Doesn’t surprise me that I wake up, and see they did indeed, extend maintenance another 5 hours. The excuse this time? My dog ate my homework (aka a severe hardware issue). To be fair, they did manage to go live no more than 2.5 hours into this final extension.
Funny thing is I brought my expectations regarding everything this company does, all the way down. And unsurprisingly, they proved yet again, how totally inept they are with being able to roll out a major patch on schedule.
Everything is a repetitive cycle from development, to testing, to production. Quality and pride in “craftsmanship” should be inherent throughout the entire cycle. Mind you nothing is perfect. My point is there is this established pattern of consistency with Blizzard where there are usually more problems in rolling out these major patches, then there are actually cases where they actually manage to come in on schedule. It’s a cultural issue when there is this pattern of not being able to execute.
The executives and decision makers at this company talk the big talk, but the inability to consistently execute where it counts, is telling. It’s like most any other major corporation where the lower level, lowest paid grunts don’t have the adequate resources to do their jobs effectively (just so that the ones higher up in the chain, can get their huge bonuses). I’ve been in senior management before long enough to know how all this bullshit works at that level.
16+ hours of downtime to rollout a patch in this day and age is an anachronism.
Furthermore, a lot of the bug issues with the Mac client, went totally unaddressed. The first thing I do is met with the same client crashes I experienced and sent feedback about. This has been ongoing since closed beta began. I’m beyond wasting any more time sending them feedback after the fact now so I’m just going to continually launch the game on my test machine and have a whole bunch of Blizzard Error crash dialogues queued up; all to be sent at continuous intervals. I know, who the hell games ona Mac right? Seriously though, I do realize the Mac programmers are probably a smaller team; but seriously, do they not test this stuff? (rhetorical question). They might as well remove the Mac system requirements and call it a day already.
Individual character total play times are also botched (how they can totally screw up that data transfer, is seriously mind boggling; I’ll be surprised if they’ll even bother to fix it). <- (It’s a known issue from beta that still was not fixed due to a display issue causing truncation of the information). And it looks like their public facing web API for character profiles also hasn’t been updated as characters still display their character level Paragon as opposed to displaying the new account wide one. Also, bound on account legendary and set items are allowed to be listed on the AH’s, others are able to buy them, but since the items are still soul bound, the items cannot be sent to the purchasing players stash. The gold transaction still goes through though to the seller though. GG programming and “quality assurance testing” D3 team (your failures are now complete). Basically, I’m taking that they really do absolutely almost zero in-house quality assurance testing as a whole since they’ve probably stretched those folks out thin (I’ve heard enough Blizzard related anecdotes about how those folks are generally shit on).
And these last paragraphs are yet another fine example, of the poor product quality (reflected in every part of their badly executed processes). I am actually getting tempted to cancel my Collectors Edition and be done with this now since this is actually beyond being mediocre. It’s all (from the executives, to the development team, to the web team) one big half-assed attempt.
