Over the past few years, this game has significantly declined in quality. The auto-loot feature often fails, and every time the servers go down for maintenance, they come back with major issues. Even on high-end PCs, the game’s performance is subpar. Additionally, there seem to be more maintenance days than ever. As for the latest expansion, it’s perhaps the most underwhelming yet; it doesn’t plummet to the depths of Shadowlands, but it’s just very lackluster.
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That’s entirely in your head. Maintenance has been much worse in the past.
As far as the bugs, they can be frustrating but it’s a 20 year old game that they keep building on top of. Sometimes things happen.
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Unsure if you remember when the internet died because of a small piece of code that had been maintained by someone was deleted?
WoW has been having new features stacked on top of an old game engine for 20 years. I’m honestly surprised it’s been able to survive and evolve as much as it has.
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It’s cheaper for Blizzard/Microsoft to have fewer coders and inexperienced coders. That’s the actual answer to your question.
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Thanks for your feedback!
I believe it is because the current TWW team is a bare bones staff and most of the elite staff are working on midnight around the clock.
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This game was built on an old engine, and while it’s been updated, it’s being pushed to the limit, no?
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Barely scratching the surface. Talent and creativity can take the game to new heights even with an old engine.
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Starfield would like a word. 
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At this point, I would bet that there are parts of the code base that no current programmer has ever worked on. I know we maintain applications that are nearing a dozen years old and the original developers have long since moved on and took their secrets with them 
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Because the value a company like Blizzard gets from doing a performance patch or a bug clearing patch isn’t as much as just pushing out new content on top of broken systems does.
Blizzard has seen time and time again that the broken content patches, poor performance, lacking optimizations and delays don’t really impact their $$. Players just don’t care about it and will accept it every single time.
Billion dollar company be doing billion dollar company things.
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9 times out of 10, the servers come back and everythings fine. What happened last Tuesday doesn’t happen often.
Also, last Tuesday they were adding Plunderstorm so that had added complexity.
For the first few weeks of TWW, as Warbands were being ironed out, sure, but we haven’t had much extended maintenance in months.
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The game runs fine for me on my 6+ year old PC at 1080p. I get between 65 to 250 fps depending on where I am. The only places the FPS dips below 60 is in Dornogal when there are a ton of players there, but it is still playable above 40 fps. I understand that people who did not game back in early 2000 or before think that less than 150 fps is “poor performance” and just because it runs poorly on one computer, does not mean it is “poorly optimized”.
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Old engines still limit what features and mechanics can be implemented. Sure, you can get creative, but there are limits.
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As far as MMO’s go, the client server interpolation is pretty much the best on the market.
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Not really. Stacks can be expanded and upgraded as needed. But Aka’s image isn’t too far off. lol
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The famous example of the invisible bunny comes to mind.
If memory serves, the quest system still only works with “kill credit” and “loot credit,” so the way objectives like “enter this place” or “approach this mob” get handled is by having a bunny in the quest area target you when you get close enough and instakill itself, to give you credit for the “kill.”
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It could be a result of a combination of factors, such as company mergers, new staff, older/experienced staff exiting, documentation quality etc.
A major thing that is observable across the Tech Sector is the ability to test and go over potential issues. Even in a sandbox environment it is hard to replicate anything perfectly and as a result various Known-Knowns, Known-Unknowns can be dependent on what you are trying to do, scalability, etc.
Another major thing could be the fixes themselves. As there are constant weekly patches, it is very easy to fix something in Tech, then break something new as we have seen over and over again.
Things like implementing another game mode (Plunderstorm) on top of all the other WoW platforms is not a simple feat either.
This is just a proximation, I’m sure like everything else, there are priorities that probably contributing to issues that don’t need to.
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WoW’s engine is based off of the Warcraft 3 engine with a combination of hires, fires, and the original programmer being gone it makes sense it is going to have bugs. However I know they also don’t test very well and they have admitted they don’t test zones they just walk around to see if it “feels right,” so sadly there is that too, and I’m sure a host of other issues I am not putting my mind to
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think of wow like this: have you ever seen a burnt-out car just sitting out or was pushed into a river? windows smashed, tires gone, bumper/fender destroyed, etc? wow’s like that except rather than build a new car from scratch they take the scrapped hooptie they found and replaced everything inside/added what was missing but the problem is that theyre all subpar parts, some of them put in wrong
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Imagine fi they tested and optimized how much better the game would be.
WoW would instantly become a super power MMORPG once more!
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