Why do you think Blizzard is having a hard time getting features right the first time?

We’re two weeks away from The War Within early access and many World of Warcraft players are finishing up their WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria plans while fighting off the Radiant Echoes for gear and collectibles. These events — as well as Plunderstorm earlier this year — launched with issues though, both technical and conceptual, that resulted in a frustrated playerbase. While the development team should be celebrated for making the effort to fix these experiences after launch, one has to wonder why this keeps happening when the fixes more often than not are simple ones.

This issue doesn’t just plague WoW, of course. Diablo 4 has pretty much spent all of Season 4 and Season 5 fixing the issues that have plagued the game since launch. And while I don’t consider Overwatch 2‘s decision to lock new heroes behind the season pass to be the same type of misstep (it was much much worse, and therefore likely executive-driven, rather than developer-driven) it seems to be part of a larger pattern of not recognizing potential stumbling blocks during the development and tuning phase. So why are these problems cropping up?

Part of the issue is one I’ve talked about before: Blizzard needs to rethink their testing approach. PTR testing still seems to no longer be enough, especially with the relatively accelerated patch cycle and all the new events. Plunderstorm was an interesting test case as it wasn’t even put on the PTR and while it’s arguable it should’ve been, the main issue was leveling speed and I’m not sure that would’ve been caught via PTR testing unless players were specifically tasked to examine it.

That actually appears to be the biggest stumbling block for most of these events — no one seems to be “mathing out” the implications. If it’s going to take players 40 hours a week for 10 weeks to unlock everything in your event (or in the case of Diablo 4, reach level 100) that’s not going to fly with the community, especially if the event is only eight weeks long. While it’s easy to blame executive requirements for player engagement as to why it looks like it’ll take so long, there needs to be someone who as part of the development process takes the time both to research anticipated time spent as well as advocate for the players’ experience. It’s great that ReMists added all these unused weapon appearances, but the fact that collecting all of them is a full time job means that you’re more likely to lose engagement entirely.

Again, it’s great that the development team isn’t letting issues linger, and maybe this is something that is in the process of being fixed by the new Microsoft ownership regime (or may even have been caused by uncertainty in the transition). But easily-avoided stumbles like these can reduce engagement rather than increase it, and one has to wonder how many players gave up on ReMists or reaching level 100 in Diablo 4 before Blizzard had a chance to fix the issues.

But what do you think? Is this simply the new reality of video gaming, where nothing should be expected to release without issue? Do you think the recent troubles could be the result of Microsoft and/or the executives interfering with gaming concepts they don’t understand? Is the answer for Blizzard to simply hire a “VP of Common Sense” to examine each new feature before it releases? Or do you think there are other factors at play?