Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Cosmic Janitor]

What happened to artefact transmog btw? Did that break as well and got removed?

[scwasp]

Wasn't there supposed to be a quest available once the pre patch went live?

[Cosmic Janitor]

Wasn't there supposed to be a quest available once the pre patch went live?

Nah, the actual content starts next week. this week is just to allow people to come to terms with the state of classes and beta test the changes the patch has on content.

[scwasp]

Nah, the actual content starts next week. this week is just to allow people to come to terms with the state of classes and beta test the changes the patch has on content.

Aha I see, thanks for the answer

[tristannarutofan]

Haha, they no longer even let you look at the magetower skins you haven't gotten in your order hall.. man blizzard is as petty as their players .
Also funky that I had to login with every character to get the honor counted.. not to mention that the system is still dumb, yay for 70 levels of no rewards, lazy bunch.

Why would u want to look at simething youll never have? Sounds like u are looking for an excuse to get offended

[Katchii]

Every time you claim you have to choose like that, it shows that you have no quality, else you'd choose both. And your promise to deliver quality later won't be fulfilled. Seriously, we are not in kindergarden. The moment someone starts talking like you above, it's readily apparent that that's just empty talks, they have them because they cannot deliver neither now nor later.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's called prioritization and resource management. Businesses don't have infinite resources, time, or money so they have to make decisions on what makes the most sense to work on and what work will have the most impact and Blizzard is no exception.

They have decided that this month of play time is irrelevant from a progression stand point, and therefore balancing doesn't matter. You don't agree with that decision, that's fine, but saying it has anything to do with the quality of the game is ridiculous.

[rda]

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's called prioritization and resource management. Businesses don't have infinite resources, time, or money so they have to make decisions on what makes the most sense to work on and what work will have the most impact and Blizzard is no exception.

They have decided that this month of play time is irrelevant from a progression stand point, and therefore balancing doesn't matter. You don't agree with that decision, that's fine, but saying it has anything to do with the quality of the game is ridiculous.

Spare me, please. I know what I am talking about here, I am just shortening things in order not to write a page-long essay. You are right that resources aren't infinite, and yes, of course, there are priorities, but we are not talking about something abstract, we are talking about a specific thing: balancing specs, and this area has been changing.

When it is said that whenever they release a pre-patch for a new expansion, the specs are balanced for the new max-level, what is exactly meant by that? It is meant that the numeric coefficients on spells are computed according to average expected stats and spell structure at the new max-level, not the old max-level. In prior times old max-level and new max-level were wildly different because characters were getting new spells / spell modifiers. This changed, we are now getting nothing. There are a few other factors involved, most of them changed as well, in the same direction. So while, yes, it is still true that balancing for the old max-level is different than balancing for the new max-level, the difference has been decreasing heavily and the additional effort involved in providing some tuning for the old max-level in addition to the supposedly thorough completed tuning for the new max-level has been disappearing. Yet what we see on the sheet is one completely broken spec (how did this get through tuning for any level? huh?) and the rest of the sheet being 2x in spread from high to low (way too big accounting for all possible error margins).

Here's the reality: they did not do anything except the basic number tuning. They kept talking about that number tuning and were saying that "this will happen on the PTR, that's what PTR is for" and then it basically didn't happen, they did a shoddy job and completed it in what seems like 20 minutes.

Now, I am not saying that lack of balance for the old max-level is so damn important or unusual. We always had this problem yes, and many other things are more important, yes. Agree. I am saying two things. First, that this was always Blizzard producing bad quality while telling stupid stories about resource management (which nobody should care about, but the fanboys care). And second, that this is somehow even worse in BFA than it was before because BFA stopped adding abilities during leveling yet their supposedly completed tuning for the new max-level produced such a stupid picture for the old max-level despite the specs being the same.

/Damn, ended up writing a page-long essay.

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Anyway, sum total of the launch day in the US:

It didn't even get to cries about changes in specs, because they managed to screw up the launch and tons of people couldn't even log in for a long time.

The screw up is seemingly in some of the new code that they added. They disabled Communities and a server dev tweeted about memory corruption. Bad quality.

I also love some of the errata in the blue on the first page:

"Opening the Character Pane after equipping a newly acquired item on a character may result in a crash." -- cool. How did this get through testing again given that opening the character pane after equipping an item happens all the time? Bad quality.

"Looting the corpse after a boss encounter while in a group may produce an assertion." -- great. For those of you who aren't big on dev lingo, "assertion" means "we'll throw up a message that something is wrong, and while you can click Continue, you can crash later on and you can lose your data, etc, and we will not be able to help you". For all intents and purposes it is a crash by another name. So how did this get through testing? Did nobody loot bosses? Bad quality.

There are some other gems, but yeah, BFA pre-patch delivers in ways I didn't even expect. I thought it'd be bad because their changes were bad, but it didn't even come to that, it doesn't even work yet.

[rcshaggy]

Nah, the actual content starts next week. this week is just to allow people to come to terms with the state of classes and beta test the changes the patch has on content.

So no point then to play WoW, and still gonna wait until August...

[Raetary]

apparently, my holy artifacts 910/915 relics have ,after the squish, a lower item lvl then my 890/900 shadow relics.

[Marlamin]

I for once am not going to argue with rda because I agree that testing of this pre-patch was hella rushed and I was expecting issues like this. I expected even larger issues, really.. They're not really handling it great either with the evasive naming in the known issues list. The patch notes are also very incomplete compared to the usual (can we get Rygarius back to write them?). Come on Blizz, you're better than this.

[Evilmoo]

"Opening the Character Pane after equipping a newly acquired item on a character may result in a crash." -- cool. How did this get through testing again given that opening the character pane after equipping an item happens all the time? Bad quality.

Because C Team does not have enough resources to do testing.
Bugs and crashes that are happening now are akin to the problems of a real "small indie company" who can't spare few hundred $$ for indian QA guy, not a multibillion corporation.

[Drekmar]

I for once am not going to argue with rda because I agree that testing of this pre-patch was hella rushed and I was expecting issues like this. I expected even larger issues, really.. They're not really handling it great either with the evasive naming in the known issues list. The patch notes are also very incomplete compared to the usual (can we get Rygarius back to write them?). Come on Blizz, you're better than this.

Wonder why he quit, at one point they had problems with not enough CMs. Miss that guy.

[rda]

I for once am not going to argue with rda because I agree that testing of this pre-patch was hella rushed and I was expecting issues like this. I expected even larger issues, really.. They're not really handling it great either with the evasive naming in the known issues list. The patch notes are also very incomplete compared to the usual (can we get Rygarius back to write them?). Come on Blizz, you're better than this.

Thank you.

Also, I will try to only write about things that are unusual or very important. I get that it makes little sense to complain about what everybody already kind of agrees is bad.

- - - Updated - - -

Wonder why he quit, at ine point they had problems with bot enough CMs. Miss that guy.

Likely found a better job. CM is a non-career.

- - - Updated - - -

(Added: yup, he is now "Community Team Lead & Manager at a mobile game publisher". That's a step up. And yes, his tech notes were quite thorough.)

[Raetary]

i have to say, the extra 10% exp gain in warmode is a blessing.

[Drekmar]

i have to say, the extra 10% exp gain in warmode is a blessing.

It is. Considering I play on PvP realm since ever, its basically a free 10% boost.

[Gurmech]

Shame you can only turn it on in SW/Orgrimmar though. It should be every major city in my opinion.

[rda]

Shame you can only turn it on in SW/Orgrimmar though. It should be every major city in my opinion.

They might make it that way in the future, right now they just want this to be a big decision and try to minimize abuse (kill someone, then run for ten seconds, and turn the mode off at the innkeeper).

[Croy]

They might make it that way in the future, right now they just want this to be a big decision and try to minimize abuse (kill someone, then run for ten seconds, and turn the mode off at the innkeeper).

Sounds reasonable

[rda]

By the way, let me make just one more comparison. Just one. I won't dwell on it.

Do you remember the pre-patch for Cata? It also had a rework of specs. What it was:

(a) talent trees were replaced with the current three-choice rows which were independent of each other,
(b) many specs have been reworked materially with new spells added and many spells changed,
(c) they cleaned up the leveling path for each spec, putting spells in the order that makes sense, added spec overview pages for new chars, etc,
(d) they added a mastery stat with a unique bonus for each spec.

Compare to the rework in this pre-patch which is 90% removals.

It's the same with features and the same if we compare to other pre-patches. WotLK pre-patch, for example, added the whole achievement system among other things. Again, compare to this pre-patch which adds nothing and will just let you unlock the pre-patch event (which all pre-patches had) some time later.

I find this pretty telling for the future.

[Marlamin]

In better news, having played a bit on my Arms warrior to get a belt in Argus since I got rid of one of my legendary belts, it feels much more fun than it did in Legion. Maybe a bit more mobile too, which I like. Overpower being back is neat though I'm not sure exactly where in my rotation I like it the most.