First impressions matter and are long lasting. Siren Isle patch released with many bugs. Undermine released with many bugs. Now this patch has many bugs. Not getting a reward after logging in patch day from Nightfall? That is going to be remembered and taint the feature in the players mind.
As a player I do not know what the underlying issue is but can only guess. Is the developer timeline too strict? It seems set that overall as a company Blizzard wants to get this patch cadences to be consistent while also having developers work on releasing future expansions faster.
But I ask: is it worth it? If the patches leave bad first impressions then isnāt pushing patches at this schedule forced and defeat the purpose? The purpose of making players enjoy the game. This patch could, and in my opinion should, have been delayed. It feels like upper management wanting to have their cake and eat it too frankly. Content released in the patch shouldnāt be delayed more than 1-2 weeks. if horrific visions arenāt set to release until a month after the patch then just donāt release the patch for a couple of weeks and instead have bug fixes. Please, do not stick to a patch schedule for the sake of a strict schedule.
There should have been stress testing for Nightfall. Having it be open for set amount of hours at specific times to funnel players to recreate what an actual patch launch would be like. If the PTR had that I feel like at least some of the issues we are experiencing now could have been found sooner.
Feedback for patches feel like its being reacted to slowly. Undermine rep for the specific cartels was mentioned to be slow from PTR and at 11.1 launch. It got buffed by a massive 100% in the latest patch. Having to buff by 100% is missing the mark by a lot.
I worry that too many devs are being pulled and being set to work on Midnight to get it out sooner. It makes me worried for the rest of the Worldsoul saga if it is constantly going to be trying to get patches out and putting out fires that could have been avoided if just a little more time was taken. There are still current issues like the drop rate of Miscellaneous Mechanica that still have not been addressed and it feel like as a player i have to hope for wowhead to make an article to gain traction before it is looked at.
I donāt expect a patch to come out with zero bugs. I always expect some bugs, but the patches in the War Within so far have not been at the appropriate level they should have been on their launches. Please give developers a little more time. The content that there is looks good but again, first impressions matter.
26 Likes
I understand that it may be difficult for the development team to adjust the current roadmap, but I believe that, whenever possible, allowing at least one more month before releasing updates could help reduce bugs and improve the overall experience. Iām sure everyone involved in the development process knows how to reach the defined goals, but sometimes a bit of extra time can make all the difference in delivering a more polished and thoroughly tested experience for players.
2 Likes
It has been 1 year since I first made this thread.
In a recent apology post from the WoW team mentions that the team is taking lessons that this doesnāt happen again but this is not the first patch with bugs that felt unacceptable. Weāve had similar issues the past Iāve mentioned the buggy patch quality for Siren Isle and Undermine. Not to mention 11.1.5 where the Nightfall event was bugged for days on release. Which makes me wonder why this promise to do better was not around in 2024 and only now.
Again, fundamentally I think the patch features are good but the bugs ruin players first impression of them. A single negative experience at the start is going to carry a bitter taste for a long time. I like all the new content personally but bugs can be irritating. Removed 99 stacks off the Myth creature in Abyss Angling and he just disappears.
Then there is the situation with bonus rolls. The refunding of charges is nice but also the whole situation kinda sucks. Some people got their bis trinket on the first roll and now got a charge back. Some people geared out alts with using 2 charges in mythic+ and got refund to be able to gear faster. Which I think refund for the people who used it post-bug is the correct choice it just feels bad no matter what because it shouldnāt have happened to begin with.
I think on Ionās interview with TheGameBusiness and what heās said
"Midnight will be the fastest expansion weāve ever made in terms of the gap between expansions,ā he says. āWeāve had a regular eight-week content updates all along the way. No corners cut, no compromises in terms of what weāre delivering, and no sacrifices to quality.
āMost importantly, no sacrifices to team health. I can truly say, which may be a rarity in the industry thatās thankfully starting to change more, this is an expansion that was made without crunch. This was an expansion that was made without telling the team, āall right, we need to come in weekends and stay late.ā We did this smarter instead of pushing our team in unsustainable ways. At the end of the day, weāre going to keep making this game for years and decades. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And we need to treat it accordingly, both when it comes to supporting our team and our players."
From the player perspective at least I donāt think this has held true for awhile. Weāve had the 8 week content schedule for the last few years and patch quality feels lower. If it takes 9 weeks instead and the patch has less bugs I think players would be good with that.
7 Likes
Seems like thereās too many bugs that simply happen live to me and itās understandable why but I feel the PTR should be used better if not simply to have it done better internally. Extinguishing fires all the time isnāt that fun and while some stuff like addons are expected to break it would be nice to have the main contents not being ridden with bugs and classes to totally break.
And while itās great to acknowledge communication being an issue this has been said way too many times at this point to think that itās taken seriously without seeing meaningful changes or ressources allocated to it, which Iāll note that this community council had the goal to improve communication but hasnāt really fulfilled that goal or really any ambition it had at least in the public eye as far as I know.
4 Likes
The main issue with the rapid fire patch system they are trying this time around is that nothing they have introduced so far has any depth. Everything we are getting is some of the most shallow, hollow form of content they have done before in rapid succession.
It baffled me to realize that we are only -2- months into this xpack and things are going this poorly. This Trilogy was supposed to make planning and development easier, but the only thing Midnight has done is lower the overall quality of the game.
The Addon mess is probably the biggest one right now. And it didnt even really accomplish anything. People are still using addons and piecing together work arounds because no matter how many symbols or markers you put down when its a constant sea of purple on purple its IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE. BLIZZARD. How we still have this issue after this many years is beyond me.
Now we are about to roll into 12.0.7 next month, get a new single boss raid, 2 more zones, and another tier of Ritual Sitesā¦ and the only exciting part is being able to farm myth crests from ritual sites. The sites themselves are just worse delves.
We have massively traded quality in favor of quantity, and the good will that was built up in DF is going to suffer hard. Expect more Ripcords as WoW loses players again. 2 months of this has felt like almost an entire tier cycle. At best we still have 16 months of this to go.
2 Likes
The quantity versus quality is what is actually driving me away from the game. There is a bunch of extra stuff now that I have no interest in doing mostly because half the time it is bugged. They kind of defeated the purpose of the features that were included with the expansion (prey, housing) by the sheer mass of stuff that they are putting out.
The other nail in the coffin right now is what they did to the addons. They went so overboard with killing off the addons, that it makes the game unenjoyable. So between a broken game, broken addons, and broken classes that blizz views are good enough (or tuned to the absolute lowest denominator), the game just isnāt it for me anymore. Which is sad because I have been playing since 2009.
Maybe theyāll pull their heads out of their butts and actually do something about it. But at this point yāall I think we are looking at quantity versus quality now. How much can they push out to keep everyone entertained instead of just working on the broken systems that they already have.
3 Likes