This site has the answer!

http://www.patchtimer.org/

Hehe...

Yeah, I suppose I'm somewhat jaded after all the other games/companies... But I never expected I would view Blizzard as just another Sony after such a short period of time.

Ah well, at least the game itself is still hella fun, even if the infrastructure to support it is utter crap.

They would have had to wait for Euro release at most before they could do anything as it would have been silly to release content before a major release. Im assuming they might be releasing in some other places too still...so maybe will need to wait until they are out too?

Just a guess.

Id expect something in the next couple of months personally.

Tils

nope, they're done worldwide for release, Blizzard has always been the "big patch, long wait" type company, I would hope they're going to work towards changing that to a certain degree for WoW.

I myself haven't run out of content yet, not by a LONG shot, but some people have, and they seem to be pretty vocal (and in some cases downright annoying)

Yeah, I suppose I'm somewhat jaded after all the other games/companies... But I never expected I would view Blizzard as just another Sony after such a short period of time.
Why are you viewing them like another Sony? I see Blizzard waiting to release content because it isn't quite right or it was in QA and something was found that was wrong. If anything, they may be too worried about getting things "perfect". Sony seemed to be about getting content out quickly and fixing it later. Both approaches IMO have advantages and disadvantages, but really don't seem all the similar to me.

And no matter how fast they release content, they will not be able to stay ahead of those who eat the content the fastest. However, getting things in that are repeatable (battlegrounds, more raids/instances with good loot, etc.) helps a lot with this.

Anyway, yeah, that site is pretty amusing :)

No, Blizzard's problem is the "giant patch" mentality, which works fine for regular games and is perfect for applications, but it isnt appropriate for an MMOG. It's all working out much like people expected... Blizzard can make a hell of a game, but they are showing their newbieness when it comes to actually *running* the thing. I think the patchtimer guy wrote a little bit about his opinions on giant patches and MMOG's, and I agree.

In any case, I've heard that they are in code-lock now, so maybe we'll get a bugfix patch in a couple weeks... and considering the truly gigantic number of unresolved bugs (many from beta are still around...) they should be doing bug patches much more often. I dont care if the developers have to stay up all night once every 2 weeks pushing out a patch... they've recently pulled in a hundred million dollars of revenue (or more), and if they cant do it, they need to open up the pocketbook and hire some more people.

The reasons why are varied, but some of them include their policies for dealing with major bugs. You've got a problem like raid saving which is causing huge issues, which they've known about since BETA, and they either have no idea how to fix it(which is frankly quite scary) or they are taking their sweet ass time getting to it. Meanwhile, something oh so important such as lull, gets hotfixed into the game sans patch.

Yes, in terms of patching policies in general, blizzard is a highly different beast, and it could be argued whether or not that is actually a good thing. But when it comes to keeping their customers in the loop, lying/misinforming their customers(Some classic cases where Tyren would say one thing, and then thankfully a dev like Tigole would come back and tell us the real deal or the various stealth nerfs after a maintenance that weren't communicated to the players or even their own community managers), GM support in general, and all of the other support oriented areas, Blizzard is making the same mistakes an dropping the same balls that SOE did. I can tell that they are *trying* to correct this by how verbose they are being of late, but throwing lots of words at us with no actual specifics is really not helping.

***

I appologize for the run on nature of some of the above, got interrupted a couple times and no time to go back and edit. ;)

Anyway, bottom line is, from the outside looking in, the entire company looks horribly mismanaged. Bad internal communication, poor allocation of resources, etc. That is exactly how I viewed SOE. The funny thing is glancing over at the EQ2 side of things, it looks like that team is doing a fantastic job of being everything SOE wasn't... *shrugs*

Well if only we could get the EQ2 live team to run WoW, we might have the perfect game!

They just need to set a one patch a month deadline and patch whats done at that point. Instance, quests, bugs whatever patch whats done and people will be happy. There has to be stuff thats just sitting waiting for their super patch to come.

Granted I almost want it to wait to be able to try Dire Maul with my guild for the first time, rather than catch it after they have done it a few times. :lol:

Well if only we could get the EQ2 live team to run WoW, we might have the perfect game!

Well... EQ has nearly 8 years of experience in dealing with MMO's. The do a decent job on patches and fixes.... but barely. Now, I know that the EQ2 live team has much more to deal with (more classes = more bugs and balancing issues) so I will kinda give them a break, but the end game of EQ2 is totally broken. That is why my guild recently left and started fresh in WoW. There is nothing like spending countless hours and deaths to develope a strat to kill something huge, only for it to drop some a stack of crap items that could be found on random zone trash 20 levels below. And this isnt a issolated instance, but constant.

Oh, as for class fixes in WoW, dont feel bad. For the first 2 - 3 months of running EQ2, over 15% of each classes skills were broken, bugged, or otherwise unusable. SOE was great about patching simply because they had SOO much TOO patch.

There is nothing like spending countless hours and deaths to develope a strat to kill something huge, only for it to drop some a stack of crap items that could be found on random zone trash 20 levels below. And this isnt a issolated instance, but constant.

Ahh.... that brings back memories of eq1...

For some reason people either forget or gloss over the fact that the current EQ2 team is almost entirely made up of people who worked on EQ1, minus the really talented people that Brad has been scooping up. Then they (the EQ2 fans) go on about how it's "seperate teams" when it comes to developing the two games, etc, etc... well we heard that story before too, and it was BS then.

I dont actually think the EQ2 team could do a better job handling the explosive success of WoW. I *do* think that someone at Blizzard needs to wake the f*** up, get things in gear, and start pushing bugfix patches. Raid lockout bug fixed internally? Well push it for gods sake. They hotfixed other stupidly trivial things... mostly nerfs... And why is there no public test server? Why are they hanging on to that legacy CRAP forum software that breaks under the slightest load, when there are many tried and tested packages that DO the job and dont break!

The Cryptic CoH team handled their unexpected success much better. Why is that kind of good performance and service so hard to duplicate?

Raid lockout bug fixed internally? Well push it for gods sake. They hotfixed other stupidly trivial things... mostly nerfs... And why is there no public test server? Why are they hanging on to that legacy CRAP forum software that breaks under the slightest load, when there are many tried and tested packages that DO the job and dont break!



Haha, hell yeah.

Most of the good Blizzard people left too ;)

I don't see any of the companies (the big ones anyways) being any different.

I had to wait hours for GM support the other day to fix a broken quest mob in the Barrens. Isn't supposed to be SONY'S thing to have bad CS? No, its everyone. No one can afford to have enough CS to make everyone happy (and still have a profitable game).

BitTrickle. What a CROCK. I'm no Sony lover, but DAMN, they (and every other MMORPG I've EVER played) do a FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR better job distributing patches.

And todays debacle with the servers. All this proves is they "waited" to release the "live" game. The WoW we started with was just beta. They got the servers running fairly good in beta, and held on tight for the release. They didn't want to fiddle with too much because they knew this would happen. And it did.

I'm only playing WoW because of friends. I did the beta, saw the problems it had/has.

There won't be any MMORPG that's any different for a long time. In fact, I don't think I WANT MMORPG's anymore. I want to play with a group of friends in a huge dynamic world. Not with a bunch of random dorks named Leigholas or Sepperoth.

BitTrickle. What a CROCK. I'm no Sony lover, but DAMN, they (and every other MMORPG I've EVER played) do a FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR better job distributing patches.


i agree with this, and also am playing because of friends, we try and play every mmo that comes out lol...^^, i must say tho...WOW has definitely had its problems but also its shining moments. and practially speaking, the good out weighs the bad IMO. just happy to be able to see WOW on a mmo level and first hand experience! ^^