So I was just thinking...

[Republic]

...how the hell does Blizzard miss such a large issue as talent points not working properly with 3.1?

I actually intend for this to be a constructive thread. I'm not looking to slam anyone. I am just rather, well, amazed that they missed such a large bug. I mean, 3.1 was a major talent overhaul/rewrite. It isn't often a patch brings a reset of talents (across all classes anyway). In my opinion, the talent changes were perhaps as significant as the addition of Ulduar, etc. Wouldn't you guys agree? I mean, the talents affect everyone who logs in to a character.

I've read about talents not being calculated correctly, not being able to be learned (not sticking after trying to apply them), disappearing after being learned, etc. I've read people having simple "displaying of talent" issues and then others (myself) having issues with toons not able to learn talents.

My experience tonight on one of my DK's was such that they were missing a couple of points (the total didn't equal the amount for the character level), to being unable to learn talents (the last 2 points earned weren't sticking or taking effect after clicking to learn).

I asked around general chat to see if anyone else had these issues and was told by one guy that the only way he got his worked out was to respec. I tried this, short of any other solution found, and it worked. In any event, how the hell does Blizzard mess up something so important to a patch release? I mean, it could be argued that this was the focal point of the patch.

I'm not looking for "Blizzard sucks" responses. That isn't my purpose. I just can't believe how something like this is messed up. What sort of quality assurance or auditing do their programmers have? I've all but decided the PTR's are useless for actual TESTING purposes. It seems most players who go there are simply interested in drooling over new epics rather than filling out bug reports. Know what I mean?

Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts on the issue, feel free to post. It seriously seems like the balls being dropped are getting bigger with each patch release.

On a slightly related note, I've also noticed a lot more sounds "working" in the game now. Elevators, schools of fish, all kinds of ambient sounds are present that weren't before. When things like this are "added", you really take notice of how many bugs exist in this game. I mean, let's be honest, someone didn't just get up at a meeting and say "OMG, the Vengeance Landing lift needs sound effects!". It seems this game is full, and I do mean FULL of bugs, whether people are aware of them or not.

What's the solution to the process? It's kind of sad if you ask me.

[Xrystal]

I would have gladly tested the dual talent speccing unfortunately I didn't have a character that had 1000g but by the time I realised that it was costing that much I had no character slots to create an existing character with what I expect would have had the gold to pay for the dual spec option.

All I ended up doing was testing addons to make sure they would still work.

[IBLJerry]

I have tested a bit the dual talent spec on the PTR (I'm the author of Talented). I have transfered 4 characters over the course of the PTR, two very early (twice my level 80), before the PTR went up in fact, one a little bit later (23 hunter as I needed to work on pet talents) and a final one much later (one 70 mage, for checking something), I think it was while 9742 was on the PTR. Out of the 4, I bought the dual spec only for the two warriors, quite early. I remember it worked fine.

Edit: With one warrior, I did unlearn talents at least four or five times, and reapplied specs with "problematic" talents like Devastate without having an issue. The same spec that had issue on live.

Actually, I do not remember having any issue with the talent on any character, even the warriors. It worked fine. There are a lot of stuff that I did not try (zoning with a hunter pet, for instance), so I can't say for sure that everything was working fine, but what I did work on was solid. Nothing like we saw when the patch was deployed.

My guess is that it's quite different to transfer a character to a new database, and work from here, than it is to convert an (old, big) database to a new format, and that a small difference in the internal DB may have been the root cause of all the issues that has been experienced on live.

It's really hard to determine the full extent of issue that a single failed assertion can have, without access to the source code.

Maybe they should clone a live server db, apply the patch to it beforehand and check there, as part of the QA process that goes on once a patch is ready. Maybe they already do that but it didn't trigger the bug for some reason... The fact is that, even if this bug is really easy to see on live server, that doesn't mean that it was easy to find beforehand. And I can definitly attest that it was working much better on the PTR than on live.