World of Warcraft developers Blizzard released a prop hunt mode dubbed Decor Duel with this week’s patch, having initially announced the Midnight expansion-adjacent addition was on the way back in January. Sadly, said patch was littered with bugs, with the studio now having apologised for releasing it in a state that wasn’t “up to [their] standards.
“The team is taking lessons learned from this launch to help ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Blizzard wrote in a blog post addressing the 12.0.5 patch’s issues. “We will also work harder to communicate openly, early, and often when a launch doesn’t go as expected: the known issues we’re working on, fixes as they roll out, and any other information that would be useful to our community as problems are worked on and solved. We care deeply about this game, and we play it right alongside you. We will do better.”
If you’ve not been warcrafting lately, the patch’s problems have included the Decor Duel mode being undermined by an exploit involving the “track humanoids” ability, which has been allowing seekers to see exactly where the hiders they’re playing against are at, rather taking the challenge out of the mode. Also causing annoyance has been the fact that hiders have been missing out on rewards if they’re not deemed to have moved enough while in their chosen spot. This looks to be a design choice aimed at getting props to move around and attempt to juke and stun seekers until time expires, but being railroaded into that hasn’t been a lot of folks’ cup of tea.
As Kotaku‘s Rebecca Valentine documented, those two issues have been far from the only ones, hence Blizzard having to rush to their tools and get repairing. To their credit, the publishers have put out hotfixes and info on how they’re tackling problems in short order.
Here’s hoping they can squash any remaining bugs swiftly and are able to evaluate whether more time in the oven might benefit patches like this one going forwards.
