WoW devs apolgies for yet another badly launched patch

I’ve seen it many times over the last few expansions. Blizzard will launch a patch, and something will be colossally broken with it. Whether that’s the bugs of failing to start the Legion Remix stuff, or some other laggy or otherwise busted launch day content for its recent expansions. But apparently, this recent Midnight patch was so bad that they had to apologize for it.

Blizzard issues apology for broken Midnight patch launch

WoW devs posted onto social media in the early hours of the UK morning to say how sorry they are about the patch. Like a sketch from South Park’s BP episode (at least that’s how I envision it).

The apology came with a hotfix patch note addressing a ton of bugs about the game. Many are class related, which, if you’re curious, you can read all the major fixes they did since the patch went live. There’s also countless bugs with the new prop hunt game mode, with hunters becoming unmerciful destroyers of props through a class interaction completely breaking the mode via its hunter tracking niche. Then a bunch of other silly things on top of it.

Players noticed the quality issues during PTR testing

Over the last few days, we’ve seen many Reddit threads pop up talking about quality. There was even this one long post from a warlock player who reported countless bugs for his class during PTR testing. Only for him to find none got fixed come launch, and his class was unsurprisingly broke on patch day.

Blizzard says it is learning lessons from its launch day experience and how bad it was. So chances are they want to do something about it. But it’s kinda become a common occurrence for many players at this point.

I remember watching a Bellular video a year ago now and it covered how bad the previous expansion’s .5 patches were.

Seems like it’s the same thing again for Blizzard.

Perhaps the expansion comes down to its quality being a bit of a mess with the abundance of content it’s making. Throw in its strong content cadence, and players are getting a lot of things relatively fast. Add on top that Midnight seems to be a strong pivot with Metzen joining, and frankly, it’s easy to imagine why the live WoW team could be struggling to deliver quality patches, given all the things going on.

The answer simply is to slow it down and spend more time making deliverable content that works. No need to make these .5 patches drop as close to the main season patches, given that many players are still progressing Keys, PvP season, and the two raids themselves in Season 1.

Also, it’s best not to drop broken content, then raise sub prices for the UK and other LATAM nations while this is the patch that you’re currently dealing with. It adds some extra sting to the wounds.