Why are there so many errors in the new quest text?

Community General Discussion
81

I think the point is that those errors should not have been there in the first place. Every place I’ve worked, there was an expectation for good writing skills. People whose job it is to write text should be expected to excel at writing.

4 Likes
82

People are complaining about bugs in other areas non stop.

And development issues have to be QA’ed as well.

Typically, larger companies don’t keep on a large year round QA staff. I expect Blizzard does what a lot of other companies do. A smaller core, but large “contract” pool of QA workers that are seasonal based on release timeframes.

83

While I do agree that these typos are pretty pathetic for a company like Blizzard and must be horribly embarrassing for the game director I am almost certain players didn’t leave this expansion, or the game in general, in droves due to the story. They left because the game isn’t fun.

  • Make a fun, engaging, and rewarding game and players will hang out and play the game.
  • Make a piss poor game and players will leave the game and find something better to do with their time.
4 Likes
84

That’s why I said MOST and MAJOR.

And the context of my response was to refute that QA is wasted on proofreading because there are other major issues…but the bugs in the game are MOSTLY minor and aren’t making people quit (which would be a major issue imo - and those are gameplay/development issues and story issues).

85

tbh, if you’d agree with him he’d backtrack and argue against his own points.

2 Likes
86

Lol theres one where the gnome is pulling on something like a gem saying “ugh! Come lose”

Instead of “come loose”.

Blizz hiring 3rd world country programmers now.

87

seeing it in that form makes it look a bit worse than the block of text which i copied from wowhead :stuck_out_tongue:

88

I remember when you were able to purchase spellcheck at neutral rep with Microsoft Office. Have times changed so much?

1 Like
89

This, honest to goodness, made me cringe. That is just plain awful. And a shame. I read all of the quest text. I guess I don’t have much to look forward to reading when I start the 8.2 quest line.

That quest text deserves an F- because it is that bad.

3 Likes
90

I’ve graded worse.

91

It is, in fact, riddled with errors:

  1. citizen’s – should not have an apostrophe. It’s a plural, not a possessive.
  2. comma splice at “Rustbolt, it’s”. These are independent clauses, and should be separated by a period.
  3. Raven’s – should not have an apostrophe. It’s a plural, not a possessive.
  4. Raven’s (sic) should not be capitalized. It’s not a proper noun.
  5. “We blast” should be “We’ll blast”. Wrong tense; it’s using the simple present (an action taking place now) instead of simple future (an action that will take place).
  6. raven should be “ravens”.
  7. Raven’s – again with the apostrophe.
  8. Raven’s – again with the capitalization.

Nitpicking a little – “Conspiracy” of Ravens is really archaic. Given WoW’s general style of prose, and the style used in the rest of the quest text, it really should just be “flock”.

Copy-edited text:

A flock of ravens is preying on citizens of Rustbolt. It’s most unacceptable! Prince Erazmin has asked me to rescue as many citizens as I can, but I could use your help. I’ve tracked the ravens to this hill. We’ll blast the ravens out of the sky, and you rescue the Mechagnomes. Use my marker gun, if you need help bringing one of the ravens down.

2 Likes
92

Anyone who makes any comment on Ion’s “perfect” vision gets fired, even if that means spelling mistakes and things that should be fixed. Narcissists like him go full rage mode when you try and correct them.

93

not really… if “we blast” refers to “us blasting”, it kind of works.
it sounds… wonky, but surely by the language skills of today, should be acceptable :stuck_out_tongue:

and as was explained earlier, this is how blizzard has managed their plurals since forever… the inconsistency, is that this block of text has proved that their age old excuse of some sort of programming “feature” which causes this to happen, is simply untrue :smirk:

94

Blizz can hire me for minimum wage to fix these, and they can hold my wow account as collateral in case I hide a dirty joke somewhere to compensate for the distance from California

95

You don’t even need that, just use Google Docs! That’s why this is so pathetic.

2 Likes
96

Why would this be a waste of resources? You do realize that proofreaders are cheaper than programmers, right? It just looks so… unprofessional.

4 Likes
97

What is more unprofessional.

A game with a few minor text issues that effect nearly no one. And has no gameplay effect.

Or a game with actually issues that need to be fixed?

Resources aren’t infinite. You have to pick where to divide your budget. Ultimately using “Raven’s” instead of “ravens”, while still needing to be fixed…is an extremely unimportant issue in the grand scheme of things.

Its not like this effects every other sentence. People have to actively search for a list of these things, because they are actually pretty rare in comparison to the total amount of text in game.

98

Seeing some of the minor mistakes makes me think that some of these quest dialogue were in fact written on phones with overactive autocorrect.

That is to say, they feel dialed in.

2 Likes
99

Dev contractor that isn’t getting paid enough to care perhaps.

100

Not that I’m defending them (I can’t, since I’m an english major and typos really grind my gears) but I’d imagine anyone involved in writing fantasy fiction probably gives up on spellcheck after a while. Azeroth, worgen, draenei, Zandalar? All words that would constantly show up with little red squiggles.

Heck, it’s even doing it on this post’s draft.