PC Gamer Interview with Ion Hazzikostas
Discussing the frustrations of players over the bug riddled and time-gated patch, the game director acknowledged that Patch 11.1.5 did not launch as planned and that Blizzard needs to do better.
Ion Hazzikostas, via PCGamer
“The issues with Nightfall getting stuck and bugging out for players in the first couple of days, that’s something we need to improve on. We fixed it as soon as we could, but understandably, that’s not the experience that we’re hoping for anyone to have,” Hazzikostas said. “It’s not the experience our players are expecting or deserve when they log in on patch day and they’re excited to check out the new thing.”
Waiting for Time Gating
Per the interview, the game director also spoke about the excessive time-gating, with each hyped up feature of the patch being rolled out weeks apart from one another in what felt like an arbitrary delay, launching with only the buggy Nightfall activity and associated Flame’s Radiance reputation available at the start.
Although the reason given is that many of the patches features were focused on PvE content and the developers didn’t want them to overlap and overwhelm players with too much to do, players looking forward to specific activities more than others felt angered and disappointed by the delays in turn.
Ion Hazzikostas, via PCGamer
“We’re experimenting and trying different approaches to live-service events, different things that come and go,” Hazzikostas said. “We have our mainstay of a seasonal rotation, raid tiers, etc. that are the anchors of our major patches. But ultimately we’re trying to interweave different variety into those experiences and on top of those experiences.”
“A lot of those are going to be focused on the same sort of player motivation and goals,” Hazzikostas said. “The thinking was, hey, it would be better for everyone and their time management—recognizing that we’re eight weeks into the season and there’s still a lot of people spending a lot of time in raids and dungeons and chasing those goals—if we didn’t dump all this on you at the same time, and could spread it out a little bit to let each one have its moment to breathe.”
“Understandably, players are accustomed to patch day being the day when everything drops,” Hazzikostas said. “We hear the feedback loud and clear. It’s quite possible we got the balance wrong this time, and that there’s too much that is being delayed and not enough that’s available up front.”
Bugs New and Old
Perhaps most importantly, bugs were the source of many player frustrations, from issues blocking progression in the only new piece of accessible content to returning issues that had already been fixed just one week prior. Part of the issue is that developers have been more aggressively hotfixing to correct bugs, allowing them to fix things immediately instead of waiting for the next patch, though this also requires better verification, lest those fixes be undone by the new patch.
Ion Hazzikostas, via PCGamer
“We are committed to quality, and we know that quantity doesn’t matter if the stuff isn’t functional, and if the game isn’t predictable and reliable and doesn’t feel like a polished experience,” Hazzikostas said.
If it’s a known issue, we’re going to get to it ASAP,” Hazzikostas said. “A couple of issues came to light. We fixed them during the last weeks of 11.1, and during that window we’d already finalized our 11.1.5 build. We have processes to propagate those (fixes) forward, to make sure those changes are applied.
“Where it gets tricky is, sometimes there was a different change made to the same piece of data in 11.1.5, and now there’s a conflict that can be thorny to untangle and reconcile. It’s our job to reconcile and untangle it, but for players who may be mystified about, ‘How did this possibly break?’, it’s because there are some of those tricky data conflicts.
“We still miss a few things. That’s something that we work closely with QA on to understand, like what was the loophole in our testing and our process and our data verification that led to this?”
Blizzard tracks WoW’s “escape rate,” the number of bugs that make it into the wild, he said. The team wants that rate to be in the “low single digits” on all the pieces of data touched in any given patch.
“We want to do better every time compared to how we did in the last,” Hazzikostas said.
The pace of the patches is faster, but that doesn’t reduce the team’s commitment to quality, he said.
“If there’s ever an update where we know there are serious issues, we’re not going to push it out just because we’ve set this eight-week target,” he said. “We’re never consciously compromising quality.”
When asked if some players blame the game’s accelerated patch schedule, operating on a roughly eight week cycle, the game director stands by their operational tempo – saying that the team is looking for ways to improve, not slow down.
Ion Hazzikostas, via PCGamer
“Rather than say, we’re going to slow down and serve our players less, we’d rather ask, how can we polish this further? How can we tighten our processes so that things don’t slip through the cracks and we are getting content into players’ hands at the rate they deserve?” he said.
Combined with the bugs and players’ overall feelings about the patch, 11.1.5 is likely to bring some changes to how WoW developers approach patches, Hazzikostas said: “We’re going to listen, we’re going to learn, and we’ll try to do better next time, both in delivering the content and setting expectations around how it’s going to be paced.”
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