Any word on pre-patch?

[Konthos]

They never did. It's just when i did some digging and found a huge reddit post giving us an Shadowlands prepatch date in may and Shadowlands release in june. The same people will now argue that prepatch could be tomorrow or yesterday or whenever, but not 2 weeks from now.

With Brewfest going up to 6th and days going by, there is like zero chance they will release it next week.

And the pvp end of season announcement will be "soon". They just annouced that they will soon announce the end of season. So end of season announcement is at least 2 weekends before prepatch (there were always 2 weekends between announcement and prepatch release).

Again with the Brewfest thing...expansion is literally releasing in the middle of Hallows End.
What they posted today was exactly what they posted in Legion, no exact date announced and then 12 days latter boom prepatch was live.

[sys01]

Because we have four different covernants to try out before Slands, which each needs at least a weeks worth of testing, before one can make anything resembling an informed and thus "meaningful" choice.
Because a choice is not meaningful if it is not informed.

Covenant choice can be done only at level 60 for the main storyline on the first character. Subsequent covenant choices made on alts can be done at 50 once the Main char is done. So I'm not sure how do you want to test out covenants in the pre-patch.

[Malefic]

End of Season announcement bud. Not End of Expansion Announcement.
BfA Season 3 End was announced 8 days before it happened.

I would argue this - https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...-season/354220 - negates the need for a longer announcement.

The announcement of end of Seasons is something done as a courtesy by Blizzard, here you go, you've got X days to get Cutting Edge, Gladiator, hit your PvP high, whatever. Whilst they still provided that courtesy time of 8 days, the above post basically told everyone "As soon as new year hits, get ready, cause it's dropping real soon".

[Ninix]

3 week pre-patch is not reasonable

There's litteraly nothing to do on a prepatch except a questline and testing out a few specs...

You really need more than 3 weeks to do so ?

[pewpmeiser]

There's litteraly nothing to do on a prepatch except a questline and testing out a few specs...

You really need more than 3 weeks to do so ?

You're literally wrong, because there's literally a lot more literal changes. We also literally are literally getting 3 literal weeks of literal pre-patch events. Levels are literally being squashed by half and the whole leveling experience has quite literally been revamped.

[Sondrelk]

29th/30th is still the most likely. Either we have an especially short time between the announcement and release, or we have a record breaking short pre-patch.

And sure, the actual nitty gritty of the content lasting the full period isnt something that really matters, what matters is whether such an exclusive limited time event should be any shorter than 4 weeks when it goes away forever afterwards.

Besides, the devs have stated their intention to have the first week only be the system changes.

[Aresk]

3 weeks for pre-patch seems like not enough to me, I don't think it has ever been that short.

TBC had a one-week event. I missed the entire thing because I was working on finals at the time.

[Archmage Alodi]

it'll be the 6th of oct

we've already been told (datamined, rather) its a 3 phase prepatch event, meaning 3 weeks. that would take us from the 6th to the 13th to the 20th into shadowlands launch on the 26th.

they aren't going to drop a prepatch in the middle of an event going on either - at least i sure as shit wouldn't

this is literally the most logical conclusion

Well we only got class changes on first week of bfa pre patch , could be the same for SL.

[Malefic]

29th/30th is still the most likely. Either we have an especially short time between the announcement and release, or we have a record breaking short pre-patch.

And sure, the actual nitty gritty of the content lasting the full period isnt something that really matters, what matters is whether such an exclusive limited time event should be any shorter than 4 weeks when it goes away forever afterwards.

Besides, the devs have stated their intention to have the first week only be the system changes.

Well we're coming from a record breaking longest expansion and almost record breaking shortest announcement of a release date.

The devs haven't stated their intention to have "the first week only be the system changes". They stated that they will release 2 patches, 1 will be the pre-patch and will come with non-Shadowlands specific things, the 2nd will be a patch that comes with the Shadowlands specific things - because they want to take the time while pre-patch is live to continue to iron out things relating specifically to the Shadowlands.

[Infernoxas]

If memory serves, prior expansions usually let's the pre-patch run ~3 weeks prior to expansion release. I'm guessing we'll be seeing the pre-patch release in two weeks on Tuesday October 6th.

However, given the circumstance that is BFA and blizzard wanting to get content in our hands faster, I would not be surprised if they release it a week earlier (next Tuesday).

[Aurosh]

29th/30th is still the most likely. Either we have an especially short time between the announcement and release, or we have a record breaking short pre-patch.

And sure, the actual nitty gritty of the content lasting the full period isnt something that really matters, what matters is whether such an exclusive limited time event should be any shorter than 4 weeks when it goes away forever afterwards.

Besides, the devs have stated their intention to have the first week only be the system changes.

Yes we have a shorter prepatch. You wanna know why? Because they need as much time as they can to do class development and level squish. There was never any need for 4 weeks and BFA prepatch release was a mess. So that's probably the reason they gave themselves more time. Because they need it.

Go to PTR or look at the missing tuning. We are far from done yet.

[Nork]

So Patch next week, innit?

[ReVnX]

TBC had a one-week event. I missed the entire thing because I was working on finals at the time.

Prepatch itself was 6 weeks

[thunderdragon2]

at this point i cant really see it coming be4 or after the 6th

[Aeriedk]

Usually, Blizzard gives a 2-week notice before any pre-patch releases. Since we didn't get anything by now I'll have to guess that the pre-patch landing in September has pretty much gone, which means that we may have an October 6-7 pre-patch. But then again it's all just speculation, from my side at least.

I really wish people would stop saying this. It's like one person said it and now everyone is saying "Two weeks! Blizzard always gives two weeks!". This is false. I believe it has always been at least two RESETS...not two full weeks.

With that said. It will either be the 29th or the 6th. My money is on the 29th.

EDIT: In theory they could release it tomorrow, but I really doubt that.

- - - Updated - - -

With Brewfest going up to 6th and days going by, there is like zero chance they will release it next week.

They are releasing the expansion during the middle of Hallow's End. I really doubt they are worried about releasing the pre-patch during Brewfest.

- - - Updated - - -

One week of pre-patch is more than enough. Why would you need more time?

Probably just to give players something to do. No point really leveling toons or gearing right now. My guild has cancelled all remaining scheduled raids because we progressed as much as we cared about.

I agree with you that they don't need more time of pre-patch, but I would argue that activity in the game is probably plummeting right now.

[Nyel]

So Patch next week, innit?

No. Having that blue post explaining what’s in the pre-patch, but then not containing a release date for pre-patch is quite telling. Sure, they can still give us the release date later on, but why wouldn’t you just put it into that post altogether?

[Nork]

No

/10 chars

YES. In case patch is not launched next week, I'll give you 1.000.000 gold.

Trust me, geezer.

[Nyel]

YES. In case patch is not launched next week, I'll give you 1.000.000 gold.

Trust me, geezer.

Deal.

/10 chars

[C20]

People are still making the point that tuning isn't done... as though prepatches have always been released with perfect balance. Remember the 3.0 prepatch before WotLK release? Ret pallies mowing down everything in their path, only to be nerfed after a few days. They didn't even make it to the expansion before they got brought down to a more reasonable level. That was from a time when hotfixes were very new to the game, and Blizzard fully utilized their newest tool to quickly bring things in line. Nowadays, they're par for the course, and they're used more frequently than anyone cares to track.

Since people seem to be making assumptions based on what seems like voodoo logic ("but Coren!", or "Numbers still aren't tuned!", or "Jupiter is not in alignment with Venus!"), let me explain how the release process for software goes. This is a common procedure, but it's not a hard-and-fast set of rules because things change, and unexpected things happen.

At this point, they'll be focusing exclusively on P1 priority tickets. These will be related to game stability (e.g. making sure raytracing doesn't crash the game), and number tuning for the 1-50 experience (e.g. XP, damage, healing). There'll be an especially keen focus on the level 50 numbers because there's still a special post-season PVP 'event' happening as well as people trying to complete things (e.g. N'Zoth Mythic) before the grind starts again.

The server dev team will be prepping the deployments to their staging servers - servers which are used to test a product release without it going out to actual customers to ensure the deployment process works.

They will have estimates on how long each task is going to take. No more tickets, except critical ones (i.e. ones which could cause unplanned downtime and thus require people working overtime to fix the issue or which would bring the servers down in the middle of peak time), will be escalated to P1 at this point. Depending on how quickly the tasks are completed, they will be making a decision by Friday this week on whether it will release on the 29th.

They could get to Wednesday, have fixed the majority of issues, and be happy for it to go for testing. Internal QA will report any issues they fine. If there's significant issues, the tickets that these issues affect will move from "In testing" to "Requires work" or "Failed testing". Devs will then pick these tickets up, and fix the issues that were found. Rinse and repeat. QA might not find any significant issues, and all the tickets might pass testing.

If we get to Friday, developers will push to finish what they can, and QA will test on Friday and over the weekend if necessary. If we get to Monday evening, and there's still a moderate number of P1 tickets needed before pre-patch can be released, they'll push the release back by a week to ensure that devs have time to fix things, and QA have time to test and report issues with those tickets.

People seem to have this idea that release dates have a date set many months in advance (expansions do - that's because it affects profit reports and stock values). It doesn't work like that. Issues crop up, and sometimes those issues take a long time to fix. The release date is a fluid thing right up until a few days before when it comes to large, in-house products like WoW. In smaller companies, the release date isn't often known until hours before, and in some companies, devs will wake up one morning and have received a message on Slack from their project manager, showing an email from a client or an internal department (usually from someone in the CTO's department) saying "We've gone live with the release". Devs aren't kept in the loop about releases as much as they should be in some cases, especially if they're not the ones controlling the release. Even in cases where they're the ones doing the builds, they'll often provide it to clients, and then clients will ask deployment team to release it without the dev even knowing until they find out the next morning.

They are releasing the expansion during the middle of Hallow's End. I really doubt they are worried about releasing the pre-patch during Brewfest.

If weekly maintenance is already announced, then it won't be this week, not that many people think it would be anyway. My money was on the 29th, but I'm now thinking it'll be the 6th. I don't have any reason for that thought, just a gut feeling. It could be either and I'm fine whichever one it is.

[ssambakd]

12 days before BfA prepatch went live, so 2 weekly resets, which would land the Shadowlands prepatch on the 29th (8 days from now but still 2 weekly resets).


How are we finding out tomorrow?

what do you think?