Is Blizzard so bad at hotfixing that they have to release daily hotfixes now?

[treekush]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

[willtron]

I prefer the hotfixes this way. What I don't like, is they're slowly but steadily destroying the spec I enjoy

[tehdef]

Daily hotfixes are more inline with an agile development cycle.

Sorry you're dumb though.

Infracted

[RoKPaNda]

Daily hotfixes are more inline with an agile development cycle.

Sorry you're dumb though.

I actually read this post before the OP. And I thought "Wow that was really harsh. Surely the OP was just inquisitive." - Then I read the OP, and I was wrong, and the post I quoted was pretty spot on yeah.

[Deleted]

There are only so many hours in the day and so many developers working on things. They will have a priority list that is constantly changing as well as things being added to it as they occur. They can either release daily hotfixes which increase players enjoyment on a daily basis, or they can do it all in one major patch during the downtime. Since the hotfixes do not need downtime, how on earth is it failure or poor development to get fixes to players as soon as possible?

[ohshift]

I agree.
Letting the game go unbalanced or broken for 6 months is a much better deal.

[Darsithis]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

WoW isn't failing.

Daily hotfixes is an agile development methodology. My company is an agile development company as well, operating on a behind-a-week release on weekly sprints for one of our major clients (the one I am assigned to). I release entirely new versions of our software every week, sometimes with extra "hotfixes" during the week if emergency issues come up. This is normal.

[Lucetia]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

Actually, it'd be worse if they didn't. Reason being is nothing will ever be perfect. A tweak one day may be ok, but then the next it changes things a bunch and you have to adjust something else or revert.

Think of it this way. Would you rather go major patch to major patch without hotfixes/mini-patches? No game will ever be 100% balanced at a major patch because there are so many things that go untested not by choice, but because it's hard to test every single possible scenario.

[Deleted]

Right. Daily hotfixes are so much worse than releasing Patch 6.0.6 weeks later...

[Deleted]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

Would you prefer waiting for 6.1 for these changes?

[Kuul]

After playing 2 months of Wildstar where dungeons were bugged for weeks, I definately prefer that they hotfix shit in less than day.

[TheTaurenOrc]

I am impressed with how fast their reaction time is with hotfixes compared to the past. But I have to agree there has been a lot recently. I am left wondering what the hell was the months and months and months of beta all about?

Some changes seem really mundane like the ones for Garrisons that should have been caught during beta.

[proteen]

You make it sound like releasing a game is an easy task. After the game is launched, there's a ton of iteration that needs to be done. I am extremely glad to see Blizzard addressing concerns in a timely manner and applying hotfixes as deemed necessary.

[Sansnom]

I lol'd this entire week. Do they hire their developers straight out of HS or off the streets? Why is it necessary to keep releasing daily hotfixes. That's when you know WoW is failing hard...

I don't think you work in the software development. Yes, you find it funny that have bugs in their code and have to release them regularly. If you are working in the software development, then either

You never wrote a single piece of bad code. I am amazed at your skill and maybe you should be a consultant on how not to ever write buggy code.

You are ignorant of the bugs in the your code and so never fixes them.

[Banquetto]

Some people really do love to whine, don't they? Issues malinger for a week without being fixed? "LOL takes Blizzard a week to fix a simple bug, you know WoW is failing hard". Issues get fixed daily? "LOL Blizzard hire their developers straight off the streets, WoW is failing hard".

You know you could have saved a minute of your life if you had just written a thread, subject line "I hate Blizzard", body "I hate WoW", and we would have gotten the same quantity of useful information from it.

[ihyln]

I agree.
Letting the game go unbalanced or broken for 6 months is a much better deal.

It's not like they didn't have 14 months to work on this and test or anything

[Surfd]

It's not like they didn't have 14 months to work on this and test or anything

It's not like a few thousand beta testers are actually going to find EVERY single bug in the game, especially things that might only show up when MILLIONS of people start hammering it in un expected ways. And I say a few thousand beta testers, because that is really all there are. The vast majority of the rest of the people in beta are more intersted in scoping out the upcoming changes and trying to get a leg up for when the game goes live then actually beta testing.

[Tenjen]

what the hell sort of logic is this?

no. no. no.

The only thing this is a sign of is that Blizzard developers are paying attention to the needs of the game on a daily basis and are keeping up with changes at a very fast pace. isntead of waiting 2 weeks, a month, many months or till the next major patch.

You're terrible for spitting on the great deal of daily effort and dedication they are showing to improve the game and react to the many changes needed to keep adjusting the game to mainstream usage by the WoW playerbase.

You're doing the equivalent of screaming about how a nation is collapsing because they are repairing the roads or updating infrastructure. This is truly the worst type of hate-mongering i've seen. Twisting positive dedication and efforts and conveying it as if its the worst thing ever that is a sign of the worst case scenario.

[DaveL]

Crying about hotfixes that basically fix stuff following day?
You probaply don´t remember WOTLK days when we had to wait weeks for major patches (remember 3.3>3.3.1,2 and 3).

[Kaganfindel]

Would you prefer that they just let shit stay broken for a few months, and then dumped all the fixes into the game in one massive, quarterly patch?

If so, I think I've got just the game for you, cupcake! Oh yeaaaaah!