World of Warcraft game director on the woeful patch 11.1.5: ‘It’s not the experience our players are expecting or deserve’

World of Warcraft’s latest patch was riddled with bugs and time-gated content, frustrating players and causing some pundits to pan it as a disaster, with even friendlier streamers noting that the patch process is broken and that Blizzard blew it. (See our full report for the details).

I recently interviewed WoW senior game director Ion Hazzikostas, who said that the 11.1.5 launch did not go as planned and that Blizzard needs to do better. He spoke about the bugs surrounding the new in-game Flame’s Radiance events, which launched in the patch.

“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.”

Time-gated content

Hazzikostas also spoke about the patch’s unusual approach to time-gating content. Many of the update’s most-exciting features, including the release of a new form of bad-luck protection, a new game mode where players can fight two raid bosses at once, and the return of Horrific Visions and Corruption enchants, were all delayed to weeks into the patch—until June, in some cases.

That left only the Flame’s Radiance events as the main content available at patch launch, and since they were bugged, the patch as a whole landed with a splat.

“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.”

Because so many of the features of the new patch involved the same segment of players—those who enjoy WoW’s group-PvE content, such as dungeons and raids—developers thought it might make sense to space them out, so that people wouldn’t be overwhelmed, he said.

“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.”

But players were angered by the delays, particularly in light of the buggy patch event.

“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.”

The bugs

Players were frustrated by bugs that cropped up that had already been fixed in earlier patches, and other bugs with their characters that didn’t seem related to the new content. Many blamed the game’s accelerated patch schedule, which has a new release dropping every eight weeks or so, the fastest cadence in WoW’s history.

“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.

Part of the issue is that developers have been using hotfixes more aggressively to correct bugs, because they allow for instant changes instead of waiting until the next patch, he said.

Day two of patch 11.1.5 and i still have no idea how the MAIN event of this patch works. Its stuck on 00:00 since the patch released. from r/wow

Above: A bug complaint posted to Reddit shortly after the patch was released.

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.”

Players have enjoyed the faster patch rates, so the team is looking for ways to improve, not slow down, Hazzikostas said.

“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.”