Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump 4

Welcome, one and all, to Kurn’s Sunday Brain Dump — actually on a Sunday! :)

Topic 1: 12.0.5

Gonna be honest, I really don’t care much for this patch.

I tried the void assaults — boring.

I tried the ritual sites — less boring, but still boring.

Haven’t messed with Decimus’ stuff yet. In part, because I don’t have anything except maybe my bow that is already upgraded to 6/6 Hero.

Hide and Seek Decor Duels: apparently, Track Humanoid worked for this. Which is hilarious to me, as a hunter. But also, zero interest in this. (It was hotfixed.)

Fishing: Listen, I like fishing. I don’t know that I want to bother with spearfishing, etc. I’ll probably give it a try, though.

Marksmanship Hunter: I had to partly respec due to the partial refund of talent points I was given, but I didn’t take Explosive Shot. I should probably research things and respec appropriately, but I don’t know that I need Explosive Shot? Again?

Decor stuff/Housing: All I really care about at the moment is using Decor to make money, so most of this doesn’t affect me.

So… really, it’s all kind of meh to me at the moment.

Topic 2: Gold

When I hit about 1.7 million gold, I bought my next token, for about 235k gold. I’m now back up to 1.6 million and have used my token. I’m making decent money, but it’s not consistent. I need to look at making more cash more reliably. I’m way too reliant on concentration to make top-level potions and flasks at the moment. And I’m not using a lot of my other crafting professions to make good-quality gear, but I am getting recipes pretty regularly with moxie.

What stuff are you selling lately?

Topic 3: Bugs

Tell me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot without telling me you coded your Midnight patch almost entirely with Copilot.

That’s how it feels. Reading through the hotfix notes makes me chuckle and also just shake my head. How do these things get through whatever passes as “quality assurance” these days? Do they even have quality assurance at Blizzard presently? Because it really doesn’t feel like it. Like, what the hell is this patch note?

Valeera is no longer unwilling to attack Poison Dart Frog or Giant Cursed Bullfrog.

… why would she have been unwilling to attack the frogs? Why is she so poorly coded? Or what about this one?

Pandaren characters who boost during the intro sequence will now be able to port to their houses.

??? How on earth does a boost during the intro mean that they couldn’t port to their houses?

I know part of it is spaghetti code. This has got to be a vast codebase that dates all the way back to the early 2000s. I’m sure there’s still some code there that has been untouched since Alpha versions of Vanilla WoW. So I assume that’s part of it, right? But still, that’s where QA should come in.

I don’t develop software for the masses myself, although I do know how to program and read code in a variety of languages (PHP, JavaScript, Python). I have, however, spent the last decade of my life working for various SaaS companies (Software as a Service), so I see up close and personal how software is built. I know that the product team has to communicate their needs to the development team. The development team does the hard work of research and coding. Then, theoretically (although this does get skipped out on a lot), a quality assurance team tests the potential release for bugs, including regressions (which are bugs that were squashed previously, but can sometimes return for various reasons). Once internal testing is complete, you then get some public users to beta test it and development continues to fix any bugs the beta testers have found. Meanwhile, marketing is getting ready to push out a ton of, well, marketing about the latest and greatest, support is working on documentation and stuff to ensure people know how to make things work, and everything goes live when the new version goes live.

Or, at least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

As Helmuth von Moltke the Elder wrote in 1871, “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

And it’s true. Sometimes you have to roll things back because something happened once everyone got access to something and something went horribly awry. Sometimes a bug that wasn’t part of testing anything shows up and you need to hotfix it. All of that is totally normal.

What I posit is not totally normal is the frequency with which these WoW bugs occur. Not only that, but the type of bugs that occur. If it has to do with the new content, QA didn’t do its job.

So the track humanoids issue in the Decor Duel? Bad QA.

The Pandarens boosting thing? That was assuredly not part of testing at all, which is why it’s having to be hotfixed. My theory on this is that when they introduced housing, something in it is tied to character creation. And character creation gets interfered with by boosting. Not only that, but Pandaren are special, because they are neutral until the end of their intro quests, right? So if this only happened to the Pandaren, we can make the following assumptions:

1) Housing relies on character creation to some extent, which makes sense — someone cannot have a home without a character.

2) So somewhere in character creation, they (now, or at least since housing was introduced at the tail-end of The War Within) tie … I don’t know, a housing and decor database to the character. So let’s say that as the character is created and various database tables are created, we now create a housing one and a decor one. (Again, this is a guess.)

3) At some point, long ago, they introduced character boosting. I believe you can create a new character who will automatically be the boosted level. So they had to interrupt character creation at a specific moment to prevent having to start out at a level 1 or whatever.

4) When creating housing, we can assume that the link has not been fully established for a character who is not one of the two factions, Alliance and Horde. We can assume that the boosting track goes down one path instead of reusing the original code, lest boosting not give you your boosted toon.

5) End result: Pandaren who are boosted, who (presumably) get their faction at a different point than fresh-rolled Pandaren, cannot port to their plot because something went wonky on character creation.

Again, that’s just my assumption. But we can see within that assumption where things went wrong. Based on those suppositions, I believe that whoever implemented housing at character creation did not think about boosted characters beyond a regular boosted character who starts out as a Horde or Alliance player. Most Pandaren (except maybe those who, like NeutralAgent on YouTube) choose a faction eventually. But it’s not immediate in most cases.

So while I will say that such use-cases are more difficult to think of, someone should be thinking about it.

And what really gets me about this is that so many of the players of this game could think of the use-cases that could break things. Like the Track Humanoids thing. Or could at least question whether or not character creation for a boosted Pandaren is similar enough to other characters. You know what I mean? Often, our knowledge of the game is just so deep and so broad that we can see these problems coming a mile away.

I think that’s part of the frustration players have with the game. If we could see something coming a mile away, why can’t the devs?

There are a couple of possibilities that come to mind, here.

The first is that the devs don’t have deep game knowledge. Seeing how much turnover (and how many have been laid off) means that people are relatively new to the codebase. And while we can probably assume that a certain percentage of Blizzard employees are fans of Blizzard’s games, they may not be assigned to work on the game they enjoy the most. So it’s entirely possible a large chunk of WoW people don’t have a ton of long-term game knowledge.

The other thing that comes to mind is that people are relying entirely too much on AI for coding. It is mandatory for Microsoft employees (which Blizzard employees are) to use AI. Mandatory. As in, you don’t use it, you’re likely going to be out of a job.

Do you think Copilot or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever “AI” model they use (probably Copilot) has any game knowledge whatsoever? Do you think that an AI model can truly wonder about the possibility that if someone is appearing as, I don’t know, a chair, their character would still show up as a humanoid? Do you think that an AI model can contemplate and reason through why Pandarens might have a problem with porting to their homes?

The answer is no. Even AI models that are trained on that codebase cannot necessarily make the links between seemingly disparate items the way a real human can. It may know the exact chance of looting a Skullflame Shield off a random mob in Silithus, but it cannot link these examples together on its own. It would need a real human being to force it to review the code for all these things and ask if there are differences, or to point out the differences, at which point the AI will undoubtedly say something like “great context, thanks!”

A third possibility comes to mind — it could well be both of these.

All right, enough ranting for me for now. What would you like to hear me ramble about next week? And what do you think about patch 12.0.5?