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Speculating On The 6.2 Release Date

Welcome to Mezzy Talks! The editorial where I take a look at something within World of Warcraft culture, game design (which has been moved to the design corner) or anything else WoW related.

Update2:

The release date has been confirmed: June 23rd!

Update:

PTR testing is heading towards it’s final phase. Zorbix just posted on twitter:

“We’ve reached a point in 6.2 testing where going forward, builds deployed to PTR are going to be flagged as “release” versions.”

This makes an end of June / start of July release a lot more likely.

Original Article:

Recently the first bit of patch 6.2 hit the background downloader causing a lot of speculation as to when the patch will be released. As it’s a quiet Sunday night, I thought it would be good to tackle the subject of the release of patch 6.2.

Since the background download has started there have been 2 camps of speculation. The first one being that the patch will already be released within the next week or two. You’ll mostly find these players in-game in the trade channel, whenever the background downloader gets mentioned.

The second camp is one you’ll more likely come across in the online community and social media. You’ll more likely hear from this camp that it’ll take 1 month – 4 weeks for patch 6.2 to be released. Let’s take a look at each of the speculations and then I’ll do some speculating of my own.

Speculation of 1 week

When it comes to addressing this particular time frame we can be done pretty quickly about it. Before a major patch is released there is always at least 1 release candidate pushed to the PTR, if not more than 1 candidate. We’re currently getting 1 new PTR build a week and the content itself isn’t done yet (which we’ll go into more deeply shortly). There is no way in the emerald nightmare that we’ll see 6.2 release in 1 or even 2 weeks.

Speculation of 1 month

Timewarped Item
Another factor – timewalker (and raid) tuning

One month – 4 weeks would seem more reasonable, but at the current state of things it would mean just a meager 4 more PTR builds. They could (and likely will) increase the amount of new builds they do per week, but there’s still a lot that has to be done to make the 6.2 patch complete.

The shipyard can’t be upgraded to even level 2 yet, the quest(s) to get more than 2 ship blueprints still do not work properly (beyond having used a bug in previous builds to obtain the submarine), the way shipyard missions work still don’t seem to be final (the mission requirement changes in the last build indicate that at the very least) and the new reputations for Tanaan Jungle Watcher recently talked about in an interview haven’t even made it onto the PTR yet. In fact, they’re still being fleshed out. They’re not even fully designed yet.

So while 1 month seems reasonable and puts 6.2 at a end of June release, I feel it’s unlikely with the amount of time and effort that undoubtedly still needs to go into 6.2. After all if there’s one thing we learned from the delayed release of WoD, it’s that game design takes time.

Neither

So if it’s not 1 week, 2 weeks or even 1 month, when can we expect the release of 6.2? Well given the pattern Blizzard has shown in the past, I feel there are 2 possibilities that take the “soon” comment from the recent interview into account.

The first possibility is mid July which would put the wait time at 6 to 7 weeks. The second possibility is mid August. Which would put it at another 10 to 11 weeks. So you might be wondering, why the gap? Well at the start of August Gamescom takes place from the 5th to 9th of August. Whenever these events occur, the week before and the week after nothing usually happens.

Speculating the release of a new patch is a very inexact science. No one actually knows how far 6.2 is in the development process outside of Blizzard themselves. So while we as a community enjoy the guessing, in the end we’ll just have to wait for the official announcement. 1 month is possible but unlikely, let’s just hope it isn’t actually another 2,5 months!

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