How should World of Warcraft handle the arrival of Dragonflight patch 10.2.6?

Dragonflight patch 10.2.6 is due to arrive this month with an unknown set of features due to the unusual step of skipping PTR. As such it’s hard to gauge how ready it is to go live since there’s no regular update of patch notes to measure progress. I’ve been monitoring “This Week in WoW” because that’s where they tend to announce patch release days now, but there’s been no word. A thought occurred to me: could this patch arrive without any warning?

While we don’t know what the patch will contain when it goes live, we do know what it won’t deliver any changes to the current Season 3 as Season 4 — despite being part of patch 10.2.6 — will be tested on the PTR after the patch arrives. With likely nothing impacting progression coming right away, patch 10.2.6 could arrive in true pirate fashion as a surprise attack on our game.

Of course, there are a couple big reasons the development team may not want to drop an entire patch on the community as a surprise. For one thing I expect patch release date announcements lead to an uptick in resubs and even though “surprise patch” would be newsworthy it may not give the same returning player spike to the bottom line.

There’s also the technical aspect. Patches preload to the client now and while I’m sure they don’t want to deliver them early for datamining avoision reasons, trying to deliver an untested client patch during a limited downtime window is something that normally only happens in techies’ nightmares. At the bare minimum we would have some warning — even if it was just a day — when the patch starts to deploy client-side. Encryption would help with keeping the content under wraps but its arrival wouldn’t be a complete surprise. It’s a shame because if any patch deserved a stealth release it’s patch 10.2.6.

But what do you think? Would you enjoy the community reaction to a surprise patch? Or would the lack of forewarning be an annoyance or inconvenience to you? And what’s going to be in the patch anyway?