The first well-known news is the result of a communication breakdown (within Blizzard). One of those that are becoming “the norm”. Caydiem announces on the official forums that the discovery of a nasty bug related to the Hunter class won’t lead to a fix in the next patch because they ran out of time and they need to rush the patch out as fast as possible considering that they are still way behind the schedule:

Here’s where it stands as of tonight, folks.

What is it?
There is a bug in 1.5 that adds ranged weapon speed to the cooldown of Multi-Shot, Arcane Shot and Aimed Shot.

This is a bug that will, unfortunately, go live with the 1.5 patch as it stands. It is currently slated to be fixed in 1.6.

Why can’t it be fixed before it hits live realms?
I completely sympathize with you on this subject and understand that you never want this bug to see the light of day. I agree with you. However, this patch has already been delayed quite a bit and we cannot delay it any further; there are several other bug fixes that need to go live as soon as possible, and there are international concerns as well. If we delayed patches every time a bug was found, they would never be released.

Can’t it be fixed before 1.6?
1.6 is probably not three months away like some of you seem to believe, but it is still a ways off. There is a possibility, however, that this might be fixed before that.

Which was further edited to add:

I have taken your feedback on the issue to the development staff tonight, pleading your case. I’ve explained that this is a PvP feature patch and this bug can potentially be devastating to Hunters in a PvP fight. I am, basically, pleading your case before the court. I will do everything in my power to see if I can get this fixed in either a hotfix, or failing that, an emergency patch like 1.5.1. I can make no promises, but I am using everything in my arsenal for you.

Is this… diplomacy? Why a community manager needs to go wake up the devs sleeping on their bed of money, dreaming of money hats and EXPLAIN TO THEM why a bug could break the game and why it’s not even possible to expect that the community is going to swallow it without a bad, very bad reaction?

The point here is that NOONE knows what the fuck is going on at the exception of the players. The developers know nothing, the QA teams know nothing and the community managers know nothing. Well, aside that “the community is angry”, which is, in fact, their duty. This reaction was obvious, you cannot break a class and openly say you just do not care (or do not see the problem) without getting a strong reaction. Within minutes the topic was already on all the forums I read as an explicit example of yet another magistral debacle. The protest started to rise till the menace of another Happy Gnome Tea Party that brough to a resentful reaction:

Gathering in protest will do nothing but get accounts banned. I will not tolerate the planning of such on these boards.

Which lead to an even funnier follow-up:

Here’s an honest question for you.

How is it that a gathering of people is a protest in this game? In real life, a gathering of people to protest an organization, such as a strike, normally disrupts the business of said organization to some extent simply by being outside the walls.

Now, clearly, trying to organize a gathering of people to protest the patch, you’re trying to get attention, right? But unlike the real world, the developers can’t really hear you no matter how “loud” you are in game… so then. How precisely does a gathering, a protest, get noticed?

By bringing so many people into an area that it disrupts others’ gameplay.

Your direct goal is to get the attention of Blizzard by holding a protest. Correct me if I’m wrong on this. However, indirectly, said protest is meant to cause an inconvenience on the realm, which disrupts the playtime of other paying customers and is an actionable offense.

Is that clear?

No, it’s not. It’s exactly because you cannot tolerate a protest and because it damages your service that it represents an efficent way to get the attention from devs. Which is exactly what happened (as we’ll see in a bit).

After few hours of angered reactions Caydiem posted a precisation that was going to transform the whole issue into a big laugh against the community itself:

This is false — the cool down for Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, and Multi-Shot is not increasing in patch 1.5 –- it will remain the same. The bug that adds weapon speed to the cool down of these abilities has been in the game since launch. The reason this bug remained hidden for so long is that the tool tip and client side cool down timer were not showing the increased cool down. An unrelated addition to 1.5 corrected the visible cool down timer on the client, and that’s how this bug was discovered.

Please note: the current Hunter DPS will not decrease because of this bug! This bug has been active since day one, so Hunter DPS will remain the same. When this bug is fixed in an upcoming patch, Hunter DPS will actually increase.

“You goons, the world isn’t ending already. You were bugged since release and you didn’t even notice about it. So you are going to get angry now and plan in-game protests which would lead to your accounts banned? Hahahaha”

But, as I said, the devs, QA teams and community managers know nothing about their own game and the implicit sarcasm was going to backfire spectacularly again: the new percisations from Blizzard stating that “there is no spoon” were readily demonstrated as lies through compared videos taken on the test and live servers. Refute this, now. Who is right?

After those “proofs” Blizzard couldn’t defend anymore their point and the legitimacy of what they stated. It’s again one of those cases where the credibility goes down. It’s time to backtracking, admit the faults and …change the plans. Because they changed:

Due to all of the feedback we have received, and thanks to Caydiem, we will be working to resolve the hunter cooldown bug this patch. Unfortunately, that means bad news for us here, as it leads to some extra overtime (I didn’t have much planned anyways :P). Thanks for all of your patience in regards to this matter.

The fun part is that the message was edited, shortly after, into:

Due to all of the feedback we have received, and thanks to Caydiem, we are going be working to resolve the hunter cooldown bug. Unfortunately, that means bad news for us here, as it leads to some extra overtime (I didn’t have much planned anyways :P). Thanks for all of your patience in regards to this matter.

Magically removing the two important words: “this patch”. Which lead to another loud protest (with extra-flames) and more precisations:

The reason that was removed is because we don’t want to promise anything, and Hortus unfortunately overstepped his bounds a bit on that post. They’re still working overtime into the weekend and we’re still striving to get it fixed as soon as possible, which we certainly hope to be this patch. At the same time, if we promised it by this patch — which the original post still didn’t do, but most people were taking it that way — there would be further cries of “lies!” which we’re trying to avoid. Because everyone was taking it as a promise, that bit was removed.

We are committed to fixing it prior to the patch going live, but I’m not promising anything. Let’s go into why.

This should be a simple fix, but if for some reason the fix manages to break several other key systems, do you believe we should go live with the patch anyway? If it made people crash upon login, for example? We absolutely want to fix this for 1.5, make no mistake about that, but at the same time we’re not saying “Yes!” until the fix goes through QA thoroughly.

Is that understandable?

It’s fun how the stance moved from a pretext “if we delayed patches every time a bug was found, they would never be released” to “we absolutely want to fix this for 1.5”. What happened in between to justify this turnover? The community, clueless devs, horrible inside communication. Blizzard IS at loss. If we didn’t have the players themselves gathering *the facts* and *forcing* the community managers to deal with this, nothing would have been acknowledged and the patch would have been pushed live with the community itself mocked.

This just destroys the faith on the dev team. It’s not tolerable that the players need to demonstrate how the game works and where the problem are to the devs. The first precisation written by Caydiem where the whole issue seemed to vanish into just a misunderstanding wasn’t a mock toward the community filled with goons. It was a mock to the devs that had a bug since release without even knowing about it. It is a critical point, it’s about a trust. All these games are founded on trust since you cannot be aware of what is going on. You cannot suspect about a bug behind every corner and it’s not a duty of the players to demonstrate (over and over and over before an acknowledgment) that some feature is broken.

If this happens on some glaring mechanic like this example, what about the rest? How can a player have trust in the system? At the moment, on the live servers, one of the basic skills of my warrior is bugged. The “Battle Shout” is supposed to increase the attack power of my group of 191. I spent five talent points to get a 25% increase that shows in the tooltip (so it goes to 239) but whenever I use the shout the active icon just reads 191. The devs have stated that this is an UI error and that the bonus is properly considered by the system. How can I trust them on this now? How can I be sure that the points I spent to potentiate the skill are counted properly for all my attacks and the attacks of the players in my group?

What happened these days should not be underestimated. It underlined serious communication problems inside Blizzard, noone was able to figure out the precise behaviour of this bug in a matter of days. The community managers have zero powers, the QA teams have an insane amount of work and cannot think straight and the developers (or what is still left of the original team that wasn’t moved on another project or even a brand new company) cannot figure out how the system is supposed to behave. This shows a good amount of “burocracy” and horrible integration between the parts. It’s a loss of time and efficency. The structure is simply not appropriate for what their are doing in a similar way I commented on the FoH forums after the very first comment from Caydiem that originated all this:

Unfortunately this is something that you cannot rant about. They cannot do much about the pace of development and I’m sure they are doing their best to optimize the margin they have (after the fleeing devs and everything).

It’s also something I saw coming about a year ago.

The fact is that Blizzard is (was) a wonderful company to build up games and release “when done”. But ‘when done’ was a loose term. The quality of these games is set in a single point: when they are released. So the standard of quality is just something about a proper release. They could slowly build (and Blizzard has ALWAYS been awfully slow, to the point of releasing even obsolete technology) the game at their pace and finally release it when it was complete and matching their standards.

A mmorpg is a completely different thing. Not as a product, but as a development cycle. Throughout the whole development Blizzard didn’t change their process and kept developing WoW slowly, on the long term and without a defined release date.

This worked and in fact they were able to release a wonderful game under many aspects but the truth of a mmorpg is that the development *starts* at release. Here the quality depends on time and efficency. It’s about what you can do in a precise time span, how you fast you can parse and react to feedback and how you can shape the game at a radical level without spending again years to get to the point.

All these are “brand new” elements to Blizzard. Because a mmorpg is never finished when they were also releasing “closed” products, because now the time is the first variable when they always had the luxury to not consider it and because there’s a direct involvement with the community that they never had before at this level.

Now it all depends on the “commitment”. On how much Blizzard is disposed to sacrifice their old (and consolidated) model to completely focus on another business model and one game.

The same that they admitted (albeit in a “positive” way) in an old interview:

We’re used to these nice, finite, closed-ended games that we can power through, put on a shelf, go home and sleep for a month. This is just a completely different kind of monster

“Growing pains”.

They are still stuck with an inappropriate model of development that is just making the game heavier than what is necessary. It’s about the same problems deep-rooted in the bad communication between the devs and the community and that will be another topic to write about (if I have time – if not just go over to Krones, that’s what I’ll try to comment).

About the specific hunter issue the truth seems to be that the bug really existed since release. The different behaviour on the Test server introduces a further delay on the skills because the UI is now aware of the bug and is applying the new delay on top of the previous one. Basically they managed to stack and overlap the same problem twice.
(complete explanation here)