Well, most of that seemed to be the new shard tech they added, which ofc they spent 0 time load testing before putting it live. And then a lot of people returned to the game and just compounded it.
IMHO this time they tried to learn from their mistakes last time. We got the patch 6 weeks ahead of release, which is actually unprecedented I think - it's usually 4 weeks iirc. On top of that, they basically disabled every new feature except wardrobe and class changes, and gave themselves two weeks to address issues before proceeding with any of the in-game events. (I don't count the doomsayers as an event really, it's just getting a gray item from an NPC.)
I think the only major mistake they made this time was overestimating how many people should concurrently be in Stormwind. Clearly they wanted to beef up the #s there so when the invasion stuff starts, you don't have 1 guy on a lonely server fighting by himself. But that first few days, there were waaaaay too many people in SW. It's back to a manageable quantity of concurrent players per Stormwind "shard" now, and they segregated the RP people so they would stop wailing.
There are certainly a number of smaller bugs and issues, but none of them are totally crashing the game or making it completely unplayable for the majority of players (again, except for the excessive Stormwind lag the first few days last week).
I think the worst things they intentionally changed, by far, were: 1) the sheer volume of UI changes seem to have a lot of addon developers in a tailspin, with more than a few having to rewrite addons *from scratch*; and 2) there is something really wrong with the video. Like, I'm cool with the camera distance change, but there's something making my eyes hurt and making me nauseous, and things in many areas simply don't look right.
#1 is super annoying because let's face it, Blizzard abdicated good UI design years ago in favor of "free labor" from the playerbase to make large parts of the game more accessible. I craft quite a bit and I really, really miss Skillet, for example.
#2 is also super annoying for the percentage of the playerbase that has balance or vision issues triggered by whateverthefucktheydid, which they can't even really articulate. I frankly think they changed so much with the graphics engine that they themselves don't know what to do to address it, because they certainly aren't offering suggestions to players on things to try.
Yep I've posted there.
I think what makes me most frustrated about it is that I can't even find a summary list of what they changed. They mentioned various things during talks and whatnot, but there's no "patch notes" type list with enough detail in it to make heads or tails of... basically anything.
Their stance, as stated on the forums, is that they are "listening" to people. I take that to mean that they didn't keep good records of what they changed. This can happen in development - you get going and check in the code and it works, so you don't document it well (or document it at all, in some cases). And you continue on in this way for one or two years leading up to a major release, which then goes live, and suddenly a huge number of your customers are literally puking their guts up and you have NO IDEA what might be doing it.
So instead of them saying "here's what we changed, go try this list of adjustments/reversions/whatever", they are waiting for players to figure it out themselves. Which is kind of hateful. I mean anyone who pays attention to my posts knows I like Blizzard and I love their games and I don't hate on them much, but in this case, they are being wankers.
Give the hyperbole a rest. Game development is an area that revolves around providing a seamless, highly polished experience, and at a code level that usually involves a huge number of edge cases and a lot of time and lines of code written just to make things "feel" right. So it's usually not at all realistic to expect a developer, especially in a part of the game like camera interaction, to just provide some kind of simple list of every aspect of how everything fits together. Doing so would involve a large amount of technical detail and background explanation that wouldn't make sense to the vast majority of users.
I imagine that you could deduce this if you even read their post on the sorts of factors that could be playing into these problems.
Do we know the exact release date yet for Legion? I mean, we know it is 30th of August, but what time on that day per timezone?
midnight pst
Originally Posted by Bigbazz