Another Wednesday is upon us, and another somewhat significant release is behind us. The first real expansion of “HearthStone: Heroes of Warcraft” has finally arrived on the servers, and after a lot of launch issues, everything seems to be working reasonably well – at least for the moment. But with the Nether… it was quite a challenging road!
The “early morning hours” of midnight
According to schedule, the expansion was supposed to be available early Tuesday morning, so I thought to myself, “Clever Pig” that I am: “Hey, Cortyn, just stay up all night and play all morning long.” – And of course, that sounded like a brilliant idea in my ears, having pushed the release disaster of “Warlords of Draenor” deep into my subconscious again. But I would soon be reminded of that.
[pullquote]Dark circles are the tree rings of gamers – they show age, wisdom, and skill.[/pullquote]Around 6 AM, the “scheduled maintenance” was completed, but there was now a problem with the shop – players apparently could not buy packs and/or there were billing issues. A few hours of “scheduled maintenance” (which started completely spontaneously) were supposed to fix these errors.
By now it was noon, and my eyes were growing heavier – but what did it say in the Skype conference? “Dark circles are the tree rings of gamers – they show age, wisdom, and skill.”
Interrupted arena rounds and incorrect packs
Shortly after midnight (we have now arrived at Wednesday), the game could at least be started again. However, almost every match was interrupted by an error message or even completely ended, without giving the opportunity to return to the game. This is particularly annoying, of course, if you get kicked out of an arena round for which I have saved gold since “The Curse of Naxxramas”. But well: Two hours later, you could at least play without errors and snag some packs in the arena. But wait… these are the standard packs? Wasn’t it promised that the new “GvG” packs would be available in the arena?
spoiler: Yes, it was promised.
In the meantime, it seems that you can also get them, and if I’m honest, I should have realized earlier, than after my 6th arena round, that I was receiving the wrong booster packs – but I’ll blame it on my fatigue.
Blizzard has forgotten how to release
At least in recent months, there is the impression that my favorite game studio is no longer able to release a game in an acceptable state. I cannot say with certainty whether this is due to a chain of unfortunate coincidences, a reduction in staff, time pressure, DDOS attacks, or a mix of all these factors.
[pullquote]…then Red Bull also reaches the limits of its capabilities for me.
Ultimately – a bit bleakly stated – I can also not care less. As a player, it is immensely frustrating when games are not released at the promised time – but it is even worse when one is left completely in the dark about the current problems. When it’s said for almost a day “Everything will be fixed in a few hours”, then Red Bull also reaches the limits of its capabilities for me. So, my favorite developers from Blizzard: It’s not so bad if something doesn’t work out, but please don’t leave your players so in the dark – a little more communication can’t hurt!
