Mists of Pandaria release date, further out than we expected?

[freelapdance]

By we you mean you right? Gotta love the optimism of some people

[Asmodias]

Well, in America the holiday season is November-January. Common knowledge. Sorry for the "cultural confusion". It's released near a time where nearly everyone will get time off relatively soon for one thing or another so they can play it.

While that is the holiday season... being in the games industry for 9 years, I can safely say... the sole intent is for people to purchase as Christmas presents. Which simply means Mid November through December. In all my years in the industry, I haven't seen a company target a January release.

Also, what is with this "Common Knowledge" statement people are throwing around lately... It can't possibly be common knowledge if you have to explain it. No offense Uennie, but you are doing it wrong.

[Bullarkie]

I'll just leave this Joystiq article here:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/04/11/pr...-release-date/

[Asmodias]

I disagree with the OP. Im on the beta and it is MUCH more stable then I predicted. Each patch (currently getting 2 - 3 a week atm) is bringing new features AS WELL as bug fixes. I dont think it'll be that far out tbh, My guess is they aim for around the same release date for each expansion so a September - nov time scale is a better prediction, and one I think they will easily make if things continue to go in the direction they are.

The beta ATM is very stable and polished already. Sure the end game content is still being made, but the pandaren have most of the animations and as far as I could tell there are VERY few bugs with the starting area for them, the monk class as a whole feels as finished as any of the others and from what I hear of the 80 - 88 content, It is mostly done, with some bugs here and there but nothing you wouldnt expect from a beta.

People are moaning about the pet battle system being so buggy when it was released a few patches ago and then was taken out because it was so buggy are lying tbh. It was added by ACCIDENT and was not ready for testing, therefore it was removed from the beta. We just got account-wide mounts which are also very buggy, and again may have been an accident, but considering it is actually IN GAME when they said it may not be ready for release gives me hope they are currently working ahead of schedule.

I too am in the beta, and I can't say that I agree with you on how solid the game is. To preface this, yes... this is a beta. All of what we are seeing is to be expected, though not necessarily to the degree we are seeing them. There are many existing mission critical bugs such as the mount issue, there a larger than expected number of crashes in areas that are open for beta testers (I was on last Saturday and in two hours, I crashed 6 times). Their recent fixes are breaking things that shouldn't be broken... The large scale crash encountered a couple weeks ago (where standing in a heavily populated area caused you to crash), their fix caused Win7 users to not be able to log into the 64bit client. Which isn't so bad, except that the beta launcher defaults to the 64bit client. It strikes me as odd that the code revolving around that crash and the login/authentication server code are linked. There are less critical bugs that speak directly to the polish of the beta. Mainly the missing art assets in the Pandaren starting area. The mismatched placeholder models when our young pandas meet the horde for the first time. (these things had orc heads, tauren bodies and troll legs.) And when you select horde as your race... you are eventally asked to spar with 3 duded in the orgrimmar arena. There are a decent number of reports that say the event doesn't fire off. When I went through it... there was a player in there ahead of me. He and I sat there for 20 minutes waiting for the event to start (I ran around, talked to Garrosh, talked to Ji Firepaw and other things hoping to trigger the event). He told me he had been waiting in there for 15ish minutes before I got there. Finally, a third player arrived. The event kicked off and faded to black... When the fade lifted, we were all outside and had completed the event. What concerned me there was the event not triggering until a 3rd player got there.

Then you have the unknowns. Such as the content that isn't ready to be implemented or tested. As a QA tester, this scares me most of all. With all that is left to be implemented... (Pet Battles, Scenarios, Challenge Mode, 2 BGs, 4? zones, A couple of dungeons, All the heroics, All the raids, the questing experience 89-90, character balance, Graphics Optimization, and so on...) That is a large amount of content to implement and no one writes perfect code. It's a daunting task to have it created, implemented and tested (both internally and on the beta realms) in roughly 2 months. That is a lot of work for 4 months. Now, I am not saying that it can't be done. What I am suggesting is that it's not the release time frame I would bet on. Based on what I have seen from other game studios who are in this kind of a time crunch (potentially) The content that goes out the door is sub par, unstable and not very polished.

Anyway, I sort of went off in another direction there. To sum it up... In the eyes of QA, this beta isn't all that polished nor is it all that stable. However, it's in a better place than other betas I have been a part of.

[wolftech]

Those of you who keep bringing up D3 do realize that a completly different team works on Diablo than works on WoW, right? Its not like Blizzard is a small company...

[Vinho]

I'll just leave this Joystiq article here:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/04/11/pr...-release-date/

Whenever the release date is, those who bought D3 with their Annual passes will be rushing back to WoW to get their $$'s worth as the subscriptions are still dripping

[xanzul]

Less time spent inside home = Less time spent on a game = "I won't have enough time to play the game i want to, while i gotta keep on paying" = I will not enjoy it as much as i want = I can buy it a few months later / i can buy a new gamecard a few months later.

If you even knew a few basic rules of running a company (do you even know Blizz is a company?), you would understand that receiving huge amounts of money within a few days, while managing to maintain a steady monthly income, is one of the best things that can happen to your company.

Enough said, i already feel sorry for the time i spent responding to your comments.

/Bye

Not everyone is a college kid who arbitrarily spends all their time 24/7 outside just because it is summer. Even during vacations and smmer there is downtime for doing other things than doing extreme sports and partying. People play video games year round and people are NOT going to skip buying Mop simply because of the temperature outside.

[mvallas]

I've given this a lot of thought - and I firmly believe October.

This is based actually on 2 things... 1) the strategic timing on the SoR and 2) the soon to be retirement of the RaF mount.

This means that there's probably a new RaF promotion in the works.

SoR was released on the last month of Q1 - that will help pad out Q1 numbers out quite a lot.

Given that the new SoR sounds like it went over quite well, I'm expecting them to pull out a brand-new RaF promotion in June (last month of Q2). That will help stopgap numbers that quarter via some equally insane promotion....

Then, 3 months later, they'll release Patch 5.0.1 in early September (Last month of Q3).

So far every world event release and subsequent expansion release - there was a 1 month gap between the two.

Therefore I believe October will be the best bet for Pandaria expansion launch.

[Pancaspe]

I don't think anyone is seriously considering a release earlier than their normal holiday releases. Anything before that is silly or hopelessly optimistic.

If it wasn't coming out before August, they would not have canceled Blizzcon

[Taliira]

As the others are saying, most of the "bugs" will likely clean up pretty quickly. It's really not that bad. The mounts issues is probably a minor code fix. Higher level stuff is being qa tested internally and play tested by the team as well. Yeah it can appear rough right now but if you have ever done real betas they usually come together quickly especially if the team goes into crunch mode for some internal target dates.

[NonameXADX]

Just because the lvl 88 is level cap at this moment doesn't really mean that Challenge Modes,Raids and Heroics aren't done...While we're busy testing the current content, Blizzard might be and probably is testing and playing around with the lvl 90 content so we can test it when its finally available.Half the dungeons aren't opened obviously because lvl 88 is cap and because 3 zones are still to be opened.Last of AP beta invites just went out because some people had problems with getting into the beta but actually the last wave went out a week or so ago if I recall correctly, as for place holder models...There's actually not that many of them
However, you shouldn't look at the content that is not done yet, rather look at the content that is currently in and that they're currently working on (that we know of)

[Miralynn]

I really don't see a release any earlier than late August/early September. It's not just the state of the beta (though that certainly does play into it), it's also the general seasonal cycle of MMO players. Summer is a terrible time for a big release, because the majority of the player base are busy doing 'summer things' regardless of age bracket: family vacations, summer vacation from school (an issue for both younger players AND parents who play, as well as college students who go home for the summer - I have had several friends over the years who are college students that vanish every summer), and things of that nature. The numbers generally start to pick up again about the same time as back-to-school. People go back to school, and they go back to their favorite MMO whether it's WoW or something else entirely.

Riding that usual back-to-school wave of returning players by giving them a new expansion to come back to would make sense, and maybe even boost the returning players higher than usual, so I'd say at the _very_ earliest we'll see a release in late August or early September - but yes, a holiday season release could happen too. Yes, Blizz said they wanted to get expansions out faster, but their philosophy has always been 'when it's done', and that's why D3 is releasing next week as opposed to six months ago.

[Snowraven]

They're going to cut some features to push it faster, even they know that if they sit 1 year with DS it will be horrible. I expect it in August. It will also be full of bugs at launch, most having been reported on beta but not fixed due to time constrains, and will be fixed in a later patch.

If it wasn't coming out before August, they would not have canceled Blizzcon

Isn't Blizzcon usually in October? So it can come anywhere before that, August and September, as well as October are still in the picture you know?

[Yulinora]

All these are in comparison to the cata beta since I have been in both betas at a fairly early time (3rd wave for MoP 2nd 'wave' for cata's)

Bugs everywhere

I wouldn't go this far, actually, compared to the bugs that were in cata's after just over a month, I'd say they're downright sparse.

Placeholder models everywhere

This is one of those things that won't be fixed until closer to launch, but even so, the only glaringly obvious ones are the mantid, and even they have a couple of models now.

Level cap is still at 88 or something

They have the ability to raise it to 90, but they want to make sure each zone is tested thoroughly at the right level before raising cap or releasing new areas.

Half the dungeons aren't implemented

see level cap

Scenarios aren't implemented

As all scenarios are level 90, they won't be implemented until cap is 90.

Half the zones haven't been opened

Again, see level cap.

No raids/heroics opened yet

Same reason as scenarios, hell they even have heroic raid mechanics in the dungeon journal.

Challenge modes not yet available

Same thing as raids/heroics/scenarios

The last of the AP beta invites JUST went out

Can't speak on this one with any authority, but I think they were waiting for the AP promotion to end before the final wave.

Disconnections everywhere

Beta is beta and not guaranteed to work for all, I for one, have had few few DCs outside of the one patch that turned Pandaria into crash-land, but if you're listening to the forums for your info, you're generally just going to hear the vocal minority that are having crash issues. Again, it's hella more stable than the cata beta was even 3 or 4 months in.

[Daedelus]

Thanksgiving is November 25th and every kid in America gets time off from school/college for it.

Europe and Australasia say hello. This is a typical US-centric post that this forum is full of - all of you totally unaware that the rest of the world does not have the same holidays as you, or use the same stupid date format as you.

[ranku]

Well, in America the holiday season is November-January.

false, it starts in december in america too

[Daedelus]

"the holidays" pretty much always reffers too christmass. do u give gifts for thanksgiving or new years? no. thats why you release a game over "the holidays" so people will buy it as gifts for ppl they know who play it.

Only in the US does "the holidays" mean Christmas. In the rest of the word, "holidays" mean holidays.

[Miralynn]

Europe and Australasia say hello. This is a typical US-centric post that this forum is full of - all of you totally unaware that the rest of the world does not have the same holidays as you, or use the same stupid date format as you.

But Blizzard is a US-based company, and yes, most US-based game companies do time their big releases around the US 'holiday season'. It's a bit silly to complain about the factual business practices of US-based companies being US-centric.

[dokhidamo]

Nah. It's still right where I expected it. late august or early september.

[Daedelus]

But Blizzard is a US-based company, and yes, most US-based game companies do time their big releases around the US 'holiday season'. It's a bit silly to complain about the factual business practices of US-based companies being US-centric.

I wasn't complaining about US-based companies being US-centric, I was complaining that the vast majority of US posters on this forum seem unaware of the world outside the US. And the stupid illogical US date format. I was complaining about that too.