Front page "promises" in Game Development

[Vaelorian]

Someone please show me where Blizzard has ever used the term "promise". If you can't...quit using this word. You taking what they say and then twisting it and then claiming they "promise" something is bs.

Someone please show people that using quotation marks on a word does not mean to take the word litterally... Please quit taking these things litterally and actually understand why this usage of quotation marks was done in the first place...

[Resheph]

Currently I am kinda distrustful of Blizzard. Everything they say I view with the eye of one who has experienced similar promises in the past, yet it did not turn out as ideal as they would make it seem.
<snip>
I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

Initially your post annoyed me, but on brief reflection I do sympathize with where you're coming from.

The thing is, "Blizzard" is not your colleague or schoolyard friend, it's a big corporation. And they do not make promises, they put out press statements. And the latter are often just about worth the ink that's sued to print them.
I am convinced the previous team really believed it when they made the claims about the frequency of expansions/content. And yet circumstances and the reality of the day created an environment in which they could not deliver.

I am quite neutral about it. I like playing the game, and in periods there's nothing to do or I am bored I take a wowbreak. I hope this time they can do what they want, but I won't cry or hold it against them if they don't. They know what they want to achieve and they try to accomplish it. Works for me.

[Grahamington]

I'll put up 50,000G that most will run out of things to do within 5 months of the expansion release.

(Old content/achievements no count) lol

[Tharkkun]

Currently I am kinda distrustful of Blizzard. Everything they say I view with the eye of one who has experienced similar promises in the past, yet it did not turn out as ideal as they would make it seem.

I cherry picked the 2 things that they said off the front page:
- Priority #1 is making sure that you don't run out of things to do.
- This time around there won't be a content drought - "Don't worry, we got you!"

When I read things like this, my experience tells me that this will still be bad. In my ideal situation, we will get regular contact filled patches of Legion. We get quest hubs with nice rewards and continuation of the storyline. We will also get raids that last (in sequence) back to back of the expansion. We will have professions that will continue to be valid until the last day of the expansion (creating gear etc). We will get more dungeons to do so the old ones will remains somewhat fresh instead of an annoyance/stagnant piece of crap due to the fact we did it 10000 times already.

But what I expect when reading this:
We will get additional quests(hubs) but instead of having them regularly (new ones) we will sort of get the same amount as previously but spread thinner. So it seems like there is always something to do, but in fact there is the same amount - just not given to us to gobble up at once.
We will get 1 or 2 additional dungeons. Which is already better then we are used to at this time. But those dungeons will likely be pointless for any raider above LFR. (yes I know about the rewards and potential warforged things etc) - Sure you have Mythic stuff etc but how long will you be doing that? And if you only give 2 additional ones, how fast will we get bored of that? And if you use the random queue you will still be doing the old ones at the same time, which you are bored off.
Then we will see additional timewalker dungeons appear. Like that is actual content. It is boring as fuck.
And we will still have a content drought at the end of an expansion. Perhaps not a year+ but probably 10/11 months. And then they can say that it was better then before right? We will get all sorts of non progression content aswell. Pet battle events - perhaps a hunting contest (instead of a fishing one), which provides you exactly with nothing apart from a pointless achievement.

I mean currently people cheer for the Legion pre-event. Hoorah!!! But is it not really mindnumbingly boring already? You can defeat basically everything yourself without much effort except the final bosses. (or maybe you can solo them I haven't had the chance) You get transmog gear that while nice to have is not very pretty on most classes (yes my own taste). How long are you going to grind this? It doesn't take skill. Hell you can just hit mobs once and go afk - while the rest defeat the boss. (sounds familiar?)

I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

Please don't take this quote out of context to mean "There will not be a content drought between the last patch for Legion and the next expansion." Because that's definitely *not* what it means. There will be definitely be a long drought at the end.

That statement means that during the course of this expansion there will be decent content in every patch. Not the BS that WOD was.

[Gemini Soul]

They say the same thing every Xpac, if they were smart they would make a "buffer raid" early on like now and they can release it when it starts to hit a drought and just edit the loot table ilvl's to match when they do drop it. If they release The Emerald Nightmare and The Nighthold in the same timeline that they did HM and BRF, then we don't need this filler raid they have planned, and instead should save it so we don't have a year drought again. If they released a filler raid about 6 months after HFC was out, had 2-4 bosses and dropped Archy quality non-teir loot then it wouldn't of been so bad. Wonder if we are going to get 2 raid Teirs or 3 this Xpac

Wonder what their time/patch table will be 7.0 Nightmare 7.1 Kara 7.2 Nighthold 7.3 XXX 7.4 T2 Raid 7.5 XXX 7.6 T3 final raid

[Mafic]

Patch 7.2 will make or break Legion expansion in the eyes of most players IMVHO.

[Beazy]

- This time around there won't be a content drought - "Don't worry, we got you!"

LoL thats comedy gold. I actually laughed. Good one Blizz!

[Deja Thoris]

I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

There comes a point when people like you complain so much that its just noise. You don't need to run to the forums with a negative slant on every utterance they make.

Blizz could announce that they are giving $1 million and blonde hookers to all their subscribers and you'd complain they weren't brunettes.

[WintersLegion]

Actually if you don't have guys like "me" you'd only get the following posts:
- what class should I be?
- returning player - tell me everything about current events
- SPECULATION: X
- SPECULATION: Y
- SPECULATION: Z
- A new class idea!! "Tinker(er)"
- A new class idea!! "Necromancer"
- A new class idea!! "Bard"
- A new race idea!! "Ogres"
- A new race idea!! "Naga"
- I got banned!!!
- The price of the token is too high!
- I was conned!!
- What lootsystem should I use?
- How do I recruit?
- My guild collapsed!!
- a horde pride thread
- an alliance pride thread
- etc

Yeah this will be a very enlightening forum for sure!
I am not saying that my thread is better btw.

I'm completely fine with that all bitching for the sake of bitching does is spread negativity.

[Sylvaeres]

Currently I am kinda distrustful of Blizzard. Everything they say I view with the eye of one who has experienced similar promises in the past, yet it did not turn out as ideal as they would make it seem.

I cherry picked the 2 things that they said off the front page:
- Priority #1 is making sure that you don't run out of things to do.
- This time around there won't be a content drought - "Don't worry, we got you!"

When I read things like this, my experience tells me that this will still be bad. In my ideal situation, we will get regular contact filled patches of Legion. We get quest hubs with nice rewards and continuation of the storyline. We will also get raids that last (in sequence) back to back of the expansion. We will have professions that will continue to be valid until the last day of the expansion (creating gear etc). We will get more dungeons to do so the old ones will remains somewhat fresh instead of an annoyance/stagnant piece of crap due to the fact we did it 10000 times already.

But what I expect when reading this:
We will get additional quests(hubs) but instead of having them regularly (new ones) we will sort of get the same amount as previously but spread thinner. So it seems like there is always something to do, but in fact there is the same amount - just not given to us to gobble up at once.
We will get 1 or 2 additional dungeons. Which is already better then we are used to at this time. But those dungeons will likely be pointless for any raider above LFR. (yes I know about the rewards and potential warforged things etc) - Sure you have Mythic stuff etc but how long will you be doing that? And if you only give 2 additional ones, how fast will we get bored of that? And if you use the random queue you will still be doing the old ones at the same time, which you are bored off.
Then we will see additional timewalker dungeons appear. Like that is actual content. It is boring as fuck.
And we will still have a content drought at the end of an expansion. Perhaps not a year+ but probably 10/11 months. And then they can say that it was better then before right? We will get all sorts of non progression content aswell. Pet battle events - perhaps a hunting contest (instead of a fishing one), which provides you exactly with nothing apart from a pointless achievement.

I mean currently people cheer for the Legion pre-event. Hoorah!!! But is it not really mindnumbingly boring already? You can defeat basically everything yourself without much effort except the final bosses. (or maybe you can solo them I haven't had the chance) You get transmog gear that while nice to have is not very pretty on most classes (yes my own taste). How long are you going to grind this? It doesn't take skill. Hell you can just hit mobs once and go afk - while the rest defeat the boss. (sounds familiar?)

I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

Your reading comprehension skills amaze me. Seriously. You're incredibly talented at spinning plain English into whatever you think it means

- - - Updated - - -

I'll put up 50,000G that most will run out of things to do within 5 months of the expansion release.

(Old content/achievements no count) lol

Oh man, big money boy over here

[clevin]

My thoughts exactly maybe it is time they move onto something else if they have this much pent up negativity of this game..

While I agree, the flip side argument, that it's not a promise if they don't explicitly say 'we promise to...' is also annoying.

Personally, they shouldn't have said a thing about droughts. They've said this as each new expansion rolls up and it's never been true so they have less than zero credibility and if they don't realize that someone should pull them out of their little bubble.

[Deleted]

People really need to stop seeing everything blizzard ever says as a "promise". Then you will miraculously stop being disappointed.

those things quoted by the op are definitely promises. and it wouldn't be the first time they completely abandon those promises.

[Wild]

I'll put up 50,000G that most will run out of things to do within 5 months of the expansion release.

(Old content/achievements no count) lol

Im sure for some people this is sadly true. If you play WoW 15h daily over months, you will always run out of content and get bored. Some people don't realize that there so much to do then just play WoW all freaking day and night. People who dont have a RL, at least go play another game and stop QQing about BLizzards great work. I mean they havent even launched it yet and people are already worried about not having enough content for their sad lives! This is insane...
(generally speaking!)

[Schizoide]

They make the same promises every time. Every single expansion since WOTLK-- that's what, 8 years? Every long-time player should be highly skeptical.

If they do it, great. But don't hold your breath.

[clevin]

I fail to see your point. Let's take your dungeon example, we'd get 2 new ones, but mythic+ adds an infinite progress system to that with randomized modifiers. You're basically getting Greater Rifts but better, and they've built a whole game around Greater Rifts, because pushing your limits keeps people entertained. You're basically not just getting 2 new dungeons in patches but you'd be getting a whole new stage to figure out to perfection.

If I wanted that I'd play Diablo. While I'm fine with borrowing/reusing concepts across games and I think the system is interesting, an MMO is not the same as Diablo. The idea isn't to just run the same bit of content over and over and, while some people will be fine with that esp with the increasing gear levels, many of us will be bored for the same reason we don't want to do the same raid over and over just increased in difficulty - it's the SAME content. I didn't like Challenge modes for this reason - I didn't want to bother doing the same stuff but timed, I wanted new stuff.

- - - Updated - - -

Im sure for some people this is sadly true. If you play WoW 15h daily over months, you will always run out of content and get bored. Some people don't realize that there so much to do then just play WoW all freaking day and night. People who dont have a RL, at least go play another game and stop QQing about BLizzards great work. I mean they havent even launched it yet and people are already worried about not having enough content for their sad lives! This is insane...
(generally speaking!)

Oh bullshit. I play, at most, a couple hours a night (not including AFK time or time just chatting which sometimes adds real time) at release. I still ran out of things to do in WOD. Had I done everything possible? Nope. No pet battles, no mythic raids, etc. But, like others, I mostly play for the core content of WoW - quests, leveling, instances (5 mans and raid), etc. While I'm find wit them being in the game, things like pet battles are a side game to me and not really what WoW is all about. Run old content? I did it when it was new content, so, no, thanks.

Contrast that with MoP where, yes, I ran out of content in a given patch (because unless you rarely play at all you will over the course of 4 months or so) but then a new patch with real content came out and gave me more core content to do. If Legion is more like that, I'll be happy. Again, like what I think is a fairly large group, I know there will be peaks and lulls in content. All I ask is that every once in a while, at quick but reasonable intervals, we get new content. To me, that's every 3-4 months.

[Rudol Von Stroheim]

Currently I am kinda distrustful of Blizzard. Everything they say I view with the eye of one who has experienced similar promises in the past, yet it did not turn out as ideal as they would make it seem.

I cherry picked the 2 things that they said off the front page:
- Priority #1 is making sure that you don't run out of things to do.
- This time around there won't be a content drought - "Don't worry, we got you!"

When I read things like this, my experience tells me that this will still be bad. In my ideal situation, we will get regular contact filled patches of Legion. We get quest hubs with nice rewards and continuation of the storyline. We will also get raids that last (in sequence) back to back of the expansion. We will have professions that will continue to be valid until the last day of the expansion (creating gear etc). We will get more dungeons to do so the old ones will remains somewhat fresh instead of an annoyance/stagnant piece of crap due to the fact we did it 10000 times already.

But what I expect when reading this:
We will get additional quests(hubs) but instead of having them regularly (new ones) we will sort of get the same amount as previously but spread thinner. So it seems like there is always something to do, but in fact there is the same amount - just not given to us to gobble up at once.
We will get 1 or 2 additional dungeons. Which is already better then we are used to at this time. But those dungeons will likely be pointless for any raider above LFR. (yes I know about the rewards and potential warforged things etc) - Sure you have Mythic stuff etc but how long will you be doing that? And if you only give 2 additional ones, how fast will we get bored of that? And if you use the random queue you will still be doing the old ones at the same time, which you are bored off.
Then we will see additional timewalker dungeons appear. Like that is actual content. It is boring as fuck.
And we will still have a content drought at the end of an expansion. Perhaps not a year+ but probably 10/11 months. And then they can say that it was better then before right? We will get all sorts of non progression content aswell. Pet battle events - perhaps a hunting contest (instead of a fishing one), which provides you exactly with nothing apart from a pointless achievement.

I mean currently people cheer for the Legion pre-event. Hoorah!!! But is it not really mindnumbingly boring already? You can defeat basically everything yourself without much effort except the final bosses. (or maybe you can solo them I haven't had the chance) You get transmog gear that while nice to have is not very pretty on most classes (yes my own taste). How long are you going to grind this? It doesn't take skill. Hell you can just hit mobs once and go afk - while the rest defeat the boss. (sounds familiar?)

I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

I'm somewhat skeptical buuuut... the 7.1 announcement increased my confidence a great deal.

I'm hoping it's going to be a raid tier every 4-5 months with a more "casual" focused patch in between. Which in this case is the introduction of Kharazan and more questing. You don't know how happy that made me to see.

Now, we can all go, "...but yeah it's probably content broken up into significantly smaller portions," and you could be right except, let us consider WoD. We basically got jack diddly, all expansion, except for an extension of the Garrisons and two additional raid tiers. Big whoop. 7.1 for Legion already looks like a bigger push than most of WoD's additional content combined and it's preparing to go into PTR as is.

Legion itself looks far more well-bodied than WoD did at launch. Anyone critically assessing this can argue there is more content there, at the outset, and more robust systems in which to enjoy said content.

So even if they stretch content thin and don't deliver to the fullest that we as players might hope, it's still going to be leaps and bounds ahead of Warlords. I'd consider that something worth being content with for now and then we can judge later if it held up to more lofty standards/wishes.

After all, MoP was a solid expansion content wise and really was only drug down by the major gap between SoO and WoD.

I have my gripes about WoW and stinging wounds over WoD but I'm pretty excited for Legion and I believe for good reasons.

[Sansnom]

Currently I am kinda distrustful of Blizzard. Everything they say I view with the eye of one who has experienced similar promises in the past, yet it did not turn out as ideal as they would make it seem.

I am actually not done complaining yet or expressing my distrust of anything Blizzard says. But I have other things to do.

Move on. Leave. Play another game. If you do not trust the company to deliver, then really don't buy their product anymore.

What are you trying to hoping to do?

[Luxeley]

For each of the last 4 xpacs, there has been a content drought of 10-14 months. And now, all of sudden (for the 5th time) Blizzard says "don't worry, we've got your back." Let me put it to you this way, if you're going to far back into someone's arms and 4x's in a row they're texting, are you going to be dumb enough to trust them a 5th time a row. This is just one example of a company that probably does possess the best of intentions each time, but consistently does not deliver. And, they do not deliver because there is no accountability for them to do so.

[Sansnom]

I'll put up 50,000G that most will run out of things to do within 5 months of the expansion release.

(Old content/achievements no count) lol

Who are the "most"? People who play 20+ hrs per week or around 5 hrs per week?

See, that is part of the problem. There will be people who will run of things to do if they are prepared to take a week off just to play this non-stop.

There are others who are not in a rush to everything.

Finally, running of things to do is different to running out of things "I LIKE" to do.

[manypillars]

I'm not sure why anyone takes any of these announcements at face value. It's just speculative fanfiction about their own IP until it gets released on live. Also, keep in mind that they consider fill the bar, mob grinding, getting to content, and repeating content to be content. Every mob you kill, every bar you fill, every second it takes to get to the place to actually kill mobs to fill bars, and even doing it the 30th time are all content.

Sure, it's all cookies, but some of them are poop cookies and fuck if I'm eating shit and calling it yummy.