World of Warcraft is plagued by a wealth of bugs and issues. It’s slowly becoming unfortunate – and somewhat embarrassing.
Currently, the 20th anniversary of the MMORPG is being celebrated in World of Warcraft with grand festivities. A huge event offers plenty of exclusive rewards and new content. This is actually a cause for joy, and many players are quite satisfied with what is being offered.
However, there are some difficulties that stand in the way of this celebration. The number of bugs and errors has drastically increased in recent weeks. Since the release of The War Within, some issues have arisen – some more drastic, others simply annoying. To mention just a random selection of them:
- The guild bank of many guilds has been partially or completely deleted. In many cases, there is no replacement.
- Characters could be locked in houses with PvP talents.
- The scaling in timewalker dungeons is not functioning correctly.
- Many talents did not work correctly for days.
- The auction house was nearly unusable for days.
- Even in the World First Race, exploits could be used.
- After a patch, it stutters and lags when guild members use a feature.
- Boss abilities are invisible after a hotfix.
- The depths were a complete balance chaos for several weeks.
- Some characters are suddenly trapped in “empty phases” where no other players are visible.
Additionally, there is a whole range of local problems that are especially reflected in the translations. The number of typos has drastically increased, and the translations for all current Blizzard titles are becoming more questionable – even if it’s not as bad in WoW as it is in Hearthstone.
However, it is becoming more common that for some things, the German translation is completely missing, and suddenly you hear English texts or voice lines.
Time Pressure and Lack of Quality Control
One reason for the number of problems, frequently cited by the community, seems to be the drastic reduction of the Q&A team (“Quality Assurance”). Activision Blizzard was accused of implementing the “Return to Office” orders primarily among Q&A staff to make it easier to fire them.
This inadequate quality control is also noted from time to time in the WoW subreddit.
Another factor is that World of Warcraft is now releasing new content almost constantly. Even seemingly small patches now bring so many innovations that there is hardly any time left to fix all the bugs before the update is released.
This has repeatedly led to many fans wondering: How can it be that the bug is still present in the “finished” patch when I reported it multiple times on the PTR?
Everything points to the fact that “more time pressure” and “less Q&A” together lead to a problem that is not beneficial to World of Warcraft. This is particularly unfortunate, especially since one would like to celebrate the game’s birthday and hope that the MMORPG has a long future ahead.
Bugs Have Always Existed and It Has Been Worse
However, there are also some people who are exaggerating immensely. Because even if the quality is currently lacking due to the multitude of bugs, this is not the “buggiest WoW that has ever existed”. Those who claim that have forgotten many events from the past. To name just a few:
- The great “Corrupted Blood” incident that paralyzed entire cities and made WoW nearly unplayable for days.
- The curious bug where characters had negative mana regeneration and thus found themselves without mana in combat – even without casting spells.
- The errors at the start of Warlords of Draenor, where characters were trapped for hours and days on the flight path to the garrison because no further garrison instances could start.
These are all bugs that many look back on and say: “Oh, that’s gaming history, that was amusing back then.” But if you remember the comments in the forums, it was not amusing for the players at the time and it prevented them from enjoying WoW for a long time.
There are small bugs and issues that can be forgiven. If suddenly something in an old raid doesn’t work anymore, it’s annoying but not the end of the world – it’s something you can do without for a few days. In a game of the size and complexity of World of Warcraft, there will always be strange interconnections that affect old content.
However, if the bugs cause parts of the current content to be unplayable or only barely playable, or suddenly problems arise that result in entire features needing to be temporarily disabled, then that is not a good sign. And it’s unfortunate when you actually want to celebrate something as impressive as the 20th birthday of a game.
