Discussion: Is it okay for an MMO expansion’s launch to be buggy?

After finishing the great, herculean labour that is attempting to review a World of Warcraft expansion, one thing’s been sitting around in my dome—in my estimation, Midnight’s an excellent time that’s been let down by some rough bugs and messy integrations.

These are things I mention, but overall I’ve taken them on the chin. And that’s mostly because I’ve been playing MMOs for the better half of my life, at this point. I’ve seen multiple expansion launches, and absolutely none of them have been clean-cut—the terrible queues of Endwalker still haunt me.

Whether it’s server issues or bugs, very few MMO expansions set sail without something going terribly wrong, because these are monstrously complicated, long-lived games. I don’t envy any developer or QA tester whose job it is to try and stamp out bugs in a game with over two decades of design intricacies underpinning it.

But despite my sympathies, I also get why people sharpen their pitchforks over this stuff, especially given that many MMOs ask for a paid subscription. Time is money, as the goblins say.

This is especially difficult in games where seasonal progression is a thing—take, for example, a loot bug in WoW that’s seen players only getting loot for a specific slot. There’s small, forgivable bugs—and then there’s bricking a character’s progression for their first season of your game. Not good.

But how much is too much? I am asking you, reader of Terminally Online, to pitch in with your opinions, both in the following poll and in the comments below.

I’m personally willing to overlook scuffed nonsense like this, but then again, that’s because I’m not much of a hardcore player—I’ve done Savage raiding in FF14 before, but the gear treadmill isn’t the first and foremost thing on my mind. I can, however, see the appeal in wanting to chase that item level deadline.

And there is, of course, a limit. Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker is one of my favourite RPG stories of all time, but I’d be lying if the constant disconnects and queue times didn’t eat at me back in the day.