WoW lives on a cycle of hype that moves between live patch releases and PTR excitement, as datamining slowly nudges out new content well in advance of the actual launch.
10.2.6 for Dragonflight has been a bold experiment for Blizzard – no public testing, no patch sitting open on CDN servers to be datamined. For all intents and purposes, 10.2.6 is a black box, inside of which we only know of two things – the vague idea of a skull-and-crossbones piece of content, and the data needed to make Season 4 of Dragonflight work. However, since the launch of 10.2.5 in mid-January, WoW has basically been coasting. Season 3 of Dragonflight is still ongoing, and the Classic side of the house has brought the final phase of Wrath Classic along with Phase 2 for Season of Discovery, both of which have kept some energy into the franchise, as has this week’s launch of early testing for Cataclysm Classic, but retail has been missing something.
WoW exists in an interesting space that I’ve discussed from the opposite side of FFXIV before, but not from the WoW side, and it’s this – WoW is unique even today in just how much the prerelease content hype cycle keeps the game afloat. Sure, datamining is not an uncommon practice in the era of live service games, but few games rely on public testing and public availability of prerelease content quite like World of Warcraft does, and so every single patch that hits PTR is mined for content endlessly. Sure, WoW is a live game with an ongoing cycle of current content, but few games draw so much attention to what is next as early as WoW does – weeks and months prior to anything ever dropping, we can see new zones, raids, dungeons, storylines – almost the entire breadth of what is to come. Hell, until around BfA when Blizzard started using modern file encryption tactics, we could often see the literal entire content base of a patch months prior to it even launching.
That led to a sort of interesting antagonistic cycle with Blizzard and the MMO community, where Blizzard would so often talk about how Wowhead limits what they can do for the game while also continuing to leave the vast majority of patch content easily data mineable and publicly tested, meaning it would be trivial for most players to see it just by playing on PTR. Yet at the same time Blizzard complains about Wowhead, it is also clear that the relationship of the two entities is symbiotic – hype about new content, even controversy about new and coming content is press, it’s attention, and it keeps WoW on the mind and spoken of. As much as Blizzard might say they dislike what Wowhead does, as much as they might complain about it – they also still allow it to continue and grant Wowhead and the like press access to events and favored access for interviews and other exclusives. It’s clear in 2024, and especially right now, that WoW benefits as a product and a game from the cycle of discussion about new content that isn’t even out – it drives excitement, gives content creators a constant ecosystem of new things to draw in for their content, and it leads to a perception that WoW consistently has something going on. It wasn’t that long ago, during Shadowlands, that when Blizzard had fucking nothing for another several months in the gap before 9.2, that a PTR-unveiling of a cinematic was their big hype event to counter-punch at FFXIV launching Endwalker! Blizzard clearly needs the hype cycle for as much as they comment negatively about it.
10.2.5 isn’t a bad patch and the overall direction of the game in Dragonflight has been positive. We know that two remaining patches will be coming for WoW prior to 11.0 and the launch of the expansion in the late summer! Yet right now, WoW feels almost like a dead game – because there’s just a huge gap where all that discussion would go. Blizzard can have Arena cup and MDI events all month, but the absence of patch discussion and publicly-tested content still feels like this massive yawning chasm threatening to swallow the game whole. And obviously that’s a little hyperbolic, sure, but I know a lot of people who are just kind of like…unsure about what to do right now in WoW. The game is fine, there are goals you can still reach for, but at the same time, the lack of time certainty or ideas of what comes next is kind of unnerving in a way.
I think the big discussion that is interesting to have on the heels of this period of patch uncertainty is this – is the availability of prerelease content info actually a bad thing for WoW? In the past, I’ve even accepted the idea that WoW suffers a bit for being a game that is so commonly unable to keep secrets because of public testing and content previews, but I think the flipside of that is what we have at this very moment – where WoW feels weirdly unalive because it is just kind of doing its thing, and that even with content on the horizon that we know is coming, it feels very strange and distant, like it won’t happen for months, when the patch is supposed to be out by the end of the month along with the beginning of the The War Within alpha test, which will likely have content creators able to stream and share publicly. In a way, this kind of puts the game in a weird spot, where the assumptions about what makes WoW healthy or not are kind of being challenged by all of this. Granted, “all of this” is a single patch lingering that has no promises of any content and isn’t intended to be a season launch point (at least not day and date with patch launch), but WoW is so often blaring the content plan from every available rooftop and it won’t stop feeling weird that the next patch is just a big question mark.
Or maybe it won’t be for long, because…
A Theory – The Patch Launches Tuesday
Late this week, Blizzard announced eight-hour maintenance for WoW this week. Okay, weird with no patch announcement, and there are a lot of reasons why that could happen. However, the team also announced a smattering of balance changes to classes and specs that would be going live on Tuesday as well. It’s maybe not necessarily a full patch of changes, but the volume of them is big enough to raise an eyebrow. Coupled with an 8 hour maintenance window set for the same hours as most patch-day maintenance windows, and well…it starts to feel a lot like a patch day, right? Maybe it won’t be – in fact, it could very well not be. However, the coincidences are starting to line up.
Earlier this week, Holly Longdale, executive producer and vice president over WoW, tweeted about how the lack of news and information has been negatively affecting WoW’s ecosystem and asked players to “stick with us for a minute.” To me, I think that the public acknowledgement (off to the side on a executive’s Twitter as it was) of the patch and the lack of news feels like a wink and a nod to the coming patch being this week, especially when the sequence of events was that tweet on March 5th, the announcement of extended maintenance on March 8th, and the further announcement of the class tuning pass on the same day. It seems like an easy layup and the way you’d most want to confirm a patch without actually sharing details or putting up a PTR or CDN-loaded patch that could be combed through.
So if I had to guess, patch coming Tuesday feels like a safe-ish bet.
My Take
I think that the experimental nature of the WoW team on Dragonflight has been interesting and positive in a lot of ways. Learning what works with the current game, current audience, and the ecosystem around both is a wise play during what has been a rebuilding phase of sorts for the game. It has led to some very positive moves, like more frequent world content drops, more available catchup and gearing mechanisms to jump right in to the current endgame, and retuning of reward curves to play with what feels good as a reward in WoW. However, not every experiment is going to be a win, and I think I would, so far at least, chalk up 10.2.6 and the no-news nature of it as an iffy experiment. Sure, on paper, it was logically a great move – players complain about a lack of surprises and interesting unknowns in WoW, so hide the patch away from prying eyes until launch day, has to be good, right? However, I think that for the audience that enjoys retail, the lack of news is also kind of a madness-inducing one. After Shadowlands, while WoW’s death was never really a serious question, the possibility that WoW just kind of gets bad and drives off a lot of players has been something that seems more possible now than it ever did prior to that dumpster-fire expansion. Dragonflight has had momentum for most of its run, and I think that a lack of current hype has kind of dulled that. Logically, sure – the game obviously isn’t going anywhere and we still know there’s a whole final season of Dragonflight, the 10.2.7 story content drops, and a summer expansion to look forward to, but emotionally, in the here and now, WoW has been coasting on what is largely the same content base since November, and a lot of players are yearning for the next big thing to do. 10.2.5’s Azerothian Archives are interesting but short-lived and mark one of the smallest contributions of new content in Dragonflight, while the other major new things, Bel’Ameth and the Gilneas Reclamation, are questlines and exploration that can be completed in a few hours on a single night.
WoW obviously needs datamining and prerelease hype to drive excitement and stickiness to the game as much as Wowhead needs Blizzard to keep that stuff in the public eye so they can have meaningful, regular content drops. I respect the idea, Blizzard – but I think you might need to mothball this experiment in the future, or at least try to control the feed of information more yourselves, akin to how the FFXIV team does it. For now, in the current cycle of WoW content…it’s maybe not the right idea as it stands.
Kaylriene 
While it may be symbiotic between the some of the WoW content creators –and by that I mean those who make the guides and add-ons and drive the hype– and the WoW team, the constant data mining has been disturbing to me. I mean, I’m in IT security, and for a company to merely roll along and kind of wink-wink at people and allow them to just go to town on their property and datamine to their hearts’ content is the sort of thing that my nightmares are made of. That Blizzard never took it seriously enough to use better file encryption until BfA bothers me to no end.
My own personal opinion of video games –especially MMOs– being basically “solved games” before they’re even released aside, if I were an investor in Activision-Blizzard I would have been asking tough questions of A-B if they were using the same forms of data protection throughout the company as that found in their games. If so, I don’t think their critical data would have been protected for very long, and at the very least would have left them open to a lawsuit from investors displeased by how A-B ran the company. Or worse, open to an attack by a hacker group looking to capitalize on player discontent at the state of a game (pick one, any one) to attack A-B directly.
Okay, that aside, the WoW team’s main problem is that the vast majority of people who are left playing WoW (Classic and Retail) are conditioned to know what’s available beforehand so they can plan for what they want to do. They expect DBM to already be configured to handle bosses and events, and people to have already created Weakauras to tackle thorny problems in rotations and raids. Their YouTube feed will be inundated with videos on how to do all the things in a patch or expansion, and so they won’t be forced to flail on their own for a while.
The Classic team did try to release a patch bypassing the PTR already, Phase 1 of Season of Discovery. While it meant that everybody had to go try to find all the new things, it also meant more work for the customer support and the live support teams. Therefore, for SoD’s Phase 2’s release the Classic team followed the “normal” route, basically ignoring the “Discovery” portion of Season of Discovery in favor of ease of support. (I suppose the unwritten part of that shift back to a normal release was that the layoffs in Customer Support meant they couldn’t support SoD the way they wanted to, so…) For people like me, who wanted to experience the Discovery portion of Season of Discovery, that meant that we weren’t on the same footing as everybody else when Phase 2 released. It may not sound like a lot, as we’re only going from L25 to L40 in Classic Era WoW with a few mods here and there, but knowing that “everybody” is supposed to know all the fights and the locations and all the tricks meant that I was back to being behind the curve. If I were inclined to go raiding in SoD, all the pugs advertising in LFG stating “must know all the fights” were basically saying “not you” without even having to say “L2P noob” or “Go to LFR”. Even the RP servers were not immune to this phenomenon, although they were much better than the totally swamped PvE servers.
My point to all this is that while Holly (and Blizz) may want to dial it all back and have more mystery to their saved game, the players they have left expect the cycle to continue, and it is a sales and support risk they’re taking by not looking the other way with their company’s data. There’s no easy way to fix the conundrum they’re in, but they might as well start now.
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While I think Blizzard will continue the beta/PTR hype cycle for big changes, I do hope they start to be much more mum and coy about the smaller patches, especially for non-raid and/or story content. A bit of mystery before such things hit would be a nice ‘palate cleanser’ from the excesses of Wowhead’s datamining.
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I’d love to see them move towards what FFXIV patch hype is like – fully in-house controlled and tested, but with regular stream events and scheduled, controlled unveilings to showcase what is coming in a new patch. There’s definitely room for a middle ground between what they’re doing now with 10.2.6 and what they normally do for sure, and I think it’d be really great for them to play in that space some more!
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