heel

World of Warcraft Europe -> Info -> Test Realm


Looks like we won't be seeing 2.4 on the PTR for another few weeks, at the very least.

 

Emeraude

I'd feel insulted if this patch in on the PTR for longer then 1 week.

It's a minor bug fix patch, there's no way it will take longer then a week....right? >_>

 

◊ Vectivus

If they honestly don't add more to this patch, I have to wonder why these weren't either pushed as hotfixes or saved for 2.4 - I don't see anything game-breaking.

 

• Nite_Moogle

Hey everyone, thanks for playing World of Warcraft! The Burning Crusade went live one year ago and to celebrate we're
announcing the release date for our next expansion that we said would be out in a year or so that you haven't really heard anything about since summer
pushing the content-laden 2.4 to the test realm so you can see the Sunwell and have something new to do since Illidan has been dead for quite a while now
doing a special TBC anniversary contest promotion from one of our many partners, perhaps from figureprints.com or Dell
giving the players a patch that doesn't really do anything.

Gurgthock: the time taken to implement the 10 hugs achievement could have been used to make a new 5-man

 

heel

I see two possibilities. First, there could be a high volume of bugs that they'd like to clear up before 2.4 is released. If this is the case, then we're going to see multiple builds of 2.3.3, with each one adding on additional issues. This is how they've handled some of the smaller bug-fix patches in the past. If this is the case, then we can expect a few weeks of 2.3.3 as the various builds are pushed to the PTR.

The second possiblity is that 2.4 is simply not ready for testing, and because of the way their development process works, there isn't anything to do in the interim - we're treated to these exceptionally minor bugfixes, while they take whatever time is necessary to finish up 2.4. If this is the case, and were 2.4 expected to be ready within a week or so, I think that the fixes listed here would have just been rolled into 2.4. So, if 2.4 is still being worked on, I think we can expect to wait at least a few weeks for it.

Either way, I would bet most of my gold that 2.3.3 won't go live until the 29th at the earliest, and, more importantly, that 2.4 will not be on the PTR until February at the earliest. Very disheartening.

 

Jitka

2.4 will live on the PTR for a very, very long time (6 to 8 weeks minimum is my guess), and a lot of the bugs that are currently in game are exploitative in PvP and arenas (BoP while blinded, mind control making your character stand, etc etc) or just downright annoying (UnitBuff isn't quite working correctly so filtering is broken). While not game breaking, they do change how things are suppose to work and should be addressed.

What I'm curious to see is - as has happened when previous small patches come before a large one that's in development - how many of the bugs will resurface in 2.4 because the 2.4 patch team didn't incorporate all the changes added in 2.3.3.

As much as I want to see 2.4, I don't think there should be a bitch fest about 2.3.3 coming to fix bugs introduced in 2.3.2.

 

malthrin

Yeah, this seems more like a hangup in the content pipeline somewhere that's delaying 2.4. The coders have to be doing something - may as well have them fix bugs if there's nothing else on their plates.

 

◊ Praetorian

Well they obviously can't be hotfixed or they would be.

Patch notes are never ever ever ever complete -- there are probably other changes that aren't listed. And there are probably features like reduced load times or fixing castsequence macros that they'd like to get in before 2.4, since they know 2.4 will be a long phase.

And Blizzard has said that they're basically never going to release even a mini-patch without a brief PTR period just to make sure it doesn't completely fuck things up in a live environment. That much doesn't strike me as unreasonable. A change made that affects loading times might have unforeseen consequences on a server with thousands of players, or on particularly hardware configurations, or whatever. And for all the "wtf a PTR for this piddly crap??" bitching that invariably ensues, there would be much, much louder bitching if a major bug went live in an untested build.

 

Stella

My only concern with this is the fact that participation on the test server when it's a tiny patch like this is meager to say the best, and that previously large bugs/issues have still gotten onto the live servers from minor changes that were active on the PTR. It's been awhile since I tested patches regularly though so maybe they save offering premades for patches like this and bring in a ton of folks?

 

PSGarak

My intuition is that these are the least complete patch notes to date. Bug fixes in general seem to have a hard time finding there way into patch notes (compared to balance changes) and that's most of what this is. I highly suggest that as soon as this patch goes live on the PTR we all just go down the 2.3.2 Document Issues list and check them all for fixes, or at least changed behavoir indicating they tried to fix it.
And yes, I highly anticipate a good deal of these changes will get reverted in 2.4. It's a common theme.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

Emeraude

You guys are really overestimating this patch. There's a good chance that these patch notes are complete.

2.2.0 went live, and a week later we got

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- World of Warcraft Client Patch 2.2.2 (2007-10-02)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and a week after that

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- World of Warcraft Client Patch 2.2.3 (2007-10-09)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Both of which were on the PTR for only 1 week. The former to activate Brewfest, and the latter to just fix bugs.

 

• songster

I don't think we can know at this point. The kicker is that first line, "-Loading times have been improved slightly for characters newly entering the world. "

That could be anything: a minor coding optimisation, a complete rewrite of the character database backend, or even a hardware upgrade for every server worldwide.

Each of the last few patches, starting with 2.2, but also 2.3 and subsequent, have had potentially significant back-end changes to the underlying engine - and there's more scheduled for 2.4 with the changes to combat log etc. My feeling is that they're putting things in place for some quite fundamental changes in WoTLK. Which makes sense, because the WoW engine was quite old even at release.

 

◊ Praetorian

A difference is that we were told pretty much towards the end of 2.2's PTR cycle that 2.3 was pretty much completely ready (but delayed by all the 2.2 sound crap). Here we really have very, very little solid info about 2.4 beyond "It'll have a new 25-man and a new 5-man" and we've known that almost since Blizzcon.

 

◊ Vectivus

I doubt, given that BT has been out almost since Burning Crusade released, that something like the Sunwell isn't polished off and ready to be tested. They've clearly known they were going to add this instance to the game for well over half a year.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would suggest that the interviews/blue snippets we've heard suggesting that Blizzard wants to add some PvP/class balance to 2.4 are what is delaying us. They're waiting for more FotM combos to emerge, so they can decide what they're going to do with 2.4

If all 2.4 was going to herald was this new faction, a single raid instance, and a lone 5-man dungeon, it would have been out eons ago. Hell, they've probably got most of the PvE content for a good portion of WotLK done already, too.

 

◊ Kalman

Remember that 2.4 is introducing some fairly large UI changes as well.

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

• Playered

Both of those were related to a holiday event [time fixed] so they had no choice but to do it fast.


So again a content patch is being stifled by a UI change, why cant they learn and have the UI one seperate and after the content one?

 

◊ Vectivus

I know of the combat log changes - are there other major innovations I've glazed over?

The combat log changes were announced a long time ago - I can't see that stalling 2.4.

 

• sadris

They--combat log changes--were announced at Blizzcon, but based on the [limited] information Slouken has released it appears only recently has work begun on it.

 

Northerner

Perhaps we are in the twiddle stage now and 2.3.3 will be the Valentine's patch with 2.4 coming afterwards. That brings 2.4 live around what, April 1st I suppose?

This is pure speculation of course but the timing makes some sense if they are tweaking the holiday content at the same time.

 

Renew

What type of labor laws have just passed in California? Possibly the reason why dev time has come to a huge slow.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Stella

1. January != May, not even in Soviet Russia.
2. If WotLK had even half the outdoor zones done, it would be in beta by now.
3. If we're just going to wildly speculate on why 2.4 isn't coming out all that fast, I'm hazarding two half-assed reasonings:
a) WotLk isn't moving fast enough and they are trying to maintain a proper release schedule to keep people playing WoW until it's ready..
b) Internal Sunwell dungeon/25 man testing is proving difficult, it's too hard/too easy/a boss ability drops the entire raid through the floor into a 20 minute slow plunge to their deaths/a trash mob ability disconnects gnome mages from the game/a new schematic allows engineers to actually make money with engineering/the new faction mount makes BE females legs bend behind their heads/etc.

 

• Playered

a) is flawed, as on one of the interviews they stated they had back-up storylines to use if they felt the needed to pro-long WoTLKs' release.

 

Boneitis

When has Blizzard done anything on time? Did anyone honestly expect WotLK 12 months after TBC launched? I sure didn't. Regardless of what they say, their past actions show that they will endlessly delay content until they feel good about it. I've always been figuring a Summer launch. But even then we need them to switch from preview mode on WotLK to beta mode. Chances are there will be a 2-3 month beta that the Blizzcon attendees will get into and they've said nothing about any upcoming beta.

I also wouldn't be surprised at all if Sunwell had be re-designed from what it initially was when they started working on it and that counts for the delays. After so many key quests, to find out that Sunwell is open to everyone. And via rep and dailies, or whatever, you open up the other bosses. This model is completely contrary to what we've seen so far.

And given the state of The Eye and SSC upon launch, I'd rather they take their time, than release another raid that clearly isn't finished. I do agree that there will be a fairly long PTR for 2.4 but I can't see a 2.5 patch, so this is probably the last one.

Lastly, and I'm guessing here, but I think they're intentionally delaying WotLK so that more people could see the content, ie BT and Illidan. There was a lot of negative PR on how few people experienced Naxx back in the day and how the people who did see it wouldn't shut up about how amazing it was. So they brought it back for WotLK and don't want to repeat the mistake of blocking people out of the main lore content, as shown with what they claim to be doing with Arthas and how Kael is going to be in the 5man somehow.

 

Lamey

What I personally cannot understand is that why they need to push so many different things in the same patch. Trying to push out new outdoor area, 5-man instance, raid dungeon, pvp and class changes aswell as major upgrades to ui simultaniously must be excessively resource-hogging and you constantly have to balance around as the changes to classes can easily affect (and in the worst case ruin) many things. While they probably have very good reason to do it like this I simply dont have understanding for it and I keep pondering and ranting - yet again - how come there hasn't been any content in a while. It simply doesn't feel right.

 

• Whiteknight