#5 - March 11, 2008, 4:38 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I was just curious as to why Blizzard always waits until a major patch to release fixes/changes that they have stated are going to come out? I'm not talking about things like class balance issues that constantly change on the ptr, but overall gameplay issues and changes. A couple that come to mind currently are the mana biscuit limit and the removal of diminishing returns on honor kills. I'm sure there are others as well.
My question is why can't they just implement these things during the weekly maintenance as they are ready instead of waiting for one big batch of changes? IMO it would make it easier for them to deal with unforseen problems and glitches if they came out a little at a time instead of getting flooded with the problems all at once.
To answer your question, there are a couple of a reasons...
1) From a technical standpoint, we can't make some of the changes stated above without patching the client and server. We *need* to patch them in. We can't just make those changes magically appear during maintenance. Some of those changes are beyond the scope of what is possible in a hotfix as well. We'd love to be able to change stuff like that on the fly, but we can't do it from a technical standpoint.
2) Even if we could do those changes without a patch, it would be very risky. Any change, however small, can cause a ripple effect of bugs in the game. It's very important to test out any change before pushing it live.
3) Assuming there were no bugs, we still want to see things on the PTR to test things from a design standpoint. Think about all of the changes that were done in 2.4 which were eventually backed out. The change to drinking, the class changes etc. We need to see how some of these ideas play out in a semi-live environment first.
Hope this explains things a bit.
