MeinMMO demon Cortyn finds the state of the latest patches in World of Warcraft shocking. Unfortunately, a trend continues.
For a few weeks now, the Pre-Patch 12.0 of World of Warcraft Midnight has been live, and the feedback is quite mixed. While fans of housing are over the moon building mage towers, cursed caves, or simply crazy houses, things are crunching at all other corners.
The new interface has problems, disconnects are occurring more frequently, the new talent system is partially faulty, and the new Devourer specialization crash-landed at launch. This is all quite embarrassing for an over 20-year-old MMORPG that, although it delivers significantly more content now, still cannot ensure the quality of these patches more than 3 years after the release of Dragonflight.
Public perception and reality clash hard
I like videos like the “State of Azeroth” from a few days ago. There, the developers spoke for about 30 minutes about the current and future World of Warcraft. Sure, most of the information was already known if one follows the news somewhat regularly. Nevertheless, I find such regular communication with the community important – because not everyone works (like me) in the field or absorbs every WoW info like a sponge.
Yet there is quite a reality gap between “This is how we present the game” and “This is how the game really is right now”:
- The interface frequently outputs LUA errors for many players – even without installed addons. Some recommend an absurd macro because of this.
- The Devourer Demon Hunter was a total flop in the first days. Both in terms of gameplay and damage dealt – leveling with him was barely possible, as there were no weapons for him during the leveling phase.
- Disconnects are occurring more frequently, whether flying, in housing, or just jumping, as many are reporting again today in the WoW Subreddit.
- A bug caused players’ characters to be ported against their will.
- The pre-event had to be patched on the very first day because some rare enemies were bugged, and the necessary time for earnable rewards was unbelievably long.
No, Patch 12.0 is certainly not the qualitatively best pre-patch World of Warcraft has ever seen. I also don’t believe it’s “the absolutely worst pre-patch of all time” – but it’s simply not good.
This is incredibly unfortunate.
Community becomes the test team, patch day becomes a flop
Once again, the community has realized that they are basically being used as “second beta testers” and still are. When one announces in a video how great it currently is in World of Warcraft, how exciting the pre-event is, and how good the talent overhaul is, it’s simply a shame when in the game:
- You experience a pre-event where you have to wait 10 minutes after each rare mob just to receive 1 badge, of which you need 40 for a single item.
- Talent trees show “red” lights because they supposedly require talents that were removed with the patch.
- You see a new specialization that is monotonous, deals no damage, and seems unfinished.
Yes, many of these issues have since been fixed. The Devourer Demon Hunter has improved, in the pre-event enemies now appear every 5 minutes, drop 2-3 tokens, and the costs of items have been reduced. But that took time.
Logging in on patch day and discovering that everything isn’t working properly or is poorly balanced has unfortunately become tradition in World of Warcraft.
Every single event that World of Warcraft has brought in the last 3 years has been poorly calculated at the beginning. The ratio of “time invested in play” to “what rewards do I get for it?” has every time been a complete flop.
Just to illustrate this with numbers from the pre-event:
- The number of tokens for rare enemies has been increased from 1 to 2-3 (which is +100% to 200%).
- The timer for rare enemies has been reduced from 10 minutes to 5 minutes (that’s x2, as there are twice as many enemies leaving tokens).
- The costs for items have been reduced from 40 to 20, thus 50% less (that’s x2, as there are twice as many items for the same amount of tokens).
If you now add these numbers together, Blizzard has increased the event and the rewards through the rare enemies by more than 600%.
Or, to express that in necessary time:
- Before the changes, one had to farm for 6 hours and 30 minutes for a single purchasable item.
- After the changes, it’s only 45 minutes (at worst) or 30 minutes (at best).
Blizzard is not “just barely hitting the mark” here – they aimed in a completely different direction.
Because it’s very current: Fresh today (February 4, 2026), Blizzard has even completely dismantled this goal again by essentially saying “Now everything doesn’t matter anymore”: Second characters now receive the tokens for weekly and world quests as well. This means that one can complete the whole event within a few hours if one just plays on 3-4 characters.
The patch is tested in the live environment
No matter how you turn it: No recognizable work has gone into the reward system of this patch.
The patch day should be the day that one looks forward to – when one feels a “hype”. Small errors can be forgiven. But when events and new content are structurally poorly balanced or faulty, it is detrimental.
Midnight looks really good. I’m immensely looking forward to the release of the new expansion and believe that we will get one of the best expansions of all time. But that does not excuse how this patch turned out.
Because the disappointing WoW reality we have to live with right now is: “Oh, a new patch is here? Better wait another 2 weeks before you play it.” It just shouldn’t be this way.
We do know that not everyone will survive the world soul saga – but it would be nice if that also applied to the bugs.
