Drinking from the (Buggy) Content Hose

WoW Midnight got its first content patch last week. Despite only being a "minor" patch, 12.0.5 introduced no fewer than four new casual activities (among other things): Abyss Angling, Decor Duels, Void Assaults and Ritual Sites.

My first impression of all of them is that they are... fine. I've had fun trying them all out, and I'll probably do at least some of them a few more times, especially the Ritual Sites. However, I also would have been perfectly fine without them. Midnight has been out for less than two months and I'm far from being done and bored with the launch content. I didn't need even more stuff on my plate. It all feels like a bit much to be honest, even if I'm not necessarily a completionist who needs to do all the things. I didn't think it was possible for an MMO to overwhelm people with constant additions of new stuff, but at least to me, WoW feels like it's coming close right now.

This relentless onslaught of more content also comes at a price. This patch was apparently so buggy at launch that Blizzard actually felt the need to officially apologise for it. I wasn't affected too badly myself, but I'm not surprised it happened as this is something that has been building up for a while. It's kind of wild how we went from "Blizzard polish" and "we'll release it when it's ready" to the complete opposite, with new releases being pushed out the door on a strict schedule seemingly no matter what state they are in.

Not sure if this counts as a bug or is just down to my old rig, but the most noticeable new nuisance since the patch for me has been that the water graphics in the new zones go bananas sometimes. 

I remember when I started playing WoW back in 2006, bugs in the game were basically not a thing. I'm not saying there literally wasn't a single one, but they just weren't something I ever encountered. (Now, server stability was a huge issue at the time, but that's a different kettle of fish.) And Blizzard maintained that reputation for polish for a pretty long time, even as they piled on expansions.

Over time, some bugs did start to appear here and there, but it still wasn't too bad. The first time I used the "bugs" tag on this blog was in 2015, and even that was in relation to a private server. I didn't have cause to use it while talking about official WoW until 2021, in this post about a Shadowlands patch. 

And then with Dragonflight, the flood gates opened. I generally loved Dragonflight, and while I did notice that the increased content cadence seemed to come with a trade-off in the form of a lack of polish, at the time it didn't seem too bad yet. In War Within things escalated, and while I really enjoyed the Nightfall event for example, it was an utterly buggy mess at its launch.

With Midnight, things have ramped up yet again, and I've gotten used to encountering bugs everywhere. They're usually not game-breaking show stoppers, but noticeable nonetheless, from activity trackers not working and settings that won't stay saved to just randomly buggy quests. There's a world quest in Silvermoon where Magister Rommath asks you to spy on the newcomers to the city, which had been so hastily copy and pasted from a previous expansion that the written instructions still said to "take pictures of the wildlife" for weeks, which I thought was pretty hilarious in context.

I've been wondering whether and when we'd reach a tipping point, and I wonder if this is it or if we're still not there yet.

The thing is, I have sympathy for the Blizzard devs here. By nature, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my own work - I'm human and make mistakes, sure, but I'll always strive towards 100%. However, in over a decade of working at the same large company, I had to learn to let a lot of things go or else go insane. I've been lectured about the 80:20 rule and how some things are just not worth doing from a business point of view. Some bugs you just write a ticket for, knowing full well that they are never going to get fixed because you just can't demonstrate the business value of fixing a typo and some wonky looking formatting, and I'm guessing that the WoW devs face some of the same pressures. It's probably better for the financials to work on the next content patch to improve retention than to fix some bug that most people will never encounter, never mind unsubscribe over. The impact this has on brand perception is not a metric that is easy to measure and demonstrate the value of.

I'm also not really upset because I've got to confess that my own tolerance for that kind of thing in MMOs has actually increased over time, even if admitting that marks me as not the most discerning of customers. I play SWTOR as my main MMO and that game has been buggy as heck ever since its launch. To this day, you've got to expect every major patch to have at least a couple of very noticeable and annoying bugs, and I know people who intentionally hold off on playing any new content for at least a few days to wait for some live bug testing first and then go in once the worst of it is fixed. If WoW is going down the same path, I'm not someone who'll easily be put off by that, but at the same time it's still a shame, because I honestly don't need quite such an aggressive patch cadence to stay interested anyway.