Originally Posted by
exochaft
I think the issue is less about Day 1 patches as a tool and more about how said tool is used.
Without devolving into an extremely long post, the Day 1 patches nowadays are now being used as tool to be lazier in the QC and testing department. Obviously this trend will highly depend on the company, but there are some games that are so broken on release day that people wonder if they even bothered testing things (or in some cases, people who were part of the testing phases of the game knew/reported the issues a long time prior to official release).
Yes, I'm from a time before PCs were even in most homes, and I still remember buying the original Wolfenstein 3D on 3.5" floppies as well as buying consoles in the early home gaming market. Yes, games did launch with bugs. However, there was a much larger push to make sure the game was released in a good state exactly because there was no such thing as Day 1 patches or even internet in the early days. Some of my favorite SNES games that I play to this day have bugs and glitches in them, but they're completely playable as they are because the games were still tested enough that such issues either wouldn't effect most people or you had to really go out of your way to find/exploit the bugs. In general, it was pretty rare that a game launched that was so broken that you couldn't play it or the experience was so terrible you didn't want to play it (they did exist though, and they were usually cheap games).
Fast forward to today, and you can commonly get games that launch in such horrendous conditions that even Day 1 patches can't fix them. What's the difference? To be completely fair, a lot of games are so complex that it gets harder to catch all the bugs. However, the ability for a gaming company to test and do QC on a game is leagues better and more accessible than it was decades ago. Nowadays, the fact you can have multiple alpha and beta testing phases involving thousands (or even millions) of people prior to release day is something that could only be dreamed of decades ago. Unfortunately, I feel this access to generally free and accessible QC testing is taken for granted, or used as a replacement for internal QC testing, or just QC testing is skimped for time. While Day 1 patches may be a necessary evil when it comes to larger, more complex games (especially in the PC gaming market), even Day 1 patches are turning in Week 1 or Month 1 patches attempting to fix issues that should've been address a long time prior to release.
All this being said, I think it's fair to say most people wouldn't really care about minor issues and bugs that have minimal or no impact on gameplay. When thinking back to the earlier gaming days before the internet was widespread, vast majority of bugs in games fell into the category of having little to no impact in gameplay... because if there was major impact, your game sales would likely suffer. Nowadays, it's considered acceptable to some people that a game can launch with massive bugs and issues impacting gameplay because we can have Day 1 patches. Again, it's not about the ability to patch a game on release day if necessary, it's that gaming companies are using it to be lazy at the expense of the customers.
When it comes to Blizz, their testing as been... questionable at best. Nobody's perfect, but having been part of the alpha and beta testing phases for Blizz games and patches, I can safely say their acceptance and/or response to player-based feedback has been steadily declining over the years. It's gotten to the point in some cases where blue posts will gaslight the crap out of the community when it comes to major issues that were know for extended periods of time during the testing phases, claiming that no one caught them until things went live. D4 testing phases hasn't seemed to terrible, but I imagine the company is trying to combat their image issues as of late, but fundamentally the recent announcements when it came to balances/fixes after the open beta were already know in the closed beta as part of the feedback. Basically, I'm fairly skeptical with Blizz and their behavior in the past, so I don't blame others for being skeptical, as well.