I was watching some youtube stuff today with people discussing the patch release dates, including the idea of it being as late as August, which would be 8 months…and I started wondering why. Why is it taking so long?
Now I know the automatic response is the Covid has meant most of the employees are working from home, and that’s probably true. But why would that turn a normal release schedule so far out of whack? I have friends and family who have had to work from home, and some of them do time-intensive work. One, for example, works in the mortgage department of a large bank. Conveyancing for sale of property is extremely time-intensive, because if you screw it up, a sale will fall through and that’s not a good thing, yet she has had no more issues than if she’d been in the office. Others work in creative fields like small craft business and so on and none of them have any delays in their business.
So why would this patch be so seriously affected by people working from home? They have online live conferencing for example, which is no different from sitting around a table in a room. There is facetime and skype and zoom or whatever for live calls…hell, you could actually work live with other devs on your multiple monitors from your living room. Their faces and voices and input would be right next to you, as much as they would be in an office.
Maybe I’m missing something, and if so let me know but I can’t get a grip on why not being in the office would put the game this far behind its schedule. It just makes me wonder if there is more going on that we know about, if there are serious technical issues that have caused this delay, or problems within the company.
Thoughts? Am I ooked in the dookus and missing the obvious?
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I think it’s more than just covid.
I think part of the story is that they have a super small team that’s having trouble fixing the problems it created for no reason. I believe they thought their ideas this expansion were great, but the community response threw a wrench in it maybe, and I don’t think they know what direction to take the game in now.
I think things would be a lot better with a full team sailing this ship, including their release cycles for their new content
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They have already abandoned SL and are working on the next Expac. The skeleton crew/interns are stuck on SL. I’m from the future believe me.
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Apart from your questionable future attendance 
you may not be that far off the mark.
It’s quite possible they have wiped this year’s content as a loss and have moved a lot of their teams across to the next expansion, and that Shadowlands will become Shortchangelands with only 2 major patches and a windup for release of the next expac.
If so, I’d like a partial refund because I paid for a full expansion, not a couple of patches of substandard quality.
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What are you hiding?
Show me your T.A.R.D.I.S…
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Raid testing is all but done.
No one knows to be honest.
My educated guess is they are having a hard time balancing covenant legendaries which are introduced in patch 9.1.
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I thought I read that people hadn’t been able to test the changed classes and specs in the raid. Is that happening now?
How you get access to secure servers and software and the engine for making this stuff? They don’t just let everyone take it home. This ain’t Paint Shop Pro.
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I am sure that COVID was a contributing factor, but there is surely more than that. I think that they got a very late start due to the delayed 9.0 release, whereas typically Blizz will be already working on the X.1 content before X.0 is even released.
Back at Blizzconline, any info about 9.1 was still at a very conceptual level, and at that time there were some unofficial rumors that 9.1 could be as late as September.
When PTR was first released, it seemed premature as there was barely anything testable and we had no idea what kind of zone Korthia was supposed to be.
I logged into PTR just this week, and there was a surprising amount of placeholder content. Renown is still bugged. My character was flying—not on a mount, but “swimming” around in Shadowlands zones.
Torghast was tweaked recently, and some blessings and anima powers were still either bugged or working differently than their tooltips state.
Now as to why 9.0 got such a late start, it is possible that new devs had to be onboarded due to all the recent resignings, or the direction and very content of 9.1 had to be adjusted due to the overwhelming negative player response to 9.0.
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How do you know how Blizzard has it set up? I would assume that employees are given access to the business servers from outside the building as they would inside the building. Everything goes through the www the same way, be it inside one building or another.
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In terms of PTR length it isn’t abnormally long. They just were apparently behind and didn’t start the PTR until 4/13.
Tomorrow the PTR will be 8 weeks old and in that time they’ve tested the entire raid (some fights multiple times), zone, quests, mega dungeon, Torghast, and with the latest build the mythic+ affix.
10-11 week PTRs are typical for raid patches so 6/22 or 6/29 are still likely.
We will never now fully why, but it is what it is. Take a break or play classic.
Blizzard has a pretty long track record of slow releases.
Yes but at the end of the day most of this was worked on before the expansion was launched. So technically they have been working on 9.1 since the tail end of the beta.
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If they blame C19, then that is just an excuse at this point. Blizz is no longer a small indie company with few resources.
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Hey that’s private! But if 10.0 is what they say it is for once, I’ll be pleasantly surprised…
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Why would they bother? They didn’t care to balance the original legendaries in 9.0.2!
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We paid for 2 sets of tmogs in 389 different colors…for those willing to farm the anima ^^
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I just know they are short staffed after firing so many wow employees during BFA.
Otherwise yes the wait for the first content patch is reaching an unbearable point
I’m very sick of the meta and all the pvp carries as well
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I have no clue! Their choice for what they balance is scattershot. I guess the new build this week will tell us a lot.
Covid isn’t causing many delays anywhere else in the industry. Other studios are putting everything out right on schedule.
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