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 doesn’t happen again but this is not the first patch with bugs that felt unacceptable. We’ve had similar issues the past I’ve 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 shouldn’t have happened to begin with.
I think on Ion’s interview with TheGameBusiness and what he’s said
"Midnight will be the fastest expansion we’ve ever made in terms of the gap between expansions,” he says. “We’ve had a regular eight-week content updates all along the way. No corners cut, no compromises in terms of what we’re delivering, and no sacrifices to quality.
“Most importantly, no sacrifices to team health. I can truly say, which may be a rarity in the industry that’s 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, ‘all right, we need to come in weekends and stay late.’ We did this smarter instead of pushing our team in unsustainable ways. At the end of the day, we’re 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 don’t think this has held true for awhile. We’ve 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.