How is it possible for a company as big as Blizzard to still mess up this bad?

[Forgottenone]

Dueling people and when Gorshalach's Legacy procs it's doing over 1/3 of their total HP. It's working in arena as well, not broken at all.

[Mad_Murdock]

This could also be explained with people who raid moving to more populated servers to join new guild or to join friends. I started on Lane back in 04 and I can tell you I moved a few times to join better raiding opportunities or friends on various other realms.

Could be, but at some point the servers everyone is moving too would be too full to allow more on. Again, the key here is Blizzard (Ion) acknowledge at the last Blizzcon they needed to do more connected realms(question was asked during the Q&A). We also know from the last numbers giving wow was down to around the 5-6 million mark. If I based it roughly on the login screen, my server which again is down to 500A\400H on during prime time, is listed as a medium server (though oddly it was listed as low pop about a month ago). How can 1000 people during prime be considered medium? When a server like Stormrage-US has around 5000 on during prime

And again, I don't dive too deeply into the WoW is dying pool. But it seems extremely obviously WOW is much smaller than it was before. Do we call that dying or just shedding a few extra pounds is up for debate.

[haxartus]

Blizzard doesn't do anything to even remotely justify the money they get.

Blizzard gets over $360 per year per person just from subscription costs. This was not true 10 years ago, but for quite a while servers have been getting more powerful and cheaper quite rapidly. It's likely that the server costs are less than $1 per player per month, and quite likely less than a million a month for the entire playerbase of the game.

The patch content that is being developed is also laughable - even if we had a raid and a full zone every 4-5 months, we've paid the cost of a full AAA game in that time, and a patch is not even remotely comparable to an AAA game. The Antorus patch was mostly reuse of models and like a 5 hour storyline that was stretched over a few months to drain more subscription money.

Even with 3 million players, these $360 every 2 years is more than a billion dollars per expansion.

Even if they have a 1000 people involved in the game, and they don't, and even if each person gets $100 000 per year, the total salary costs over 2 years will be 200 million, leaving 800 million in profit, because server maintenance costs are laughable, as I've explained before.

So, with 3 million players they make about $500 million per year from the game, and spend at most $100 million, leaving the other $400 million in profit. GTA 5 cost $300 million to develop, $100 million less than that. Are we seeing anything even remotely comparable to an AAA title like GTA 5 each year ?

Hell no, we don't even have voice acting on all quests, and most quests don't have a cutscene, let alone other things... All we get is copy/pasted, low effort, low development cost reused content, with non-existent QA. But we apparently have a playerbase that is willing to ignore all of that, and ignore all the money they pay each year.

Blizzard has literally found a cash cow and they are milking it as hard as they can each year.

[The Stormbringer]

You think this is bad?

[clevin]

Is it a huge system/db? Not sure how feasible it is for them to copy over some servers and then start testing left and right. Simply put there's no way they have enough testers at every major patch, to cover the different activities millions of players do.

Copying a live environment is trivial. It takes meticulous documentation of that environment, but servers are cheap and tools are out there to do this. Getting the variety of different things that everyone does all tested is harder but an older game should do that better by learning what people do and scripting those over time.

There will still be bugs - always are. But if they're due to not matching environments or not catching truly obvious things, people should be fired

[Rinaul]

Could be, but at some point the servers everyone is moving too would be too full to allow more on. Again, the key here is Blizzard (Ion) acknowledge at the last Blizzcon they needed to do more connected realms(question was asked during the Q&A). We also know from the last numbers giving wow was down to around the 5-6 million mark. If I based it roughly on the login screen, my server which again is down to 500A\400H on during prime time, is listed as a medium server (though oddly it was listed as low pop about a month ago). How can 1000 people during prime be considered medium? When a server like Stormrage-US has around 5000 on during prime

And again, I don't dive too deeply into the WoW is dying pool. But it seems extremely obviously WOW is much smaller than it was before. Do we call that dying or just shedding a few extra pounds is up for debate.

I suppose that's true, yet Zuljin has read as full for quite sometime yet I was still able to move toons there as well as a few friends of mine. Just saying full is never too full until launch day when queues form. It's always gonna take people but then they "expand" the servers like they did a while back to allow more people and it in turn made some medium pop servers show as low afterwards. Either ways I suppose we could both be right. Back during TBC I had chosen to move to a server that turned out to be a super dead server. I believe it was Baelgun. They're have always been dead servers and therefore we always need evaluations and connections.

[Bethrezen]

OP, show us you can program flawlessly, better than Blizzard then.

[Siq1ne]

I'm just convinced that some people think the internet and all it's apps are just magically thought up in someones head and appear out of thing air... just perfectly working and well maintained.

For those of you: It's not. It's hard work and human error still plays a huge part in development, doesn't matter how big your company is. Sometimes things just don't work when they are suppose to.

TL: DR; Coding ain't easy, everybody knows. Well, I guess not everybody.

[Fynzie]

It's easy to tell in these threads who has actually coded and written programs versus 'back-seat programming experts'.

Most of them are still asking for new engine to have HotS graphics, deep knowledge of computer programming and 3D graphics.

[mihai25]

Make difference. In Alpha/Beta/PTR, just a limited players have acces.
When a big patch like a expansion goes live is normaly to appears bugs/issues because many players log in. Thats is role of a pre-patch expansions to avoid this problems when real expansion goes live.
My english is not very good.

[thatmikeguy]

Simple, Idiocracy was a true story.

[Tharkkun]

Exactly. They are giving up on the game, but they are doing it gradually so the players don't panic.

It has been extremely obvious, I just don't get why people can't accept this. There is a huge drop of quality of pretty much everything that has been done for the game, compared to TBC/Wrath days.

Legion didn't even have much content. They were just smart in making the players repeat the same things over and over again, while players thought it was their idea to do so "legendaries/pity timer/etc".

Players rush to get through content faster then in the past. Once a game becomes older the Whoah factor disappears. So you don't stop and smell the roses along the way. The amount of repeatable content is actually the same. 5 man dungeons took longer to crawl through but other then that the content is the same.

Other then questing to max level the only additional content in TBC was the introduction of Heroic dungeons and Arenas, both of which we have still. We have Mythic and Mythic+ to infinity now. Dailies were introduced later in the expansion for the 1st time. Now they are world quests and a shitload more of them.

What kept you busy was the badge farming system but now Mythic+ provides the same type of loot instead.

[Sanguiris]

New game engine, updated combat, new support for dx12, more different world merging with no more pvp pve servers. Shit happens get over it and go do something else.

[Jtbrig7390]

Guild Wars 2
Elder Scrolls Online
Warframe
The Division
The Old Republic

I could go on but if you're asking me the question it's like you're not even aware of the level of quality of other games' launches and major patches out there.

You clearly never played those games then seeing how each one has had major issues even more so The Division and Old Republic.

Shit happens, It will be fixed.

Go play something else until its fixed.

[Tharkkun]

It's not like it's done on purpose. Something went wrong, they worked hours to fix. It sucks, but shit happens.

Despite all the work on Beta and PTR, the amount of people testing there is a tiny fraction of the real playerbase. Once you deployed to live servers, the real test begins, and that's the reason we get this a prepatch weeks before the expansion, and why there's no event in the first week. Problems are expected and need to be fixed before the real content is released.

You can expect more maintenance and lots of hotfixes over the week. There's still a ton of broken shit waiting to be fixed right now. That's just how things are.

Yup. They had to disable and rollback a major feature of the chat system which now integrated guild chat and communities. Whatever worked on beta/ptr had a catastrophic issue on live.

[haxartus]

Dailies were introduced later in the expansion for the 1st time. Now they are world quests and a shitload more of them.

But WQ's are just copy/pasted regular quests. Another aspect of the game where Blizzard makes the players think that there is content where there is none.

[Deleted]

Who cares, shit happens, stop being an entitled capitalist ass.

[Amathricus]

SWTOR.

Can't have issues if you barely put out content to have issues.

If anything you just picked 5 random games without doing research into said games.

Dear Gods, that one should have waited at least a year. It was fun, class story lines were amazing, but there was nowhere to go from there. And then the expansion just grouped the class lines. Disappointing at best. Was sorely missing content.

[Jastall]

It's called 15+ years of legacy code and a shiton of side effects for everything you touch at a core level.

Shhh, don't try to explain that this shit is complicated, these people think coding is some sort of magic you throw money at until it works perfectly.

[turlockmike]

World of warcraft is a very complex system involving hundreds of physical devices, millions of lines of code for dozens of different applications (executable on your computer, server code, chat services, voice services, database, etc.

The blizzard team is far ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering content for video games, but that doesn't mean everything will be perfect, sometimes something as small as unexpected load could cause and issue where a database fills up faster than anticipated. Them removing the community groups makes me think they didn't anticipate the load there and there was an uncaught bug.

Anyway, it's much better that it's happening now in the prepatch, then it would be happening during the live launch.