I guess the post really is mostly driven from my test server background. I lost track of the times a grind or raid night was lost because the devs took the server down to patch, as was completely their right. Side note: You could always tell the “regulars” from the production players in chat. The regulars would be talking about RL stuff, and the production kids would be complaining that the server was down. Well, we complained too, but stopped after about a minute since we knew they didn’t care. Anyway, the server would drop, and we’d have a new patch. What was being loaded? Dunno. Often there were a few people who knew and were testing something - like when my guild was testing the VP revamp, we brought the server up and down probably 6 times on the final testing night. However, think of all the other data they could have gotten from people told, if nothing else “hey, we changed the mitigation of shields. let us know how it runs.” Rather than having us wonder what was patched in.

Besides the part where you lost all your equipment and guild tag when you zoned into Freeport. That was an extra bonus, free of charge.

Then again, I stopped playing on the test server. Rarely do the test servers exist to test balance. They exist to test for bugs. The balance issues I disagree with are going live anyway, and if causes problems live they might revert. Heck, many of the bugs go live because they are not considered game-breaking enough to slow a release, so the only reason left for me to visit test is to preview coming content, and I would rather not burn out on it before I get the chance to play it “for real” and relatively bug-free (which occasionally is “bug-free”).

I don’t expect an explanation on every little change, that’s impractical. However, when you cause major upheavals to a class, it can be expected to cause uproar. Trying to take off some of that heat before it comes is just logical.

Keepin’ it simple since ‘81!

You better start looking for another job then :-p Thats just stupid to say that after 2.0.9 it rolls over into 2.1.0.

So, so very wrong. its not like the version number is 209 then add one and you have 210 - this is major version 2, minor version 0, release number 9, going to major version 2 minor version 0 release number 10 - Typically, the way numbers are increased is that if you break API compatibility (which 2 certainly did for WoW), then you increase the major number - if you break binary compatibility (which doesnt make a huge amount of sense for a game release, so you might tag it with things that change the program relatively significantly like adding features but not breaking current things) you increase the minor number. EVERY other release (bug fixes, messaging tweaks, etc) is in the release number. Each of these is independant within themselves, but reset the lower numbers when they’re increased.

for example.
1.2.3
1.2.4
1.3.0
1.3.1
…
1.3.10
1.3.11
1.3.12
2.0.0
2.0.1
2.0.2
…
2.0.9
2.0.10
1.0.11