Although I may have one point agreed with this, I don’t anymore. In work in effects and we were forced to work from home since the beginning of this. We all made it work and we’re even busier than ever. Working from home, not a factor.
COVID denier in this context is not ‘Oh I don’t believe in COVID or the vaccine’. In this context it is “I don’t believe Blizzard is still dealing with delays due to COVID.”
And yes, patches face delays just like full game releases. Picture this as an example. You work in a post office sorting warehouse. You’re used to getting a certain amount of packages each day, you sort through them, but the real spike is during Christmas, which is when a ton of people start to send packages through the mail.
Suddenly, due to COVID, there is a serious spike in packages, because lockdowns prevent people from shopping and going to their friends to give gifts, so now everyone and their mother is mailing items. The packages start to pile up, and I mean excessively. Something like this:
Once shopping and lockdowns lift, you can’t just ‘skip’ to the front of the queue. No, you have to work through the backlog. Which creates more delays, because while the packages that are coming in have slowed, they haven’t stopped. It creates a cascading delay, where because one thing is delayed, another thing gets delayed, and because that other thing is delayed, something else gets delayed, etc.
Blizzard will not be up to speed and producing content the way we expect until they can work through the backlog of all the things they had to delay because of COVID. Eventually they’ll get there. We’ve already seen increases in development, with 9.1.5 taking way less time to develop compared to 9.1 and 9.2 slated for release before March 2022 (they’d have to release that patch before the Sylvanas book to avoid spoilers, and that’s been delayed to March).
But they’re still delayed, and that’s why we’re in this position.
Sorry, this isn’t a valid factor right now. I know my software company is able to hit release deadlines.
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Is there some reason you deleted your original post that I replied to and then reposted the exact same post again further down?
so they should be in lockdown, working hard from home like the rest of us. its not an excuse anymore, weve had covid for 2 years now. plenty of time to have adjusted.
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Let’s go Brandon
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I live in the Bay Area, and besides the first 3 months, my business has has been busier than ever since the start of covid. While our governor has done everything possible to shut down the state (while being a hypocrite and not following any of his own mandates) covid hasn’t been an issue for over a year now, unless you consider having to wear a mask in doors at the grocery store “getting hit hard”.
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Yet other companies (including Activision) were able to release games. I know people who work in the gaming industry and the companies set them up remotely and for some reason, they’ve not had any issues doing their jobs. It is called adapting and getting the job done.
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COVID is barely more dangerous then the flu, and that’s almost exclusively with old people and the already extremely sick.
Cali over reacted, screwed its populace over, tanked its economy, and is now being used as a scapegoat to hide the devs incompetence.
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Took you 80 posts to show up 
Just because your business managed, doesn’t mean every business managed. I mean jeez people, can we understand the basic concept that businesses, like people, aren’t all copy-pasted clones of each other and will handle situations differently?
Your business is not Blizzard Entertainment. Your business isn’t going to deal with the same complications as Blizzard Entertainment. Stop making the argument that because your business is fine, theirs must be too.
That’s like telling someone who complains about getting hit by a natural disaster that because your house is fine, theirs must be as well, so their complaints are BS.
Blizzard is fortunate to be a tech company. Many businesses who have physical storefronts, warehouses, and factories have had to deal with much more difficulty. Still, they continue to run their operations day in and day out. Blizzard needs to suck it up and get back to work. No more excuses.
The Shadowlands is crap. There’s very little worthy of this company’s name. The new devs need to rise to the occasion. They are second rate and entitled. If they want rosy reviews and pleasant comments, they need to create something worthy of it.
Things were already behind schedule before covid hit.
8.3 was a rushed mess and there was a long wait for 9.0, which was also delayed. And that all happened before covid.
I suspect what happened was the chickens finally came home to roost for the industry’s management by crisis tactics that cause crunch development. It also looks like they were in the process of cost cutting so the team was lean and dealing with a lot of turnover begin with.
Then a couple years ago the sexual harassment investigations hits, and I’m sure some of them were fairly bad situations. So you end up with a perfect storm of union and woke takeover sentiment that leaves them in position where they can’t manage by crisis any more while the meritocracy is getting plowed under by the new oppression caste system that rewards removing dad jokes more than making a fun game.
So they’re probably at about the quarter of the staff they need to get good content patches out in 4-6 month time frames without using crunch and a staff that’s more interested in pushing ideology than making games.
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I"d bet if I was over your shoulder, talking…you’d get less work done lol
Hell when I deal with my sql peeps as we play your server is broke/no its your sql is off I don’t even call them.
I send an email with highlights showing where the sql went awry.
Usually a fat finger on a data reference. It happens. Also best seein email then on the phone. especially if they like to use common names and only the last _someWordinCamelcase is different.
Their business would’ve been fine too, if they weren’t busy sexually harassing women employees and getting drunk on the job…but yea let’s blame covid.
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Why are you defending a billion dollar company that could easily turn certain events on. Like say Mage tower. It will be in the game early November, but won’t be available until early December. Just a small delay they forgot to mention? Didn’t want to lose those MAUs so they drummed up some big hype around bringing back something that was popular years ago and still couldn’t deliver.
Fair. Scummy way to keep people subbed for a few extra months that actually want to do mage tower content, but probably takes a bit more effort than just tweaking a few numbers.
How about all the small QoL things coming in 9.1.5? Many of which are literally number tweaks. That really isn’t all that hard you can look at any private server that is literally using the wow skeleton code right now. How come those small fan teams can provide more content than the official developers? It is embarrassingly pathetic.
Instead they waste time and our money doing an aggressive scrub of their game of anything “edgy” in a game about fantasy war.
Do you never ask yourself what they are doing during a 5 day work week. What are these employees doing? They aren’t cleaning up bots for sure I can tell you that much. Billions of dollars larger team and being out done by fan projects. Like I can’t even imagine the logical hoops you go through to rationalize a defense for how management and development has been thus far.
You are a troll or just not very bright. Pick one.
Have you considered the reason why they’re doing that is to give people time to level new characters so they can jump into the MT for a chance at getting those appearances? I for example, don’t have a druid at max level. My druid is level 17. Those 2 weeks would give me plenty of time to level my druid (especially with the changes to threads of fate that are in 9.1.5), gear him up with some fairly basic Korthia gear. Then I can jump into the MT and take a shot at getting my Fel Werebear.
But no, let’s just create conspiracy theories about how it’s ‘for the MAUs’ or the other popular BS excuse, it’s to compete with FFXIV.
If they could have been hotfixed in, they would have been. Blizzard already hotfixed in a change to Conduit Energy, replenishing 10 every day instead of just 1 a day, because they could not remove conduit energy from the game in a hotfix.
How about I pick neither because you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Oh and thanks for the advice you’ve given out for free with your character name. I’ll follow that advice right now.
I’m sorry that you literally have no real argument. You can be freely ignored. Thinking 9.1.5 can compete with a full expansion of a game. I am almost in tears you are trying so hard to troll people.
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9.1.5 from the looks of it, is a series of QOL improvement, but all half-measures to what players complained about on release. I don’t see any forward thinking here, nothing of substance. At this point, I’d be happy with a roadmap of things to come.
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I’d love a roadmap, but my point is that this half patch isn’t going to compete with FF’s new expansion like the person I was replying to was implying.
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