World of Warcraft caught some heat earlier this year for a messy patch that broke a whole lot of stuff. Patch 12.0.5 was a bit of a disaster, taking an accidental wrecking ball to multiple systems and allowing some long-flagged issues to sneak their way into the game.
The takeaway that I—and many other players—had was that Blizzard’s rapid patch cadence was impacting its QA, and while I still do partially wonder if that’s to blame, at least in the case of problems that were long-flagged, Ion Hazzikostas has peskily introduced some nuance to my grand narrative. Gee darnit.
That’s per an interview with YouTube channel Psybear_tv, where the director speaks on what went wrong with Patch 12.0.5: “If it ever feels like something is rushed, or half-baked, that’s not something that we’re gonna take lightly—I think we wanna understand what more players were hoping for from a given system or a given feature, take that to heart, and do better the next time.”
Watch On
Hazzikostas is proud of the “faster patch cadence from Dragonflight onwards,” one that he says lets the team get out a wider spread of content for folks with different tastes. However, he emphasises that “just because we move faster doesn’t mean that we are sacrificing quality—we are never going to put something in a patch if it’s not ready.”
Which might come as a bitter draught to players who were impacted by 12.0.5, though Hazzikostas says “It’s obviously not lost on me that—pretty recent was 12.05’s release, and a lot of understandable consternation among players about like: ‘Wow, this seems really buggy, is Blizzard moving too quickly, are they sacrificing quality for speed, for quantity?'”
Speed isn’t the problem, says Hazzikostas, but a hiccup in logistics: “If anything it was actually us being a bit too aggressive in trying to fix bugs very close to the patch release time.”
One example he uses is the fact that player housing got disabled for a whole day: “Not a good look, right? … What happened was, what we discovered during our internal checks that day, the day the patch deployed, was that people who zoned into their houses [who] had any decor that was off the ground in any way? It snapped to the ground, and did so in a way that permanently changed their placement in their house, destroying a lot of people’s setups.”
The culprit? An elevator from 2013. No, seriously: “This is going to inspire some spaghetti code memes, but … There was a last-minute bug that we found with the Siege of Orgrimmar elevator, where players would fall through the elevator. It was like ‘well, okay, we should fix this bug, it’s legacy content but there’s people still mount farming and stuff.’
“That bug fix went in just a few days before 12.05. Because of the complex interdependent nature of 20-25 years’ worth of code, aspects of what controls how a player attaches to an elevator object also touched on some aspects of how different objects can be parented to each other or stacked in housing placement.”
Ultimately, Hazzikostas cops to the fact that “We did not go back and check housing during that final day and a half before the patch went live. Until, of course, it blew up.”
Hindsight is 20/20, though Hazzikostas admits that “we should’ve gone ahead with the stable build, released it, and then rolled that out as a hotfix later on with not the same immediate short-term risk. It’s that sort of thing—it’s lots of moving pieces.”
While I’m still not certain the developer equivalent of putting ‘I work too hard’ as a flaw on your CV is entirely the truth, it does explain some of the more baffling glitches that came with the wonky patch in April—and why some of them might slip the net, despite being so completely major.
Hopefully, Blizzard’s been able to sort out its bug-fixing engine to dodge most future snafus, especially given patch 12.1 has some interesting new challenges I’m keen to tackle, hopefully without my character’s head popping off because somebody messed with the ground geometry of Molten Core, or something.
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