The strange style of patch notes, real and fake
by Mike Schramm 
Apr 4th 2007 at 1:51PM
I don't know if you could call this "Guide to Writing Fake Patch Notes" hilarious, but I think it is at least chuckleworthy. Flibble of Draenor (the realm, not the shattered world) has put together a quick guide on how to trick sites exactly like this one into believing your patch notes. And in doing so, he hits upon some of Blizzard's more conspicuous quirks, i.e. that you should "at least try to glance at the Under Development page, so that you can convincingly lie about the things Blizzard convincingly lies about on their website."He also notes that every patch includes at least one change to a Mage spell icon (well, there are just so many of them), adding "several new items and recipes" that don't really exist, and has (faked, of course) bugfixes that "preferentially affect the 0.1% of WoW players who make no contribution to society [and] live in mom's basement at age 37." See what I mean? Chuckleworthy.
Truth be told, I really like the way patch notes are written. I'm not sure who writes them (I doubt it's an actual dev, but it has to be someone associated with the dev team), but they are both formal and at the same time seem to have a lot of cool mystery and design behind them. Caydiem hit on this note to extremely comic effect with her fake patch notes (I like that the grass in enemy faction zones is "exceptionally green"), but even the real patch notes read like a kind of otherworldly poetry: "Cabal Zealots are now more threatening while under the effect of Shape of the Beast." To players who know what they're talking about, they import a very technical message. But for someone who doesn't know about that section of the game or the game itself, that's a pretty mysterious statement. As a student of audience and media, I find patch notes pretty fascinating.
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, Odds and ends, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Todd Apr 4th 2007 2:39PM
I bet all patch notes are written by an intern.
Justin Apr 4th 2007 4:54PM
I can't speak for Blizzard, but at my company, the documentation section writes the release notes for each new version after consulting with QA. Back when I used to be a tech writer, I did a couple of those docs. Suffice to say, writing release notes for contact center software probably isn't quite as interesting as the WoW ones. Can you say, "dry as the desert"?
chaz Apr 4th 2007 4:58PM
I think someone could easily take this guide and turn out a quick web application that would auto-generate fake patch notes.
Randomize things like:
- "Fixed a bug that caused $noun to $strange_action"
- $Class $SpellName $Spelleffect will $now_or_nolonger $do_some_action
- $Item will $now_or_nolonger $do_some_action when $some_circumstance
I've written half the psueudocode here, get to work ruby/php people!
Gazoo Apr 4th 2007 5:31PM
Caydiem used to compile and write the patch notes (she often talked about the process when she was a CM) so the now semi-legendary fake patch notes are even funnier since she wrote the actual patch notes as well.
I still see the subtle humor and style that Cay used permeating recent notes so I can only assume she is still assigned to notes duty or taught an apprentice the "Caydiem method".