s and a contributing factor in why making good ones is such a challenge.
I am not saying Blizzard should not be criticized for the state of the game on Live and Beta. I feel we are a little too close to the launch date, to be where we are at. But, if I am having fun playing then I will play. If not, I will do something else.