it might be a feely thing but whenever new content gets dropped it doesnt work porperly at first and it takes a day (or longer) and a few hotfixes until it actually works
the gear upgrade discount is not working and all the new items I get I have to (almost) fully upgrade AGAIN to the ilvl I already have equipped (I know gearing is not the biggest prio in prepatch right now but I’m still having fun with making numbers go up in a game that is very much about making numbers go up, especially since my character is not fully decked out in max gear)
the tooltips on the crests still show the old item levels (before stat squish) making it absolutely non-intuitive for a new/returning player
the base UI is absolutely lackluster
dont get me wrong, we dont need full customization like we get it from those UI replacement addons like ElvUI etc but clearly there is a middle ground between making every single frame and buff and glow and proc pixel perfect and being able to tune a few little things like detaching my focus cast bar and moving it somewhere else or fading my action bars or making my player frame higher or wider and not just scaling it
and with all the little things that feel like they have just been overlooked (devourer dh with green fel eyes, wrong tooltips, new tmog system stumbling out the gates, missing spells/buff from the cdm, stupid default or missing UI settings after having years of data of how players build their UI etc etc) I am asking the question:
isnt this what the beta is for?
how does all of this make it to prepatch and during prepatch we get a post that the UI devs can only focus on the bigger bugs and issues and the smaller ones need to take a step back until actual midnight launch?
I dont know but all of this feels massively undercooked
PS: also please give us the cvarNameplateTopInsert back, as a caster it feels absolutely dogsh!t to see nameplates clamp together at the “top” (5cm below actually) of my screen and I cant snipe any casts in the nameplate soup and if I point my cam up I cannot spot the swirlie vomit I’m standing in
nah, when u tell what is wrong, the response is “that blizz has still enough time”, “Dont be such a doomer”, “Trust blizz will fix the UI that u dont need any addons”
now all can experience this, isnt this wounderful?
There’s a difference between a Live Service Game that receives regular updates that are reasonably tested and decently polished, versus a Live Service Game that receives regular updates that are insufficiently tested and exhibits a glaring lack of attention to detail.
I think most players will acknowledge that this patch, and arguably this expansion, does not exhibit the commercial quality that Blizzard have shown themselves capable of delivering in the past, i.e. the infamous “Blizzard polish”.
Was never expecting anything else. Beta testing is a waste of time without progress being copied back to retail - so I rather do the beta testing on life.
I’m content with the way that has turned out so far - only thing that currently sucks is the deco chest limit. UI was greatly improved and I could get rid of a few addons that are now part of the base UI (like details & hekili).
At least you guys have your Day & Evening rooms…
Me + 1 more person have reported not getting these rooms.
We’re at House Level 6, talked to every npc possible, and the rooms are missing in room placement.
What this is now is no details anymore its cut down to the level from the blizz one and the blizz own damage meter lacks in so much, that you are forced to log every little fight to see what happened.
Can’t see any differences - it has all the functions I used before. I can judge where I stand in comparison with the rest of the group; was never interested in anything else; I don’t need to analyze the fun out of the game.
“Oh come on, it’s only alpha, things aren’t supposed to work. They’ll fix it in beta”
“It’s only beta, they’ll fix it before it hits live”
“Ah, it’s the release patch, they’ll fix it with patch xy.1”
“Well, it’s too complex to fix during a live expansion, they’ll fix it with <next expansion>”
You probably haven’t ‘experienced’ Shadowlands, that was even lower quality than this expansion by a thousand miles.
This is the player base’s own fault, people are too greedy and too willing to cope and defend these kind of practices.
Games used to be tested by a panel who got paid to test the game and report any kind of bug or problematic game behaviour, but now people are paying to test these games, so why would they even bother delivering any kind of decent product?
Junkies will take anything you throw at them, as long as they can get their fix from it.
Not gonna lie, this prepatch is beyond disappointing. I dont really come here on forum aside of looking for bug infos but this is a shame.
5 WQs? zerging rares for 2 tokens with like a thousand needed for all mogs and pets?
WQs not repeatable rewarding 20!!! resonance crystals?
At least make those cultists impressive, i dont feel like i have the urge to defend twilight highlands from anything. It’s not immersive its nothing. The other events i played were SL DF and TWW and i enjoyed them. This one is a drag. Like “we listen to you we hear you, Azeroth is HOME” jesus with those cultists i’m like “well let them take the home” because in all honesty its a drag. Increase currency drops a bit.
Yesterday i spent 3hrs doing rare zerg to be able to buy the mount. I know there’s weeklies, but what, every day between those we take a break from cultists? I am a collector i want all the mogs but this is the type of events that makes me wonder about my own sanity.
This latest patch has been awful and housing isn’t much better. I have been playing this game for 20 years and sure there have been ups and downs but it just feels they keep using old assets over and over because there is no imagination. To be honest I may only play the next xpac and be done with it depending on the quality of the next xpac.
Don’t confuse bad writing or gameplay decisions with actual buggy code that crashes the client and makes it unplayable due to extreme piling up of errors. Shadowlands, despite it having the clvl and ilvl squishes, was stable and merely had some uncommon exceptions where enemies were unkillable due to the scaling. Every other feature worked as intended, even if that went against what the players asked. By contrast, the Midnight prepatch is an actual beta of new features not working as initially advertised, features that used to work being broken, and game crashes.
The current situation is entirely possible if the developers, engineers, designers etc. who were part of the team for a large amount of years decided to leave, and new blood had to take up their spot. You can be equally skilled as someone you replace, but you still lack the knowledge of WHY something has been built a specific way, while you look at the code.
No amount of bibliography and fully commenting code can replace the effectiveness that the person who wrote the actual code will provide in any changes needed in that code.
Forgetting an entire weapon class in the pre patch gear.
Having 10 minute timers in an event, resulting in a lot of downtime.
Flip-flopping daily on Crusade Strike.
Those are not decisions a team that has any sort of experience in an MMO design should make. It creates the feeling that at some recent point the entire wow team was changed without any form of retention or knowledge transfer.
That’s because, despite still having a QA team at Blizzard, management (and by fault also we players) demands faster patches. So if hotfixes aren’t done by the time of launch for a patch, it’s not fixed until later.
Because delaying a patch in Blizzards pipeline flow is impossible for a major reason. They plan too far ahead with release dates and throw them out too early at times, making their word binding. Because delaying, for example, an expansion launch date is gonna mess with a lot of customers/players schedules and the reputational damage is bigger than some buggy patch will be.
I hope with them going for 1-boss raids in Midnight between seasons, they can make some breathing room for proper patch cadence QA.
