I would chalk all of the undocumented changes up to the larger corporate structure in place at Blizzard and an always hurried development cycle that likely has changes being made right up until the patch is pushed. We have Community Managers - Lore, Ythisens, Bornakk and the like, who, I believe, want to communicate and would prefer to be out in front of everything with Blizzard’s message for the change. And then you’ve got development teams working on specific detailed portions of the game - hundreds of people across many teams making changes to the game - again - likely right up until the patch is pushed. Undocumented changes are typically those that were never even tested on the PTR, perhaps intentionally, perhaps because there wasn’t enough time (something identified and implemented at the very last minute before the patch), or perhaps because the change was based on a date in game that has not occurred yet on the PTR (e.g. the Artifact Knowledge (or whatever its called this expansion) change). The collective development team is so large, the changes for each patch are so many and the implementation of some things can be so late in the cycle, that I imagine there is always going to be a list of undocumented changes.
However, that being said, there should be some system of identifying the changes the developers want to make to the game and tracking if / when they made it into the patch or if there is still a potential for them to make it into the patch as we close in on the patch. This should be accessible to the Community Managers for the Patch Notes. This is simple Project Management 101. There really is no excuse for these large undocumented changes making it into the game without at least a Patch Note warning. Also, every change is a large change to someone.
Unfortunately, when large undocumented changes make it into the game, it only reinforces the idea that Blizzard is not communicating and are intentionally surprising us with these undocumented changes. Until large undocumented changes no longer make it into the game, we will be screaming for better communication from Blizzard.
It is quite honestly stupefying why Blizzard continually chooses to shoot themselves in the foot. Why would you stop AK and prevent the deletion of keys. It serves absolutely no purpose other than to piss people off.
It only serves to inconveniences players and provide ammo for players to shoot them with.
I understand that not everything can be documented, but when so many dungeons are changed that I need a list from /r/competitivewow to itemize them all, something is wrong.
This is, I believe, part of the basis of the complaint. Small undocumented changes happen and are expected. Larger ones to Dungeons, have in the past, been documented.
It feels as though there was a Communications breakdown.
The strange thing to me is I recall patch notes back in the day being overly comprehensive. Reports on bugfixes for bugs nobody had ever heard of, but now, big changes like removal of portals goes unheard of until people log in. Id rather have too much information than not enough.
We call this the sh… crap sandwich you just posted.
I’ll summarize:
Good stuff on the top.
The bad thing in the middle.
Semi-good stuff on the bottom.
(I had a snarky corporate feedback 101 comment that I’ve left out, fill in with imagination and a hint of snarky)
Now, I totally appreciate giving Blizzard a bone on this one, I do… but they’ve been at this game for awhile now. You are correct that large undocumented changes should not ever reach the hands of the players.
And if it comes down to it… I would happily write a perforce plugin for you guys (Blizzard) that rejects commits without a properly formatted change description that could be automagically fed to your release notes process. Seriously. It’s ridiculous that you don’t have this and use it. Assuming of course you’re like every other game shop out there and are madly in love with p4. If you’re using git I’d love to know.
I definitely agree, this patch seems to hold the record for undocumented changes with no discussion with the community. I don’t know if this is deliberate as the way forward for minimizing relations with the player base or simply something they didn’t properly consider in trying to get 8.1 out the door.
It’s doubtful the communication is going to change any time soon. In my little opinion, the communication took a huge nosedive with the Warlords of Draenor beta and has since gotten worse. World of Warcraft really needs someone in charges that acts like they care more about the game, along with developers who care as much as the older ones. The insane number of bugs that made it live in Battle for Azeroth, even after being mass reported in beta, is very telling of the quality Blizzard puts into this game now.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…maybe it is a duck.
Blizzard doesn’t care about better communication with the playerbase. Whenever a staff says that it is just an attempt to placate anger and never has any significant follow through. Rather than improving relations I’d say the general attitude from Blizzard towards their playerbase has devolved over the years from positive to indifference and now is in the “disdain” category.
My biggest concern is lack of external/public documentation usually has a correlation with lack of internal/private documentation (not necessarily 1:1, but still). This is a concern because if devs are making changes, adding stuff, removing stuff and doing a poor job of or not at all documenting them internally… that will lead to more bugs down the road, less progression on features, etc. As someone who works at a vendor who works with a ton of devs from lots of companies, I’ve seen this time and time again
![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")