Season of Discovery Phase 1 Compendium
To understand the significance of this new build number, let's look at previous builds for a clue as to what this new 1.15.9 build could mean. World of Warcraft: Classic (2019) was released on build 1.13, Blizzard's first seasonal server, Season of Mastery was released on build 1.14, and the most recent seasonal server, Season of Discovery was released on build 1.15.
Now, nearly every new patch number on the 1.15 build has corresponded with a new Season of Discovery Phase. For example, Patch 1.15.0 was the initial release of Season of Discovery, which included all Phase 1 content, while the final major patch of SoD, 1.15.7, coincided with Phase 8 and the Scarlet Enclave raid. This pattern holds true for every new build number, except for one. The most recent live build for Season of Discovery, Patch 1.15.8 ended up being nothing more than some backend bug fixes, as Senior Game Producer, Tom Ellis explains:
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!
So, what does this all mean for the new 1.15.9 build? Well, we won't know for certain until the build is available on a public server, or Blizzard gives us official information. For now, it could be anything from the fabled Season of Discovery Phase 9 to an official SoD Fresh release or perhaps just another backend bug fix.
What do you think Patch 1.15.9 could be? Have you been participating in the recent community Fresh event? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!
