Update:  Blizzard did a hot-fix today, resolving the issue!   Amazing response time on this, as expected.

Much better.

It’s no secret I play World of Warcraft.   Yesterday a major patch hit that gave most of the characters new models.  My troll has never looked better.  However a sticky situation has put a damper on the revelry.

I’m a Horde player, so I anticipated the switch of my Orc Warrior, Xallion and my Orc Mage Nehl, two names my blog regulars would appreciate.  The goblins and blood elves didn’t get a facelift, but the my worgen, well… a picture says a thousand words.

A week ago I transferred over ‘Furry Xallion’ in the beta to see what his human form looked like.   This is what I saw:

Wut?

I spent a large portion of yesterday dreading this being ignored.  I tried to tell myself:  Blizzard will fix this.   There’s no way this will get to the live server.  I was very disappointed.

I’m not calling forth a crusade against Blizzard Entertainment, but this sort of thing is not cool.  Blizzard has made a public statement:

We introduced new character models with today’s patch and ran into a bug where some of our new HD textures are appearing too light when the lighting hits them at certain angles. We’re working on an update for that and will get it implemented as quickly as possible.

We also have a similar issue with Worgen skin options, but it’s based on a different bug. Worgen customization options are linked between each form (Human and Worgen), and we found an error in how we numbered the texture files used to set which skin tones are linked between them. This means that some Worgen players out there are seeing a pretty stark mismatch, which is due to the game simply pointing at the wrong texture file. We’re in the process of working on a patch to address this issue as well, and we expect that to go out as soon as tomorrow.

This hasn’t really appeased me.  The problem with the human skins?  I can completely understand.  I’m not making a big deal over the skin tone being a few shades lighter there are uniform issues with hair color and other races to that effect.  My issue comes from Blizzard letting a volatile issue like this slip through when people have been griping about it for WEEKS.

I did some nosing about the net before the patch yesterday and Worgen players on the Alliance noticed this a long time ago.  The problem here: Blizzard didn’t think this was important enough to fix quickly.   Taking away a character’s racial identity is never cool.   When something like this happens on accident the forgiveness comes from how well they handle it.

If I logged in on patch day and saw my whitewashed worgen, I would have assumed it an error.   Because it was a known issue that sat on beta for a time then moved to the live server  my forgiveness dwindled.

If it was an easy enough fix to patch the day after launch, why wasn’t it fixed during the beta phase?

This does not make me a happy panda.

Somebody order a happy panda?

Not you Chen, you’re cool.