Undocumented Changes in Patches

So here at GoPets we work against a weekly patch schedule. That means every week we ship some new features, bug fixes and items. In general we do it local time Wednesday morning. From time to time issues hold us back to the evening or to Thursday. Every once in a while we face the dreaded Friday Patch. If we have a Friday Patch we know the weekend will suck with a high chance of a required hotfix.

We do weekly because I think it helps us deliver a steady stream of content and new features to the citizens of GoPets and see what the results are fairly quickly. We are still learning how to do this process and every week it is frustrating to learn of some breakdown of communication that led to some bug or error or simple confusion.

So I read the Zen of Designblog regularly - I appreciate Damion's editorial style and he rarely posts something that I do not find interesting and often it is valuable to me. I especially like it when he posts about raiding. I am avid PvPer on WoW and recently bought a WoW account just for the purpose of having a tool auxillary druid and/or paladin just so we can do some basic 5-mans to get primal nethers and such. I am not big on raiding because I find it so difficult to gather the required people together to go do a dungeon or a raid. But PvP is pure game-time & pleasure for me. Anyways, I am rambling. So I like to read Damions' posts on Raiding since he has an active raiding group and I can get some ideas from him through his blog.

Recently he posted about Elitist Jerks as the blog that he reads for end-game raiding info, so I went to check it out. What struck me immediately in the forums is the thread for the undocumented features of the current 2.3 patch for WoW's Burning Crusade Expansion.

This post will bore game designers as I decided to translate some of the jargon from that thread, but it may be interesting to others how incredibly deep the fan base will dig into your game and will know as a group your game mechanics better and faster than the development team can really hope to know. Also it is a post to my guys to show how much stuff slips through their patch procedures despite the fact that WoW patches do not ship against a hard schedule but instead ship "when they are ready". So with all the time and money that anyone could ask for - it is still impossible to test everything and clean everything and still common stupid stuff happens. But on the bright side most of these undocumented features are just that - new stuff that Blizzard did not take the time to even write up for their patch notes:

**The reduction of the chance for mace spec to proc wasn't mentioned in the notes. (Not sure if it made it to Live, or if it was hotfixed.)

<Translation> Mace Spec:** Characters that specialize in the mace weapon in their talent tree (and I do not even know if they are talking about just rogues here, I haven't played warriors or other melee classes besides rogue so I do not know if others have a mace spec)

            &lt;<b>Translation**&gt;  Druids can now pick up herbs off the ground without taking a few seconds to change their avatar from a bird to a humanoid and back to a bird again.