Okay, it’s been a few days, hopefully everyone can relax. The Patch has come, the Patch has hopefully been installed on your computer. And I pray that, you, dear listener / reader, are back up and running your TOON through awesome new adventures in the lands of Azeroth. However, you might have been one of the many who were gnashing their teeth and pushing steam through your nostrils as you attempted to Update your Client with the latest Patch.
This was a BIG PATCH (see full notes here). Content Patches usually are hefty downloads with a ton of content in addition to just the simple tweaks to the class talent trees and play. This one came with the heralded Ulduar Instance and the Argent Tournament. During episode 003, I commented on how I was worried that this Patch might be rough. When they started dropping stuff like the gear manager from the Patch, I was a little cautious that PATCH DAY might disintegrate into DOOMSDAY. As someone who has done a lot of project management in corporate America and a ton of producing in Hollywood, I know that when you’re in a rush to meet a deadline and it looks like you will not get there, you start prioritizing and dropping things.
Unfortunately, for many players my hesitations and concerns were justified. There were reports that the PATCH crashed systems, folks were unable to complete downloads, the downloader would mysteriously quit on them forcing them to restart downloads. Not to mention the worst of all, entire servers were failing. Now according to sources Blizzard is going to offer 1 free day of play time to make up for all of the shenanigans, which in all respects is the right thing to do. However, it doesn’t take away from the reality that this was a rough PATCH to get going. Now that it’s up, even I am noticing things are not working as the Notes said they would or should be working. For example Paladin Aura’s are not persisting through death, like they should.
Many players (especially you new players) may be concerned about all this. You may be asking, “Is this what the vaunted Blizzard is capable of? I thought they were the best?” As a long time Blizzard customer, I can say, that this may not be a problem that Blizzard can do anything about. There are over 11 million people playing WoW today. And you can bet that for the most part, those 11 million people were probably all downloading this software throughout the last 24 – 72 hours. Let’s do some math!
11 million people probably downloaded the Patch in a 72 Hour period. The patch was 748MB in size. That’s almost a GB. For those of you who work in Data File Management, you know that a GB is a lot of stuff to download even on a T3 line speeds. That means that 8,228,000 GB of data was streaming from Blizzard to customers in the last 72 Hours. That is 1114,278 GB an hour, and 1904GB of information a minute. That’s a lot of DATA flying around. With that much code flying around, you can expect something to go wrong. Imagine if Blizzard were a pizza chain, and the told their loyal 11 Million customers, they could get a new Free Pizza at any of their 25 nationwide locations on a Tuesday. Do you think all those Pizza’s would come out perfect? Nope, it’s the law of entropy.
When you look at the scale of the PATCH, you would probably understand, as I have understood, that it’s just too big a demand, to pull off with a reasonable margin of error. Most companies would tell you that if their product has a 98% quality control approval rating, they are doing a phenomenal job. So, even if Blizzard were at 98% in quality assurance, with their numbers 220,000 customers would receive faulty or bad Patches. It’s just math.
“So, what are you telling me, Snarl? I should just take my medicine and be happy?” No, I’m not saying that. If you had a bad PATCH experience , you have my sympathies, I didn’t have a bad one outside of the fact that I had to manually re-install all my addons, and my Downloader stopped mid-download which stretched my total download to almost 36 hours. See, I count myself lucky and it was still a huge inconvenience to get me back to questing in Nagrand. However, with so many players, I doubt there is much we can do about glitches when these Patches come down except to grin and bear it.
And that is the worst part. Players get really amped about these new Patches and when they are coming down the pipe. So, when you get a buggie Patch experience, it’s like asking for a super cool RC car for Christmas and pulling it out the box, and the wheels fall off. That just sucks.