World of Warcraft patch 12.1 tackles bug fixes and housing decor costs, as Blizzard focuses on delivering a "polished experience"

It's no secret that World of Warcraft's latest expansion, Midnight, has had its struggles. While, on paper, it opened the doors to a brave new Azeroth with the addition of player housing and improved UI, in practice, it's been one of the buggiest WoW releases to date. With said housing being disabled for an entire day due to a weird bug that spawned from Mists of Pandaria's Siege of Orgrimmar raid, Blizzard's classic MMO has begun to buckle under the sheer weight of its old code; in many instances, fixing something means breaking something else.

Blizzard has been quick to make adjustments, however. Patch 12.0.7 fixed issues with performance drops in Silvermoon City, squashed a bug that prevented area and auto-looting (that one was a kicker), and finally reduced repair costs by nuking 'wear and tear' from swinging your swords.

World of Warcraft's next update, 12.1, continues that work, taking aim at even more bugs and improving the overall UI experience. It also reduces the cost of earnable housing items, allowing for more creativity than ever before, while simultaneously introducing a one-time Professions reset to help give your Profession choice some extra weight. It's not a silver-bullet fix; it's impossible to crush every single bug, but it continues to be a step in the right direction.

Ahead of Blizzard's latest blog post, I caught up with WoW veteran and Game Director Ion Hazzikostas to discuss the current state of Midnight, and how Curse of Ula'tek hopes to fix some of the game's biggest issues.

We start on patch 12.0.5, which was dubbed by many a player as being somewhat of a disaster. The aforementioned housing downtime kicked off an update riddled with bugs, from issues with Holy Paladin's justice, to loot duplication problems with Nebulous Voidcore. At the time, Blizzard said that the patch simply "wasn't up to standard," so I asked Hazzikostas about the team's learnings, and how it plans to ensure this doesn't happen again.

"12.0.5 was not the smoothest release to say the least," he says. "While we got the experience to a pretty stable place within a few days, there were more bugs at launch than we found acceptable. To some extent, given the sheer breadth of WoW, some number of bugs are inevitable - you poke at one piece of the code, and something breaks in a far-off location. But, at the end of the day, our players aren't interested in the intricacies of maintaining a 20-year-old game: they want a good, polished experience.

"A lot of what contributed to 12.0.5 and the way it played out was actually aspects of our internal processes involving fixing bugs, where I think we were fixing bugs too late in the process in ways that made it nearly impossible for ourselves and our quality assurance analysts to catch some knock-on effects from those fixes."

He gives the example of the game-breaking housing bug, which caused items to lock to the floor and save there. "It wasn't something we could fix right away, but we didn't want to hold the entire game down, so we disabled housing.

"How does that happen?" he asks, rhetorically. "How does that bug sneak into the system so late? Did we not test it? Did we not have people checking housing? Of course we did. But there was another tricky bug that got caught late in the process that actually involved, of all things, the elevator in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid from Mists of Pandaria, which suddenly was broken and players weren't properly attaching to it. Turns out that that was broken by some earlier fixes to the housing code involving attaching objects to other objects.

"A fix was done to the Siege of Orgrimmar elevator very late in the process, just a few days before the patch was supposed to go live. QA checked it; the elevator worked perfectly fine. We did not, at the time, go back to recheck housing, and a fix to one bug caused an issue elsewhere. I could cue all of the 'spaghetti code' memes that the internet will come up with," he says with a smile. "But sometimes game development is very much a set of moving targets."

12.1 is, in some ways, more about adjusting the game's quality of life versus shiny, new features. Hazzikostas tells me that a lot of the major features and campaign beats are, of course, "pre-planned," but that there's still room to be "reactive" in order to "listen to what players are telling [them]." This allows the team to "focus on addressing pain points, improving quality of life, and fixing bugs when they crop up."

One of the main QoL improvements with 12.1 is the decrease in housing decor prices. While this is only for earnable decor versus items you can purchase with actual cash, it's great news all around - while I'm no stranger to a good ol' grind, it has felt like collecting items from some of the older pieces of content has been a bit of a slog.

Hazzikostas says it's all about "striking the balance. We want this to be a meaningful progression; something that people can really dig into as they revisit old locations and as they go through new content to earn the decor that they want. But, at the end of the day, if you feel like it's too tedious or you can't get enough of the things you want, that's just going to undermine your enjoyment in the whole system.

"As we often do, and I think that we are, at times, very fairly criticized by the community for this - when building a system like this that has to stand the test of time, we tend to start on the conservative side because, if we overshoot as we did, it's not that challenging to lower the prices and that's how they'll be going forward. If we came in too low, we really couldn't justify raising the prices of the decor. We really want to make sure that there's enough depth to the system to make the time that people spend, and the differentiation in the decor collections that people have, be something that has some substance to it."

12.1 also comes with a Profession reset. We saw one in The War Within, and Midnight is once again allowing you to respec all of your Knowledge Points. "We want the choices players make to be meaningful and help them differentiate themselves from other crafters," Hazzikostas says.

"There are very, very, very, very few choices - especially in the progression space - that you can make in WoW today that aren't freely resettable and swappable. But, with Professions, because of the macroeconomic community here, it's important that there'll be some people who are better at making this type of craft, versus others who are better at making that type of craft. People have niches where they can make and sell things for a profit.

"If you could respec freely with no restrictions, you could always just respec to be the best at making the thing you want to craft in the moment. Complete flexibility wouldn't really work," he continues. "It would undermine a lot of the goals of the system."

In response to player concerns and the general movement of the game, however, Blizzard has opted to "give everybody a chance to reallocate their points knowing what they know now," but he stresses that "from there it will still be locked for the rest of the expansion, and how you spent those points this time around needs to be a meaningful choice."

World of Warcraft patch 12.1 doesn't have a release date just yet, but will also fix a few noticeable bugs - Valeera will no longer randomly die in Delves, and you won't casually be booted off your mount in transit from Zul'Aman to Eversong. There are also a slew of UI improvements, with a new account-wide autolooting feature, the option to display map coordinates, and a tidy up of the currencies tab with new collapsible menus.

There's also all of the new content, including The Coiled Isle, a new Troll-focused questline, and various raids, dungeons, Delves, and more.