First of all, i started playing late season 3 in BFA, so i have no actual experience with the past patches. This is merely an opinion.
But one thing i’ve noticed about Wow’s patch history is that the downtime between patches are incredibly long. I know there was a 8.3.5 planned, but got canceled.
Personally i think that is terrible, and i have no idea why they choose to go with such an update schedule. Where the game is literally in a state of content drought for almost an entire year. No amount of repetitive dailies and/or timegated content, can make up for that.
For an example FFXIV literally have an update ready every third month or so, where they add small new systems, reworks or a new dungeon or just a new bit of story and lore, the game always feels fresh. There is always something to discuss or get excited about. The end game might be lacking a bit. But all that combined makes the game feel… well alive, and it’s always exciting to get back into the world of Eorzea. Not to mention It feels like the devs are having a good time working on the game. Sometimes some devs might even make a new song for a boss and such with the other musical talented devs and such. Which again. Just makes it feel like they’re extremely passionate about what they’re creating.
Why in the world don’t blizzard do the same? Personally i think it would tremendously help against all the negativity, if people get something new to distract them with. Instead all we do is the same over and over again. And then the small annoyances turn into well hate and anger. I literally roll my eyes everytime i go to Nazjatar to grind out the essence again for the 7th time.
Is the Wow dev team just so small now that they just can’t do more than what they’re doing now? Is it the difference between asian and western work morale and etiquette that is to blame? Because to me it seems like the devs are just in the background, we rarely hear from them, it almost feels like working on this game is well… just a job for them, they go to work, do the minimum required work and then leave a couple of minutes before their work day is done. It almost seems like that with the amount of older bugs and issues that plagues this game.
No it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t take 10 minutes until people on the forums would complain about whatever happens in the new update, be it the new dungeon, a new machanic, the new story part, which they think is absolutely stupid etc.
Was there?? Do you have a source for that please? I only saw that Ion said that they had “no plans for 8.3.5”
BFAs patch schedule is longer than legions was I believe, not sure what WoD was but they did cancel the last patch or half patch for WoD though but then as I understand it they pretty much gave up on that expansion and cancelled a lot of content.
As it stands at the moment for BFA we are looking at a content drought with shadowlands alpha beginning soon and it’s release being somewhere between late August and November (hoping for November with prepatch in October personally so we get a more polished product) but nowhere have I seen evidence of a guaranteed 8.3.5
Don’t quote me on it. But from what i got was that some data miners had found some things that might have indicated a 8.3.5 patch was planned. It was before any official statements i believe.
Although again, might just have been a rumor or a very small thing that was supposed to be added.
There were files on the ptr titled 835 or something like that which Blizzard regularly uses on other patch cycles.
I actually would like something like this in wow. Would find having smaller patches more regularly better than big patches rarely. Might make the game feel more alive.
Hmm not convinced that indicates a definite 8.3.5 tbh. If they had content planned, and I would hazard a guess it would be azerite/sword related then why scrap it and leave nine months of zero new content?
Especially after the how successful that move was in WoD? Would they they really risk angering their customers even more with such a move? It’s been 18 months of less than brilliant decisions I really don’t think they would risk it.
I reckon 8.3 was always the last patch and shadowlands was meant for an earlier release but they are being wary because BFA, on top of other stuff not related to WoW, has wounded there PR.
There were some files in the PTR labelled as 8.3.5. No real content, just files made ahead of time and shipped with this label in the 8.3 build.
So yeah, at some point in time it was planned then canceled long before 8.3 was released.
The X.Y.5 patches only bring lore or open world side content tho.
The model Blizzard has selected for patch updates is a new raid/tier/season every 6 months which is actually nice for most players. Some will be done in but a few weeks but most guilds take months to progress through the raid on heroic & mythic so this format is alright.
Releasing new tiers/seasons faster wouldn’t do any good, altho adding a dungeon or a questline here and there would be welcome.
Nope. That’s not how the wow playerbase behave.
There’s definitely issues at Blizzard either on decision making or developpement pipeline but I wouldn’t attribute it to smaller team or cultural differences.
More communication would definitely be a good thing, especially when they release systems on the PTR or do balance updates. Knowing why they do something is usually pretty hard since they most of the time never share this kind of details.
But can’t blame a random Dev at WoW for not openly sharing his thoughts with the playerbase. Even a writter working for Blizzard (but not a blizz employee) received a dozen death threats after writing a book based on what Blizzard told her. She was not responsible for the story itself, just for how it would be written.
There’s always lots of old stuff left to do, so I really never run out of content, even if I’ve played since mid TBC. If I get bored I just take a break. Easy peasy.
About 8.3.5, I had expected it. No proof, just a feeling based on… a feeling…
