Blizzard has issued an apology to the World of Warcraft community for its recent patch 12.0.5, which launched earlier this week with numerous bugs and other serious issues, saying it “was not up to our standards.”
In a statement posted to the official website today signed by “The World of Warcraft Team”, Blizzard said it was “taking lessons” from the launch and “will work harder to communicate” about issues with such launches in the future. The full statement is as follows:
The 12.0.5 patch launch was not up to our standards, and we know this disrupted your time and caused justified frustration.
The team has been working around the clock since launch to stabilize the game and fix the biggest issues players were hitting right away: see our hotfixes update here and our posts on the Bonus Roll issue here and here.
The team is taking lessons learned from this launch to help ensure this doesn’t happen again. We will also work harder to communicate openly, early, and often when a launch doesn’t go as expected: the known issues we’re working on, fixes as they roll out, and any other information that would be useful to our community as problems are worked on and solved.
We care deeply about this game, and we play it right alongside you. We will do better.
World of Warcraft: Midnight’s patch 12.0.5 launched on Tuesday to immediate criticism from players about buggy new content, as well as old content mysteriously malfunctioning too. Examples of major issues include the new Decor Duel (Prop Hunt) mode allowing players to easily and blatantly cheat, the newly-introduced bonus loot roll system not working at all as advertised, a final raid boss sometimes becoming unbeatable, some classes mysteriously being able to cast on the move, a buggy item that disabled players’ strafe buttons, and more. Blizzard has already addressed a handful of the major issues with hotfixes throughout the week, including most of the worst issues with Decor Duels, the invincible raid boss, and the broken bonus rolls, with more fixes planned in the future. And players who burned their bonus rolls while the feature was broken are getting those rolls restored.
Though Blizzard is clearly working to clean up this mess of a patch as fast as possible, players remain frustrated that such a buggy update made it out the door in the first place. A number of players have commented that many of the worst bugs were known and reported weeks ago on the game’s public test realm, but were simply never fixed. Some players are attributing the issues to Blizzard’s promised “every eight weeks” major patch cadence, remarking that it seems to be too fast and that a slower pace would be fine if it meant cleaner releases.
And yeah, I agree with them. Look, patches release with bugs all the time. No matter how thoroughly you test a game, once millions of people are playing it, some of them are going to find stuff wrong that a limited number of QA professionals never could. But generally speaking, in a successful launch, those issues should be limited or impact very few people doing very specific things. 12.0.5’s problems impacted just about everyone, and in multiple, major ways all at once. It was pretty egregious!
If more time will make future patches successful, let ’em have it. Midnight already has loads to do for players, particularly with the staggered release of raids. Another week without the extremely optional Decor Duel wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
