What's up? (October 17th 2003)

[Cz]

I've posted few of these Friday updates lately. There's several reasons for that. One is that I post a bit more during the week. Another is that the things that can be given updates on are now almost exclusively bugs and tweaking, which I simply don't have the needed time to dig fully into. We'll see what we can do about that in the future.

This week, I'm simply going to post a few words of encouragement that I feel is needed on some issues. Unfortunately I am not allowed to divulge any details yet (and any details now would be so uncertain that I probably wouldn't post them anyway), but at least you'll know they're not forgotten.

Shadowlands tweaks
The designers are looking into changing some systems and tweaking several features in Shadowlands. Note that this is not something to happen tomorrow. As I said, I have no details, but we're talking about such things as faction, spawn and drop rates, and challenge / reward ratio.

Traders
Still one of the few professions on my "seriously concerned" list, and we've had a meeting about Traders in particular (but also talking about some other professions). Some good ideas came out of that, though I'm not sure about the time frame we're looking at regarding this. Shadowlands tweaks, like those mentioned above, are likely to have a higher priority.

Quests
15.2 should contain several bug fixes for Shadowlands quests, and hopefully we'll catch them all this time. I see people have posted threads (here and here) about broken quests, and I hope to have time following up each of these to try make sure what's mentioned is fixed in 15.2. Both thread links have been forwarded to the designers.

Update 15.2
We hope to have 15.2 on test-live no later than the beginning of next week. I'm hope to have time to write the preliminary build notes on Monday. Currently I have no ETA for 15.2 being moved to the live servers, but I hope to have that next week, after the first stages of testing.

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Now I'm off to help reproduce a few bugs, so you'll have to excuse me for not writing more right now. Take care, have a nice weekend, and I'll try drop by now and then, both here and on other bulletin boards.

[Cz]

An addition I got from QA and Operations now:

Downtime next week
We're going to do some server maintenance on Thursday next week (that's the 23rd). The exact time and duration for the maintenance hasn't been decided yet, but since all the servers are in the US, I expect it to start during normal US (East Coast) work hours. More details next week.

There are no updates scheduled for this time, so it's just downtime, no changes.