Patch v3.0.8 - What A (Hilarious) Mess
iTZKooPA on Friday, January 23, 2009 - 19 Comments Tags: arena, bugs, death knights, epic fail, forum ads, gold selling, hotfix, matchmaking, patch notes, patch v3.0.8, ptr, wintergrasp  Fing classic. |
Patch v3.0.8 had many of us at ProjectLore a bit excited. Heck, you could get away with calling us downright ecstatic at all the changes the first Wrath of the Lich King patch would bring. We all all had our owns reasons for the anticipation, new achievements, cheaper enchants, one-shot mining, knowing that Dorkins will never stop complaining, it was all there. Blizzard finally dropped the patch on us this Tuesday, but not all was well in the lands of Azeroth. Actually, the whole ordeal has been quite a clusterfrak.
The first major bug to rear its ugly, beady-eyed head was a Death Knight related bug. The non-gameplay issue basically nullified one of the “features” being added by v3.0.8. For many, the ability to make Death Knights on any realm, so long as you had a level 55 character somewhere, was unavailable. Not a big deal, and it didn't affect a majority of the players directly. However, the hotfix forced a series of rolling restarts, the first of many to come.
The next two issues were huge, game changing problems that brought major features of WoW to its knees. A bit more troublesome than some lag and server restarts for sure. Lake Wintergrasp, a highly touted feature for Wrath's release, had a moth in it so bad that it crashed servers or at least Northrend (depending on reports). I was indirectly informed that Wintergrasp's issue had something to do with zone population. According to the informer, the zone was not stress tested heavily enough on the PTR. This allowed the bug to sneak into the live code and wreak havoc.
The next major $#*() is far more upsetting than Lake Wintergrasp being disabled. Blizzard silently modified the way Arena matching and rating was calculated in the patch with disastrous results. The modifications allowed teams to shoot up to 2000+ ranking in no time flat. This was caused by the fact that a losing team did not see a reduction in Arena points. Following the Wintergrasp debacle, Blizzard pulled the plug on Arenas as they attempted to correct the bug.
What's worse (to some) is that the developers decided that everything gained during this time frame was “illegitimate.” Do to their stance, the company reset team and personal ratings to pre-weekly maintenance levels, removed all awarded gems, points and enchantments. I for one agree with them on this entirely, but it still sucks when people waste their time. Kalgan also has a post up that goes into more detail on the rollback.
Hopefully we can have an uneventful weekend after this morning's emergency maintenance “to resolve current In-Game issues,” but at this point who knows. I guess I may have been lucky as none of these bugs really bothered me. I have avoided Wrath PvP so far, as I am still working on my gear. On my server the Alliance was stuck with the Wintergrasp buff. So that was cool. In fact, my buddy who plays the game for the Arena actually ran some rare instances!
Oh geez, I almost forgot this non-patch related dozy. Despite my best efforts to warn them about the pitfalls of ads on their official forums, Blizzard got a little greedy and did it anyways. As the screenshot shows, an unapproved group of ads slipped through their filtering process. Someone over at Microsoft (who owns the ad provider) is getting canned. At least the banner managed to stay on topic!
Tell me Bastosa, was this the mess you were “so anxious” about?
Reader Comments (19)
first!!!! OWNED
second?
third: profit
lmao at teh 1st 2nd and 3rd comments as well as the gold farm adds on wow forums
You forgot to mention the warlock summoning bug...oh unless that was intended as a nerf. Because as we all know, summoning was OP!
Haha, I love the gold-selling ads on the forums.
To answer the above question regarding warlock summoning: It was intended to get buffed, where warlock could actually summon a Meeting Stone wherever they were instead of a portal and people could be summoned with that. At least that's what I heard was supposed to happen, but instead, they didn't do it and on top of that, they gave the spell a cooldown.
And the Naxx Summoning Stone >.<
Yeah the summoning stone thing blows. I was excited cos i though 'oh great i'm going to save on shards now'. But it's so crap now. They've not given us what was promised and they've made the orginal significantly worse. If they knew it wasn;t going to work then surely they could have left the cooldown off.
lol, They actually allowed goldfarmer ads on the official forums? Epic fail XD
I haven't seen any bugs yet other than the kicking the characters off in Northrend like once every five minutes not long after the patch hit live. Though with every MMO -especially lately- it seems they're handing out patches that may fix some things, but create other problems. I don't know if it's because they have to work on a deadline or that they're getting lazy to test their patches well enough or simply overlooked them. However I do know I have come to fear patches, lol.
Supreme, classic irony. My laptop can be quite slow in loading a webpage that's either got a lot of links, graphics -- or both -- so I feel that Blizzard got its just desserts in putting ads on the forums.
iTZKooPA, Wintergrasp on the day the patch was released was TERRIBLE. Had latency up the wall; disconnecting; the timer wonked so that after one fight had ended, the next would begin immediately... And just in general, patch day was near close to being as bad as the day 3.0.2 was released. x_x
I was so glad when Blizzard disabled Wintergrasp becuase I saw almost immediate improvement on some of the issues. Also turned out that my faction (the Horde), got stuck with the buff.
All that was on the Malfurion server; I don't know if all the other realms experienced what mine did.
Oh, and I forgot to mention this: On patch day, there was a double daily for heroic Utgarde Pinnacle. So of course, there's all these players going to that instance to do the stuff. Very unfortunately... the third boss had become undefeatable. The reason why is because the boss, at various points during the fight, would reset. So it was wipe after wipe until the party(s) would throw up their hands and call it quits.
Another issue is that my twin, who's a mage, was in said pug. When she tried to use her mirror image spell during the second boss fight, NOTHING happened. Her spell still went into cooldown despite that little fact. (It has been hotfixed since then.)
Thank god im leveling an alt right now so i have not been bothered by any of the bugs....so i gues lucky me sorry for all you ppl who got affected though...and well done iTZKooPA i love reading your blogs bcause they are informative,on the issues and sometimes make me laugh.
so keep up the good blogging :)
I noticed on my Chopper mount that falling damage no longer happends and dismounts you. I jump from Dalaran and nothing. Plus a drop for the boss of Nexus didn't show in me inv when I won the need roll. There still looking into that for me.
Small things in the grand bug fest, but I want my item
Sphere of the Red Dragon's Blood...
yea they buged my sumoning spell im suposta be able to sume as maney people as i can in 5 min (cozinga 2 min CD on spell cast) but no it wont work andnow it take 10-30 min to sumon my "peeps" to do stuff....
I've always said the patches didn't get tested quite properly... while it's necessary to rely on so many users to test content, players are a fickle bunch and are prone to overlooking critical features without significant incentive to actually get in on the stress testing front.
This is why so many problems have crept into the game during patches.
I've always felt there was a disconnect between how the content was developed and how players were likely to respond and interact with it.
Con't above post:
This is why content designed to address <T5 needs like ZA gear wound up distorted to past T5 in terms of quality, while the difficulty of the instance - aimed at T4 guilds, became distorted towards T6 guilds. The people who actually had the time, interest to deal with ZA on the PTR were the ones who were already clearing T6 content. Instead of acting as a bridge to T5, like it'd been originally designed, it provided supplemental content for endgame guilds instead, Because of how those guilds were involved in testing.
I would like to thank blizzard for making my WoW fun, by showing me that cute little Gal-
Survival
-Warlock-
Its so annoying with the summoning "debuff" or "bug" or whatever you want to call it. They better fix it soon, nothing is more annoying then getting excited for something to get buffed then having to use 3 shards and 6 min. to summon some raid members.
lol i hope DK arent to seriuosly buged i guass i was one of the lucky once to axualy get though the pinnacle my first pinnacle run herioc havent able to do much since than though