More content is always a good thing right? Well, maybe not all the time.
Microsoft and Xbox purchased Blizzard as part of its Activision acquisition a few years back. Since then, World of Warcraft and Blizzard both have been operating more autonomously than they have been in the past. In a recent interview, game director Holly Longdale hailed the development speed of the latest expansion, Midnight, noting that there'd been zero crunch at the studio, with "zero compromise on quality."
World of Bugcraft, and I don't mean Silithus
My article asking Blizzard to slow down revolved primarily on the story delivery above all, which I frankly think has been quite awful in WoW: Midnight so far. The pacing, lack of depth, and respect for previous lore and character history is making the game less engaging than ever for lore fans. But most players I feel probably don't even read the quest text, which is fine. But even those players are suffering now under this new era of "rushed" patches.
More mainstream players are perhaps more than ever thinking that Blizzard should slow down on its patch cadence as well, this time because of bugs, polish problems, and a massive lapse in quality control.
World of Warcraft has been delivering a ton of content in recent years, tasking itself to an 8-week patch cadence. It's likely great for player retention on paper, but the issues this patch cycle is creating seem to now be compounding and multiplying.
Dear Blizzard - Ion, its time to reflect here... from r/wow
The above thread on Reddit and mountains of comments attached to it are only the tip of the iceberg. WoW has bugs and anomalies dating back years upon years, many of which are still not fixed. I race changed away from goblin due to a weird glitch that can occur where goblin and gnome characters are "too short" to click on the Warlock demonic gateway spell. As of Midnight's launch that still wasn't fixed. That's only a small issue in a much bigger sea of other problems on-going in WoW.
During last night's raid, our two Unholy Death Knights lost anywhere up to 20% of their usual damage output. Blizzard seemingly introduced a new bug with the class, rendering certain spells inoperable. Last week, we couldn't continue the raid because critical NPCs refused to spawn, forcing us to wait for a fix. Organizing 20 adults with IRL stuff to deal with is hard enough, and these kind of game-breaking issues put a real downer on what should be a relaxing end to the day.
I've mained Demonology warlock for the past twenty years, and I can't remember a time where there were so many weird bugs affecting gameplay. I had to switch the spec out for some dungeons due to my demon pets targeting mobs at complete random, screwing up high-end M+ dungeon runs.
I don’t criticize WoW because I hate the game and want to see it burn. I criticize WoW because I genuinely love the game and it’s sad to see the direction things are going.
World of Warcraft patches used to arrive on a 10-12 week cadence back in the day, and sometimes even longer. There has been notorious droughts for content over the years for varied reasons, which undoubtedly batter player retention. The 8-week patch cadence seems designed to prevent subscription churn. We see similar content drop cycles for Xbox Game Pass, which adds new games towards the middle and end of every month to keep people subscribed. Netflix and other similar services also tailor content drops to offset churn.
World of Warcraft is one of the only remaining successful subscription-based MMORPGs. In my opinion, it offers very good value for money overall. I've met lifelong friends through the game, as have many of you reading this, for what is effectively the price of a couple of cups of coffee every month.
I think Midnight's endgame has also been very good overall. The dungeons and raids are interesting with fun mechanics (although the void stuff everywhere is starting to get old), and there's plenty to do. The problem, more than ever, is polish, and I've argued in my WoW: Midnight review that Blizzard is spreading itself thin.
I really don't know what Blizz is doing when these patches comes out. I wish there was some sort of communication. They literally wait for us to find these bugs and then fix them and then we don't get back stuff like Bonus Rolls if we were part of the bug.Blue post goes a long…
There's mountains of feedback being ignored from World of Warcraft's public test realms and beta tests. Why have beta tests and the like if you're not going to act on the feedback offered?
The only conclusion one can surmise is that Blizzard is simply not capable of delivering on this 8-week patch cadence, and needs to slow down a bit. I think people would be willing to accept a 10-12 week patch cadence in exchange for higher-quality content drops as long as the roadmap remained transparent.
There's a ton of stuff to play. Heck, there's other Blizzard games to play. While in an off-season mood in WoW, I could drop into Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred or the latest Overwatch season. They even patched up Heroes of the Storm lately too. I don't need a drip feed of mid-tier content just to hit an 8-week cycle ... I'd rather have 10-12 weeks with more quality, more stuff. But I'm sure Blizzard has the spreadsheets and telemetry say this is best, even at the cost of polish.
Will Blizzard respond?
I've reached out to Blizzard to see if they want to comment on this, but I figure we might see some kind of communication from game directors Ion Hazzikostas or Holly Longdale up on the World of Warcraft blog before long. The backlash is growing, and major WoW YouTubers are probably editing videos to release as I publish this. It's poor timing for me too, as a Brit, considering Blizzard just increased the subscription price here by 10%.
These have all been an on-going issue now for some time. Whether it's crazy balance issues with different classes, gameplay-breaking bugs, transmog features going haywire, glitches and Lua errors with Blizzard's new addon API ... the list of problems is exhaustive, and tiring. This is before you even discuss the downfall of World of Warcraft's writing quality. Bugs are one thing, but shipping badly conceived writing due to rushing is difficult to fix after its canonized.
Every layer of World of Warcraft is suffering under this rapid update cadence the firm has set for itself. Midnight has some really strong aspects to it. Player Housing is grand and ambitious. The endgame gameplay loop is meaty and conceptually fun. Some of the side stories and characters have been engaging too. But man, there's an on-going downward trajectory with WoW lately that I'd hoped we'd put behind us. Is AI to blame? Are there mandates and targets from Microsoft on-high that Blizzard feels compelled to chase? Whatever the cause, this doesn't seem particularly sustainable.
Blizzard, please rethink how you're approaching World of Warcraft. It's getting tough out here.
All will be forgiven if you give me playable ogres though.
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