Tom Ellis on WoW Classic Recent Patches
Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis shared on Twitter why Classic needs regular code merges even when there is no content: These patches bring Classic closer to Mainline to avoid code rot and long term stability issues; although odd new bugs can still surface!
Originally Posted by Tom Ellis
What is going on with these Classic patches with no content, but new bugs? Fair question, without seeing under the hood this probably seems like madness. Let me shed a little light.
Classic sucks. Aight, wait for that to get screenshotted, and lets move on! Classic sucks to deal with from a Live Ops/Server/Code point of view, because Classic is by design an "older" version of the game its not under constant development and doesn't receive a constant feed of update patches, it often sits around for long periods of time, while it's doing that it's code is getting *old*. We would frequently run into issues where Classic versions of the game would hit crashes and bugs that we had fixed in Mainline long ago. When things would go wrong in Classic, engineers would have to travel back in time to re-read how the old code was doing things vs the new hotness they were used to working with and debugging more often.
The way to fix this, is by having Classic flavours of WoW in the merge chain so if we fix code in mainline, it gets merged and fixed in Classic. We've been careful and gun-shy around this because well, there's a whole crap ton of Wow flavours around these days and a lot of code going in everywhere, we don't want to constantly be having to re-QA the entire game constantly just in case something merged into Mainline broke something in a Classic flavor. But, that leads to the above mentioned code rot, so as part of a deal that Server & Live Ops made with the Classic team, we're pushing them to more frequently "suck in" new code and get them back in parity with Mainline so that we're not constantly juggling 2, 3 or 4 different versions of our codebase on Live.
The side effect for you is you're going to see more of these content-empty patches and sometimes (but hopefully not too much!) these odd bugs to appear that are the result of some new merged code not playing nicely with some Classic content. We're going to get better at this whole process the more we do it and Classic QA will get better and better at finding the things we missed, and Engineering will get better about not setting Classic up the bomb as our versions get more closely aligned.
But yep, if you wondered why we keep patching things for no reason, heres our reason!
World of Warcraft Extended Maintenance - November 4, 2025
Blizzard has announced an extended maintenance for all World of Warcraft game versions, lasting approximately 8 hours from 7:00 AM PT until 3:00 PM PT. European realms will also have an 8-hour maintenance on Wednesday, from 3:00 AM CET until 11:00 AM CET.
Weekly Maintenance Schedule
Continue reading...
Senior Game Producer Tom Ellis shared on Twitter why Classic needs regular code merges even when there is no content: These patches bring Classic closer to Mainline to avoid code rot and long term stability issues; although odd new bugs can still surface!
Originally Posted by Tom Ellis
What is going on with these Classic patches with no content, but new bugs? Fair question, without seeing under the hood this probably seems like madness. Let me shed a little light.
Classic sucks. Aight, wait for that to get screenshotted, and lets move on! Classic sucks to deal with from a Live Ops/Server/Code point of view, because Classic is by design an "older" version of the game its not under constant development and doesn't receive a constant feed of update patches, it often sits around for long periods of time, while it's doing that it's code is getting *old*. We would frequently run into issues where Classic versions of the game would hit crashes and bugs that we had fixed in Mainline long ago. When things would go wrong in Classic, engineers would have to travel back in time to re-read how the old code was doing things vs the new hotness they were used to working with and debugging more often.
The way to fix this, is by having Classic flavours of WoW in the merge chain so if we fix code in mainline, it gets merged and fixed in Classic. We've been careful and gun-shy around this because well, there's a whole crap ton of Wow flavours around these days and a lot of code going in everywhere, we don't want to constantly be having to re-QA the entire game constantly just in case something merged into Mainline broke something in a Classic flavor. But, that leads to the above mentioned code rot, so as part of a deal that Server & Live Ops made with the Classic team, we're pushing them to more frequently "suck in" new code and get them back in parity with Mainline so that we're not constantly juggling 2, 3 or 4 different versions of our codebase on Live.
The side effect for you is you're going to see more of these content-empty patches and sometimes (but hopefully not too much!) these odd bugs to appear that are the result of some new merged code not playing nicely with some Classic content. We're going to get better at this whole process the more we do it and Classic QA will get better and better at finding the things we missed, and Engineering will get better about not setting Classic up the bomb as our versions get more closely aligned.
But yep, if you wondered why we keep patching things for no reason, heres our reason!
World of Warcraft Extended Maintenance - November 4, 2025
Blizzard has announced an extended maintenance for all World of Warcraft game versions, lasting approximately 8 hours from 7:00 AM PT until 3:00 PM PT. European realms will also have an 8-hour maintenance on Wednesday, from 3:00 AM CET until 11:00 AM CET.
Weekly Maintenance Schedule
Continue reading...