I really don't see why this is getting downrated. As Skizzit so aptly observed, there's more than one team of programmers at Blizzard. And if the game is designed in a remotely reasonable manner, setting the animations and sounds for an NPC shouldn't be that hard. And the fact that they rushed out an unfinished major patch to get it live before Blizzcon shouldn't be an excuse for not getting something else done.

Imagine you just took your car to a mechanic. He was going on vacation that weekend and wanted to get everything done by the time he left, so he did some sloppy work on your car and it's still having some problems. You figured that while it was in the shop, you may as well treat yourself, so you also bought some really awesome (no seriously) leopard-print seat covers. But when you got the car back, you found out that not only were the repairs not totally completed, but the seat covers didn't have anything holding them on, so they were sliding all over the place and falling off.

Is your response, "Well, it still pulls to the right, so I guess it's okay he didn't put the covers on properly"? No--it's just one more piece of evidence for a rushed job.

Blizzard used to be the kind of company that *prided itself* on getting things right: better to release a *late* game than a *broken* game. I worry that what we're seeing here is a further symptom of "post-Activision Blizzard," where profits matter more than quality, and where the major decisions are in the hands of people who don't understand MMOs or the people who play them.