Front page "promises" in Game Development

[Irian]

So basically what you're saying is that you'll gripe and moan about anything Blizzard says, even if they are telling you that they're going to fully support the game and provide regular content updates, and already showed as much before the expansion is even released.

I'm not saying I know one way or another, but jesus christ dude, stop talking about Blizzard like it's your ex. It's a game company. Anyone with common sense would know that Blizzard is very likely not lying about any of this because they are desperate to reinvigorate the game and earn trust back after WoD. At the very least, wait until there's actually signs of something questionable before you start complaining.

[Deleted]

Riiiiiiiight

Right. I wasnt cynical enough for you? Look at page 1 if you wamt to see how fanboys react

[Jewsco]

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.

Have they promised us since tbc that content drought either won't happen again and/or be shorter? Yet with every passing expansion it has in fact gotten longer? So why would any sane person trust them about this? Fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me. How about they stop with the bs and just deliever it to us. Why make anymore promises?

[Mafic]

The 7.1 announcement comes before even the launch of the expansion itself.

Yeah they are desperate but players are not buying the hype anymore.

Patch 7.2 and if it delivers on its promises will make or break Legion.

[Seranthor]

The 7.1 announcement comes before even the launch of the expansion itself.

Yeah they are desperate but players are not buying the hype anymore.

Patch 7.2 and if it delivers on its promises will make or break Legion.

Brilliant... if they dont tell us anything then folks cry like toddlers that Blizzard doesn't care about them.
If Blizzard doesn't give them what they want then Blizzard is the devil and hates their customers.
If Blizzard tries to be proactive and do something right then they are seen as 'desperate'...


Maybe Blizzard should pick one position perhaps absolute radio silence and let everyone be effin surprised. And should the tears continue then Blizzard could say 'You dont like it when we tell you things, so FU'

[Mafic]

Brilliant... if they dont tell us anything then folks cry like toddlers that Blizzard doesn't care about them.
If Blizzard doesn't give them what they want then Blizzard is the devil and hates their customers.
If Blizzard tries to be proactive and do something right then they are seen as 'desperate'...


Maybe Blizzard should pick one position perhaps absolute radio silence and let everyone be effin surprised. And should the tears continue then Blizzard could say 'You dont like it when we tell you things, so FU'

The truth is that the announcement could have waited till after the expansion launched. Confidence must be low for the launch holding interest so they have to throw in patch 7.1...sorry but desperation you can smell it in the air.

[Relapses]

You are overly negative, they do something that's basically wholly good and you still find something to complain about.

Welcome to MMO-C. Fruit and punch served on Tuesdays.

[Rudol Von Stroheim]

Welcome to MMO-C. Fruit and punch served on Tuesdays.

Oh come now, that's some people, not everyone. You've always got people who are positive and negative about any subject.

That's like saying, "Welcome to Canada. Where the sun rises in the east and sets in west!" -- Well yeah, no shit!

[Relapses]

Oh come now, that's some people, not everyone. You've always got people who are positive and negative about any subject.

That's like saying, "Welcome to Canada. Where the sun rises in the east and sets in west!" -- Well yeah, no shit!

The overwhelming majority of active topics on this forum are started by people with the same contrived, negative perspective of Blizzard. Then people argue for ten pages about how their opinion is more valid "because reasons." For example, this same exact fucking thread was made yesterday. Now, personally I tend to err on the side of Blizzard which often gets me a lot of flak from the innumerable anti-Blizzard cirlcejerkers around here so I don't think my cynicism is misplaced.

[EyelessCrow]

The truth is that the announcement could have waited till after the expansion launched. Confidence must be low for the launch holding interest so they have to throw in patch 7.1...sorry but desperation you can smell it in the air.

In any other situation if you announce plans for something before you carry out initial plans you're seen as having confidence in it. Unless you are blizzard then all of a sudden it's desperation.

[Seranthor]

The truth is that the announcement could have waited till after the expansion launched. Confidence must be low for the launch holding interest so they have to throw in patch 7.1...sorry but desperation you can smell it in the air.

Perhaps, but I'm firmly in the camp that Blizzard should go radio silent and tell all the whiners and haters to sod off.

[Tharkkun]

also reemmber this ?

Character portrait has six runes in place of the mana bar (and a special circle around the icon, probably for Hero class). These runes are consume as your spells use them-- they deactivate and then reactivate over time, so if you have two frost and four blood runes, you get that much to use as spells and abilities. We have plans for mechanics that allow you to change one resource type on the fly-- like Warlock's Life Tap (Health=mana).


yeah so you would carve runes into your weapon and consumed in combat, then must be recarved in out of combat :P, or use lifetap to replenish them in combat, and no mention of runic power

That's exactly what DK's do. When you use a rune you're carving it into your weapon on the fly when you use your skills. It's part of the fantasy. That doesn't mean we as players go through the mechanic of carving the actual rune. That would be tedious.

As to 6 runes? Obviously as they got closer to beta they realized that wouldn't work as well as they brainstormed in Alpha. I'll say it again. Blizzcon is a sneak peek in the development of their product. It is not the final product nor does it ever come across as a promise. If a company pushed out every single idea they had it would probably end up being called Wildstar.

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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.

They are referring to the drought that happened in WOD. During the expansion. Cata and WoD were the only 2 expansions where we literally had nothing to do between raid patches. All the previous ones trickled in content on the non-raid patches. Cata was understandable because they revamped 50 zones. But for WoD they had no excuse.

I would fully expect there to be a drought once this expansion ends as the new one is created.

[Krille]

cause god... i was 12 at the time, and remembering being in ts talking to my 2 heal freinds about seeing my first breasts at a nickleback concert, when we were pulled into channel being told to get the fuck to the front gate, and arriving there i quickly saw LOTS of alliance all turned ghoul, charging into and past out players to try and fuck out AH's and stuff...

god it was so cool...

Hahaha! Nickleback of all concerts..

[Berengil]

I fully expect Blizz to failhard at producing a stready stream of content. Like a Shieldwall type patch every 3 months, with maybe a dungeon added.

Anything less than that is not "content", it's camoflague for " we refuse to budget for enough devs"

[DarkTZeratul]

The truth is that the announcement could have waited till after the expansion launched. Confidence must be low for the launch holding interest so they have to throw in patch 7.1...sorry but desperation you can smell it in the air.

Just like how their confidence in Wrath of the Lich King was so low they told us that we'd get Ulduar in patch 3.1 even before the expansion launched?

[Jewsco]

Perhaps, but I'm firmly in the camp that Blizzard should go radio silent and tell all the whiners and haters to sod off.

this I agree with just shut up and deliever us a great expansion and all will be fine. promises like this cant ever be kept because what takes johhny 6 months to do takes sue 3 months to do and take bob one month to do. add in not every bit of content is for everyone and they are just setting themselves up to once again fail in this promise.

[lockybalboa]

Don't get your hopes up too high, we've seen them promising that numerous times in the past and fail to deliver. All PR BS.

[MasterHamster]

Wonder if there will ever be any research conducted on this community where you have people (not directly aimed at you, OP) that actively distrusts, some to the point of conspiracy*, the developer of a game. People who say they think the game has been progressively gotten worse, or hasn't been good, since LK or whatever that was YEARS ago. Yet they either still play for god knows what reason, or even worse, unsubbed but think it's worth their while to hate on a game years after they've stopped playing.

*Latest great example being Blizzard fixing the outright broken exp from invasions as they went from 1~2 to 3~4 simultaneous, and accusing them of doing it to boost lvl 100 sales. Like what the fuck?

Will everything on the frontpage become true? Probably not, that's reality. They seem to have learned their lesson, no more shit about "we want yearly expansions" because yearly expansions take too long to develop just the foundations and then the actual doable content is lacking. WoD was destroyed thanks to feedback in MoP that claimed only raids should be rewarding (because otherwise it's fucking mandatory chores)
They want to space content releases better, make more content for Legion over the expansions timeline than to finish release, polish a bit further, pump out a major and minor content patch and then work on the next expansion. They're returning to designs that made things take time and have meaning. If I want to craft the best available profession gear I'm not going to be able to do so just by walking straight up to the AH. Now you're MASTERING your profession.

Return of relevant gear from factions, world quests to keep the world alive, Mythic+ scaling, Titanforge to make a wider range of the available content potentially rewarding for you. Artifacts that are NOT supposed to be capped within 2 weeks as a 10 hour / week player.

I am HOPEFUL, and sympathetic because I try to see WoWs development not just from our whiny entitled forums, but also how things actually work. Understanding that game design isn't just about showering players in loot and gold stars for participating, but to make things feel substantial, effort is required, and effort takes time as well.
I am sadly SCEPTICAL, but not to the degree that I feel like I'm contributing to anything by posting negative shit in every News post or forum thread that tries to be positive. Yeah, WoD became shit. In many ways due to feedback that were prevalent on these forums too.

Or did you enjoy WoW without farming for mats or rare items, daily quests for reputation, actual gear from factions, professions that felt worth spending time on? Did you enjoy the WoD focus on "one-time" content, and without mandatory chores, instead we got 'choices' just like we wanted?

No. So you stood in the Garrison in a queue...
Yet I have no doubt there will be a bunch of whining in Legion that things take "too long". Compared to what?
You want things to do in an MMO that is what you get.

[Vaelorian]

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.

I am sorry it annoyed you. I won't hold it against them either. In fact I don't hold it against them. But I am dissapointed with the lack of fun things for me to do currently in WoD. And if I see how WoD was presented and how (even a little) cooler or more fun it must have been if they could have done everything they wanted to (see I did not use the word promise), I am dissapointed. But this thread is not just about "promises" or not. It is about the perception of what you can expect. And I used to "trust" blizzard on their word and could sympathise with them if things didn't turn out like they wanted. But somewhere along the line I turned into a sour pit of distrust. It started in Cata I think and their way of doing things. Hurting pieces of the game that I liked.

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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.

thing is... I until mid Cata or perhaps until the start of Cata... I could keep myself busy with the game 100% of my free time. Now I can't.
To me this feels weird. So before I could endlessly play every waking moment and not even make that many alts (had 2 alts). So what happened?

And I played an insane amount of hours a week from vanilla until mid Cata.

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Perhaps, but I'm firmly in the camp that Blizzard should go radio silent and tell all the whiners and haters to sod off.

Me too actually

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The overwhelming majority of active topics on this forum are started by people with the same contrived, negative perspective of Blizzard. Then people argue for ten pages about how their opinion is more valid "because reasons." For example, this same exact fucking thread was made yesterday. Now, personally I tend to err on the side of Blizzard which often gets me a lot of flak from the innumerable anti-Blizzard cirlcejerkers around here so I don't think my cynicism is misplaced.

had not seen that thread...

[Destinas]

After seeing what they've done in the past, I'm not entirely optimistic about their goals for Legion. However, seeing how the pre-event is going, and how Legion was in the beta, I'm genuinely excited as well. The announcement of 7.1 before the expansion even launched is quite interesting as well - especially because it feels like they're really listening to the people that put forth a thought-out explanation of why they didn't like WoD, while taking parts of MoP that people really liked.

To me, there's a difference between simply saying their goals, and actually seeing their goals. They've said for a long time that they wanted shorter expansions, little/no content drought, more raids/dungeons, fewer/more patches - but not a lot of that was done, or worked. Now, we're seeing that patches will be coming out in a fast pace, and it looks to actually be quality content at that. It seems more structured as well, whereas in Cata and WoD everything felt like they were adjusting things as they went along, while not really listening to what most people were saying.

But, I'm leaving some room for skepticism. We've seen some cool stuff, but we haven't seen everything yet.