More content is always a good thing, right? Well, maybe not all the time.
Microsoft and Xbox bought Blizzard as part of the Activision purchase a few years ago. Since then, World of Warcraft and Blizzard are both operating more autonomously than in the past. In a recent interview, game director Holly Longdale greeted The development speed of the latest expansion, Midnight, noted that the studio had zero crunches with “zero compromises in quality”.
The world of bugcraft, and I don’t mean Silithus
My article asking Blizzard to slow down first and foremost, it was about the delivery of the story, which I frankly think has been pretty terrible in WoW: Midnight so far.. The pacing, lack of depth, and respect for previous lore and character history make the game less appealing to lore fans than ever. But I feel most players probably don’t even read the search text, which is fine. But even those players are suffering in this new era of “rushed” patches.
More core players Blizzard this time around with bugs, polishing issues, etc. massive quality control violations.
World of Warcraft has released a ton of content in recent years, committing to an 8-week patch cadence. It’s probably great for player retention on paper, but the problems created by this patch cycle are now compounded and multiplied.
The subject above Reddit and the mountains of commentary attached to it are only the tip of the iceberg. WoW has had years of bugs and anomalies, many of which have yet to be fixed. I moved away from the goblin because of a weird glitch that could happen where goblin and gnome characters were “too short” to hit the Warlock demon gateway spell. This has not yet been fixed as of Midnight’s release. This is just one small problem that is part of the larger problems going on in WoW.
During last night’s raid, our two Death Saints took up to 20% normal damage. Blizzard apparently introduced a new bug in the class and made certain spells unworkable. We couldn’t continue raiding last week because critical NPCs refused to spawn, forcing us to wait for a fix. 20-something adults with IRL stuff is hard enough to deal with, and these kinds of game-breaking issues put a real damper on what should be a comfortable end to the day.
I’ve been playing Demonology for the past twenty years and I can’t remember a time when there were so many weird bugs affecting the game. I had to change the spec for some dungeons because my demon pets were completely randomly targeting mobs and destroying high level M+ dungeon escapes.
I’m not criticizing WoW because I hate the game and want to see it burn. I criticize WoW because I really love the game and it’s sad to see the direction things are going.
World of Warcraft patches used to arrive daily for 10-12 weeks, sometimes longer. There have been infamous droughts for content over the years for a variety of reasons, which certainly hinders player retention. The 8-week patch cadence is designed to avoid subscription congestion. We see similar periods of content drop for Xbox Game Passadds new games in the middle and end of each month to keep people subscribed. Netflix and other similar services also adapt to prevent content throttling.
World of Warcraft is one of the only successful subscription-based MMORPGs. Overall, I think it offers very good value for money. As many of you have read this, I have introduced lifelong friends through the game to just how effective the price of a few cups of coffee each month can be.
I think Midnight’s endgame was also pretty good overall. The dungeons and raids are interesting with fun mechanics (although the crap everywhere is starting to get old) and there’s a lot to do. The problem, more than ever, is polished and In my WoW: Midnight review, I argued that Blizzard was undermining itself.
I really don’t know what Blizz did when these patches came out. I wish there was some kind of communication. They literally expect us to find these mistakes and then fix them, and then we don’t get things like Bonus Rolls back if we were part of the mistake. The blue writing goes on for a long time…
World of Warcraft has a lot of feedback that is ignored in public test areas and beta tests. If you’re not going to act on the suggested feedback, why beta tests, etc. do you have
The only conclusion we can guess is that Blizzard simply isn’t capable of delivering this 8 week patch cadence and needs to slow down a bit. I think people will be willing to accept a 10-12 week patch cadence in exchange for high quality content drops as long as the roadmap is transparent.
There are a ton of things to play with. Heck, there’s another A blizzard games to play. I could fall for this even if I’m in the offseason mood in WoW Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred or the latest Overwatch season. They even made Heroes of the Storm recently. I don’t you need a drip feed with medium content just to cycle 8 weeks … I prefer 10-12 weeks with better quality, more stuff. But I’m sure Blizzard has spreadsheets and telemetry says it’s the best, even at the cost of polishing.
Will Blizzard respond?
I’ve reached out to Blizzard to see if they’d like to comment on this, but I think we’ll see some sort of communication from game directors Ion Hazzikostas or Holly Longdale on the World of Warcraft blog before too long. The backlash is growing and the big WoW YouTubers are probably editing videos to post as I post this. It’s bad timing for me as a Brit considering Blizzard has increased the subscription price by 10% here.
All of these have been an ongoing problem for some time. Whether it’s crazy balance issues with different classes, game-breaking bugs, transmog features that fail, glitches with Blizzard’s new addon API, and Lua bugs… the list of issues is exhaustive and exhausting. And that’s before even discussing it A drop in World of Warcraft’s writing quality. Mistakes are one thing, but poorly thought-out posts due to haste are hard to fix once canonized.
Every layer of World of Warcraft suffers under this rapid update cadence that the firm has set for itself. Midnight has her real strengths. The player house is grand and ambitious. The end game cycle is meaty and conceptually fun. Some of the side stories and characters have also been engaging. But man, there’s been an ongoing downward trajectory with WoW lately that I was hoping we’d put behind us. does AI to blame? Are there lofty goals and objectives from Microsoft that Blizzard feels compelled to pursue? Whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem particularly sustainable.
Blizzard, please rethink how you approach World of Warcraft. This is where it gets difficult.
All will be forgiven if you give me playable aggressives.
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