WOW Classic's Season Of Discovery doesn't player test new content, leading to more bugs - but more fun

As World Of Warcraft Classic - an MMORPG that is, confusingly, a new version of the old version of World Of Warcraft - enters phase 3 of its Season Of Discovery, PCGamer has an interview with some of the devs where they talk about the decision to not run Player Test Realms - servers where they roll out the new content to smaller numbers of players to road test it. This means that when they launch new stuff for Seasons Of Discovery it'll probably break more often, but it means players get to discover brand new things together. Which is great! And the developers think it's good too.

Associate production director Clayton Stone describes it as "a radical change", but that doing so for each phase of the Season Of Discovery "has really created a moment every time for the whole player base to come together and experience something fresh together at the same time." Ordinarily players on a PTR would share what they see with the class, so people can start preparing and optimising builds and what have you. Secrets are fun!

The interesting thing, though, is that this has meant the new content is a bit more broken when it rolls out, since new game stuff often doesn't bug out until a lot of people are using it at once, or some players try to break it by testing the game's limits. Because of this, Stone explains, the team plan for live update time after launching new content, so they can fix stuff on the fly. But what I think is the best bit is that according to Stone, the community doesn't seem to mind. He says that "players are also a little bit open to us experimenting, or things not working out exactly as we intended."

This reminds me of (and I link this quite a lot) a video I like a lot, Dan Olsen's Why It's Rude To Suck At Warcraft. It goes into how the fun has been largely optimised out of World Of Warcraft, including the launch of Classic in 2019 - which I think Stone sort of touches on when he refers to it as WOW being a "solved game for so long". By reintroducing an actual sense of fun, adding unknown quantities that the players get to discover and figure out, the players are in turn forgiving of things being a bit borked. And I genuinely think this is great. I'd love to see more of this kind of mutual understanding going on (especially players understanding that big games gunna break sometimes). Part of me hopes that well see this rolled out to Classic at large. Maybe even main WOW! What a time that would be.

It's nice writing something broadly positive about ActiBlizz, 'cos it's not been roses there. Activision Blizzard was one of the companies that were part of Microsoft's most recent round of layoffs. Blizz cancelled their in-development survival game at the same time. They recently settled their sex discrimination suit with the state of California, for a cool $55 million.

Either way, the WOW march continues. The roadmaps for both varietals of WOW contain content a-plenty, and WOW Classic is getting a new version of the big Cataclysm expansion, called World Of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic. The classic version of Cataclysm Classic was old classic WOWs third expansion, originally released in 2009. I will not clarify further.