I 100% believe this was true in WOW Classic TBC Gold Hearthstone. I have not played in a long time but back when they first started incorporating cards would be a few new broken strategy everyone had to play Blizzard sat around for months stating everything was fine before waiting to launch some half-assed counter in another expansion. When it failed they finally delivered a balance patch to repair the initial issue. I'm sure people stuck around simply to see whether the new cards would change anything the player numbers were boosted.
 
Agree. I do think there is an element of this devs fooling themselves into believing their"methods" and content are at least kind of pleasure. They definitely"overdesign", starting with the benefits and working backwards from there rather than really thinking if those systems themselves are fun.
 
However, in BFA, everyone understood Azerite armor was crap in beta and blizzard said dont worry we have fixes in shop. In Beta shamans were dreadful and had many bugs and problems which weren't addressed. The first tier comes around and rather than these fixing shamans they say the initial patch Shamans will be fixed. So they made insect fixing shamans a material attribute in the first significant patch in an effort to keep people subscribed or buy WOW TBC Gold deliver them back to the game.