Xav

I'm reinstalling all the games off of the DVD right now to see if that fixes it, I have a feeling it will. I converted my beta install to live as well and got the exact same error, tried a few things to see if it would fix it, no dice.

 

Alerian

So was wandering around Zul'Drak now and saw a quest ! over Chronicler To'kini. Quest is "Tails Up" and I'm pretty sure it's new as I was almost certain I had done all of the quests in the zone before today. Can't find any mention of it in this thread or on Wowhead. Doesn't seem to lead to any other quests, just a quest to help fill in the zone.

 

Spink

Same here. I'm optimistic because I was able to patch my pre-wotlk install fine (even though I can't play with it due to wotlk being enabled on my account)

Edit: Jinxing myself here but I've passed the 2% patched point at which it previously crashed.

Edit: Yay all fixed! Not an issue with my computer an issue with converted beta D:

 

Xav

Indeed, reinstalling fresh off the DVD fixed the issues, so now you guys have 2 cases of beta client being not the best idea after all for long-term laziness!

 

clavarnway

I got a uncommon gem. Haven't gotten a rare one but I didn't mine much.

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/1424974uXyta.png

 

Spink

Interestingly it seems a lot easier to jump up on ledges like something about player physical boxes were changed or player velocity/jump height. Stormwind fountain and floaty rock in Dalaran are covered with people loving it - wonder if it makes Thaddius jump easier for people who struggle or any other future ledge bosses.

 

Valerys

I suspect this is because many people were stuck at 99/100 for ZD quest achievement due to some missed quests that could not be done at a later time.

 

Kegsta

No wonder my quest helper didn't tell me what to do with that quest.

I just leveled my Paladin from 77-78 in under 3 hours in ZD, the 1 second loot time on quest items (down from 5 seconds) is an absolute godsend, it make the painful quests where you must loot 10 things so much easier.

How much are relics of uldar going for on other servers? I was able to grab 10k worth of rep for 700g this morning, and now they are up at 700g for 5k rep.

 

Mideci

Relics on our AH are sitting at 2g-10g each, in bundles from 1-100. (Please, ban Auctioneer, it's botting.) That said, there are 50,000 relics on the AH and I bought 200 in trade for 1g apiece. I don't see this as a particularly good item to farm for profit as the price seems headed low. Good for rep grinders, of course.

 

Vaccine

Thats probably in part because they've had no use up to now except for some random buff/debuffs and the flask. Anyone who even did a few dailys a day will probably have a stack of 250 and those who got exalted SoH through quets 3-4. I suspect they'll begin to rise in price once these people have got rid of theirs and settle out at somewhere around 3-5g each.

 

Douglas

(delete, redundant)

 

Putts

It's possible, however, I had a guildmate that had this issue, it was the only achievement keeping him from getting Loremaster. When he logged in yesterday, he was immediately awarded the ZD as well as the Loremaster achievements.

 

Volrath50

TBH, I'm really surprised at the sheer number (and scale) of bugs that made it into the patch, despite it being on the PTR for something like 6 weeks.

I suppose much of that is because there wasn't a whole lot of interest to test the patch on the PTR. Hopefully interest in Ulduar means Blizzard can avoid something like this.

"As surely as I live forever, when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgement, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me."

 

• Vykromond

Players are never going to be an effective, comprehensive QA team. It's just not going to happen. If Blizzard is really relying on players as unpaid QA, especially for a patch like 3.0.8, then they're being exceedingly foolish.

Furthermore, just because there might be more people on the 3.1 PTR doesn't mean bugs will necessarily be averted. Players don't test in a methodical matter; they test what's fun, which is generally raid content and sometimes arenas.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

 

4LV

Some of the bugs of the 3.0.8 patch you can quite easily understand why they never were discovered on the PTR. For instance the WG crashing server issue. How many people go on to the PTR to do a WG? Other bugs are a bit more baffling, for instance eating inside instances, though, again, people are not very likely to do instances on the PTR when they can do them on the live realms instead.

 

Corvin

Blizzard seems to have adopted really hard deadlines for their releases lately. 3.0.2 went live when class blancing was still going on (good example is knee-jerk retribution changes after).

Expansion went live despite there being obvious issues with latency and instance stability (as probably anybody who tried to wrap up SWP post 3.0.2 can attest).

There was a lot of issues reported on PTR forum and either confirmed by blue as "known issue" or "we'll look into it". I have not really tracked PTR as far as other classes go but some death knight issues were known for quite some time. Didn't stop them from realeasing and having to hotfix them day after.

Blizzard itself could also do a whole lot better job of trying to herd players to test the things they have changed (unreleased item sets on premade characters or what not, could easily make people flock to PTR).

 

Spink

Am tempted to discuss blizzard QA methods and ways in which players could be funneled into testing different content to make sure it was tested at all but not sure if this is the thread to do it in.

 

Unity

Semi-permanent characters would be a good start - if you got to keep anything you'd worked for on PTR it would be much more attractive to keep an alt or two there. I say semi-permanent rather than permanent because it is still a test server and wipes might happen - just only if absolutely required and not automatically as a matter of policy each patch.

 

Volrath50

I'm not surprised there were bugs, just, it seemed like this patch was up there for a LONG time, especially for a rather minor patch.

I'm guessing that the majority of QA and internal testing is being done on 3.1 and Ulduar, so 3.0.8 got neglected internally.

Ah well, still enjoying the new DK tanking stuff, and I'm fully expecting Ulduar to be pretty damn good.

"As surely as I live forever, when I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgement, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me."

 

Pyros

Thing is, it was up for almost a month without any update, most likely due to end of the year festivities stuff. Then when they started making changes again, they made a lot, which created a lot of bugs. Then they patched, so obviously some stuff was going to be bugged. I know some of the class bugs were known and reported before they patched, but they still decided to go with it, I guess because of their "new" hotifixng system where they can just hotfix small stuff(like obliterate not generating threat, very annoying, but not gamebreaking).

The issue with random people testing on the PTR is, that patch didn't have any new content. A few people hopped in to check their new class changes, but most didn't even need to be tested because just reading about the change was obvious enough. This kind of patch don't get a lot of testing because most people are uninterested. I'm sure once they have Ulduar on PTR, it'll be packed(and laggy), especially with the current state of raiding where you clear all content in a night then count your thumbs for the rest of the week(and it seems early reports indicate that we don't have enough thumbs to count either).

I think if xmas/newyear didn't happen in the middle of that PTR, it would have been much quicker, and might have been better tested, because people wouldn't have lost the will to check new changes when they've been waiting for 2months for the initial changes, hi stoneskin gargoyle runeforge and def sigil.

 

SentinelBorg

There is also a new one near Gun'drak.

 

Zoee

It may have been a minor patch (in the sense of you not having to download 900mb), but it was a very complex patch. And with complexity, the chance of bugs increases. The amount of changes in the patch was immense, and that's not taking into account all the changes and fixes that didn't make it to the patch notes.

 

◊ songster

They seem to have changed a lot of internal stuff in 3.0.8 - server architecture changes to make it easier to hotfix future changes. That's the kind of backend stuff that we just don't see client-side. I wouldn't actually be surprised if the patch timetable was much more dictated by those server-side considerations than by anything we actually saw and tested. And with that kind of stuff going on, it's entirely unsurprising that some of the hotfixes made to pre 3.0.8 Live version didn't get applied to the PTR (and subsequent patch builds).

Certainly they've done more hotfixes after the patch than usual - and also I believe they've hotfixed different kinds of stuff that would normally require a minor patch. This actually bodes very well for the future.

 

Mideci

Let's be honest, though, WoW is incredibly complicated. On the one hand, it's fairly amazing it works as well as it does. On the other hand, there is significant evidence Blizzard doesn't do a good job of "version control" and product management.

Two examples to illustrate the point:

(1) Old bugs are routinely reintroduced into the game. This can only be explained by real poor version-control management practices allowing old code that should never see live, well, see live. A good example: There's a bug from beta where the adds from Violet Hold leave the portal in opposite directions making it unnecessarily complicated to run around gathering them up when they hit the ground. It hasn't been in live Wrath -- until 3.0.8. It's small, but real. I'm sure many many of you can recall bugs disappearing and reappearing. It's actually fairly remarkable the game doesn't break under the weight of an inadequate version-control mechanism.

(2) Product management is lacking. How is it even possible there is not one, complete, accurate set of patch notes? Well, in part, there was clearly no PRD/MRD for the patch that was complete and comprehensive, in all likelihood. If there were, there'd be a definitive document that outlined every change. Maybe there exists such a document at Blizzard, but I'm not convinced. There are a large number of subtle dungeon changes in the patch that are not documented (e.g. the pull late in Gundrak that was moved 20 yards backwards on the bridge) while absolutely insignificant changes (e.g. you can pick the one mustard that only some of us knew the trick for picking in Dalaran) are featured in the patch notes. End users are not going to do a good job of testing on PTR when they rely on a hodgepodge of non-comprehensive lists to know what is even supposed to have been changed.

 

Douglas

This is something I've seen Blizzard do better on in the past (eg. betas), that I'd like to see them improve on for their PTRs -- communicate more about areas for focused testing.

I participated in the 3.0.8 PTR. I tried to test what I could. I did in fact find one bug that did get fixed (relating to the new alchemy flask -- I figured I should test all the new alchemy stuff), but after that, I didn't know where to focus my attention.