No matter what you think of World of Warcraft it is hard to deny that it is possibly the MOST polished MMO on the market for over 5 years. Sure there have always been bugs in WoW, but if you sit down and play for 5 hours you may run into one, MAYBE two small bugs. This lack of bugs has been one of the driving reasons for not just World of Warcrafts success, but also Blizzard’s.
Enter patch 4.0.1. From the moment I installed it the glitches have been everywhere. From the retardedly annoying “permanently swimming” bug that makes my character swim through the air if he drops off his mount before hitting the ground, to the game/event crashing bug where when you mouse cursor over the Headless Horseman’s pumpkin in the SM Graveyard. Until we realized it didn’t effect my wife and she was made the designated head clicker, we were spending 20 minutes of crashing and reloading, me and everyone else in the group, before it let us fight him.
It’s not just that either, there seem to be glitches and bugs all over since the patch. Another fun one is the “you are not in a guild” message me and my guildies receive. Mobs evading and resetting randomly more than usual, and Icecrown being in MORE buggy that it always was. There was a point where I had to walk backwards in Icecrown for an entire day of questing, because if I faced forward everything went black and the game went to 1 fps. Guildies have been talking about many of these problems more and more, and sure, for someone who has played WoW for five years or so, these are just annoying, not game breaking (except the Icecrown problems maybe), but for any new players looking to start will they see what used to be the most polished MMO on the market? Or will these bugs make it feel like they are playing a game that has never been beta tested?
Sure, maybe I am being a bit hard on Blizzard, as this was a huge patch. But with Cataclysm around the corner, and how much THAT is going to change the game, it really makes me wonder if that huge “patch” is going to be as thoroughly tested as 4.o.1. Let’s hope this patch was as buggy as it is simply because they are putting so much into Cataclysm.
Manifest Pixel 