With the imminent release of World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, Blizzard preemptively released the 8.0 patch, meant to prepare WoW for the full release of the new expansion. Unfortunately, the new patch brought it with several major issues, ranging from connectivity problems to stat balancing of legacy content.
The 8.0 update, known as the pre-patch for Battle for Azeroth, introduced a host of new tweaks and changes, including adverse issues such as players not being able to connect during the majority of the day, after the patch went live. other issues that plagued the game, include, major scaling problems and mudflation, a term coined for MMORPGs, referring to older content becoming devalued due to the introduction of new expansions or downloadable content.
Unlike most MMMOs, World of Warcraft has been supported for a very long time, releasing all the way back in 2004, the game has received a plethora of expansions, with the upcoming Battle for Azeroth content being the 7th expansion pack for the legendary title. Due to each expansion releasing during vastly different times, scaling or the issue regarding retroactively balancing old content with new has become something that has plagued WoW since release.
Encounters with older enemies, dungeons and raids which veteran players have become accustomed to breezing through, are now suddenly harder than necessary — targets that used to take only a couple of hits, now, after the introduction of the 8.0 pre-patch have become overpowered, making the game as a whole feel unbalanced and messy. This issue is compounded by the fact that Blizzard has made it easier than ever for newcomers to jump into WoW, thanks to the removal of the Battle Chest, meaning that new players may have a harder time leveling up or even just enjoying the game.
Other cosmetics issues have also arisen due to the introduction of the 8.0 patch. Previously, ever since the release of the expansion Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard allowed players to toggle between different character models as new ones were introduced, making the game mesh better with newer content. Unfortunately, this toggle has seemingly disappeared entirely with the latest content update. Another issue, as a direct result of World of Warcraft adopting Directx12 support, is the lack of true fullscreen, instead, the game now only offers windowed fullscreen, something that has caused several threads to pop up on the Blizzard forums and Reddit.
A list of all the current issues introduced with the 8.0 can be found in a thread made on the WoW forums. With the full release of Battle for Azeroth not scheduled to drop until August 14, 2018, hopefully, Blizzard manages to iron out all the issues caused by the pre-patch, prior to the launch of the full expansion pack.
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