This past April saw World of Warcraft score an own-goal with the release of patch 11.1.5, which rankled players with its time-gated content and huge number of bugs. And while that stormy season has now passed by, senior game director Ion Hazzikostas is still reflecting on the disastrous patch in an interview.

“We’re experimenting and trying different approaches to live-service events, different things that come and go,” Hazzikostas explains. “Understandably, players are accustomed to patch day being the day when everything drops. We hear the feedback loud and clear. It’s quite possible we got the balance wrong this time.”

As for the bugs, Hazzikostas doesn’t necessarily attempt to excuse the matter, particularly in regard to Nightfall being completely frozen, but he also says that Blizzard is using hotfixes far more aggressively, which in turn means that some data changes that cause a conflict can get missed.

“That’s something that we work closely with QA on to understand, like what was the loophole in our testing and our process and our data verification that led to this?” he reasons. “Rather than say, we’re going to slow down and serve our players less, we’d rather ask, how can we polish this further? How can we tighten our processes so that things don’t slip through the cracks and we are getting content into players’ hands at the rate they deserve?”

Ultimately Hazzikostas says that 11.1.5 is a way for Blizzard to learn and improve both in terms of content delivery and setting expectations for what patches will bring. Time will tell once 11.1.7 leaves testing, but ideally the April showers will bring less broken content flowers.