How fast do people really think devs can push out content?

[SkagenRora]

Hey.

I read this thread on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comm...illed_mmorpgs/

and i find it weird that so many people think making "Real content" is a fast and easy process.

[yetgdhfgh]

Wrong forum section better try WoW general

[SkagenRora]

Wrong forum section better try WoW general

This covers more than just WoW tho.

[Darkguyver2020]

Unless they have actually worked in the industry themselves, these backseat developers don't have a frickin' clue about the time, effort and money that is required to churn out quality products in a reasonable time frame. Especially when Blizzard are essentially managing 6 different games right now (judging by the Launcher).

[Cthulhu 2020]

Unless they have actually worked in the industry themselves, these backseat developers don't have a frickin' clue about the time, effort and money that is required to churn out quality products in a reasonable time frame. Especially when Blizzard are essentially managing 6 different games right now (judging by the Launcher).

Pretty much. Every time there's a bad launch, or content is very delayed, the armchair devs go "Well I work in IT and/or programming and this is so easy a child could do it, blah blah blah Blizzard is just playing with you, etc etc."

They don't seem to have the brain power to think that maybe, just maybe they don't know as much as they think they do, and Blizzard is bogged down to the teeth.

[Snes]

While i understand that people sacrifice a lot to make games, it's still annoying when Blizzard tells you what you will or will not enjoy.

"YOUR TINY CONSUMER BRAIN DOESN'T WANT ARMOUR DYES. END OF STORY"

[Edge-]

Depends on the game.

GW2 managed to put out smallish content updates every 2 weeks for a few months straight, then they'd get to work on a larger interim patch and get prepped for the next wave.

Trion was putting out pretty beefy content/feature patches every few months, plus occasionally adding in big chunks of content or brand new systems in between major drops.

FFXIV has managed to stick to solid quarterly updates, with some pretty big patches in between. And they managed to do so without 1 year breaks between the final content update and the launch of the next expansion.

Other games put out far less due to having smaller teams or not having good content creation pipelines.

Unless they have actually worked in the industry themselves, these backseat developers don't have a frickin' clue about the time, effort and money that is required to churn out quality products in a reasonable time frame. Especially when Blizzard are essentially managing 6 different games right now (judging by the Launcher).

The number of games Blizzard isn't working on isn't significantly impacting WoW at all. The WoW team works on WoW for the most part. Yeah, they may help out on other games sometimes, but the reverse is true as well. Each game has their own team, and games like Diablo and Starcraft aren't really very big teams, and haven't been for a while.

[potis]

Depends on the game.

GW2 managed to put out smallish content updates every 2 weeks for a few months straight, then they'd get to work on a larger interim patch and get prepped for the next wave.

Trion was putting out pretty beefy content/feature patches every few months, plus occasionally adding in big chunks of content or brand new systems in between major drops.

FFXIV has managed to stick to solid quarterly updates, with some pretty big patches in between. And they managed to do so without 1 year breaks between the final content update and the launch of the next expansion.

Other games put out far less due to having smaller teams or not having good content creation pipelines.



The number of games Blizzard isn't working on isn't significantly impacting WoW at all. The WoW team works on WoW for the most part. Yeah, they may help out on other games sometimes, but the reverse is true as well. Each game has their own team, and games like Diablo and Starcraft aren't really very big teams, and haven't been for a while.

The thing about Trion needs to stop, everything that was put in the first like..6-7 months of Rift was already supposed to be there, Infernal Dawn and after was new, thats why it was bugged as fuck not that HK wasnt as bugged.


To the OP questions, depends what you consider content.

GW2 was pushing stuff out a lot but it was irrelevant most of the time.

The main problem with content updates in MMOs is what people define as content.

As example i do not consider "World events" in Rift, content.

I do not consider pets in WoW, content.

I do not consider random even in GW2 as content.

Anything i can consume in a couple of hours might be content for some, but most of the time its worthless content and i dont even quality to call it "content".

Since we are talking gear chase MMOs, anything that does not push the gear chase is irrelevant content that can be consumed way too fast.

What i believe is missing from any MMO right now is the ability to create and add stuff on your own, with people voting for the stuff, big stuff Blizzard can notice and implement if they wish buying them off the people.

The same way Valve does with its major games, add a skin, people vote, gets implemented few months after if people want it.

There are tons of programmers/people out there that wouldnt mind extra money and would try to create scripted bosses etc etc, blizzard can buy them off cheapily etc etc.

You get my point.

[Lagwin]

depends on the game, when people see something like Path of exile pump out game changing content every quarter when something like diablo 3 basically dose fuck all for a year and wants you to pay for an expansion that dose not add anything major.

But in the case of WoW they easily earn enough to actual make significant content patches every year, they have enough staff that it wouldn't be to big of a problem instead the give you virtually nothing and maybe finish a raid that was in development for a while before hand anyway

[notanmmmonewbie]

What i believe is missing from any MMO right now is the ability to create and add stuff on your own, with people voting for the stuff, big stuff Blizzard can notice and implement if they wish buying them off the people.

The same way Valve does with its major games, add a skin, people vote, gets implemented few months after if people want it.

There are tons of programmers/people out there that wouldnt mind extra money and would try to create scripted bosses etc etc, blizzard can buy them off cheapily etc etc.

You get my point.

You probably dont see a lot of other companies (other than Valve) buying player created content because of legal issues that could arise from it.

A few years ago Star Trek Online had a contest where players would create concept art for ships and the winner of the contest would have their design turned into an actual playable ship. From what i read the winner of that contest stole the design of the ship. Just a few months ago too with Fallout 4 and Bethesda there was some controversy there when modding was allowed on consoles. Fallout/Skyrim modders who had been doing stuff on PC for a long time didnt release their mods for consoles. And most of it wasnt really due to a PCmasterrace vs consolepleb thing either. Console released mods would have needed testing and i read even a console owned by the modder themselves if they wanted to test the mod properly. But whatever the modders personal reasons may have been for not releasing PC mods on nexus.com on the official bethesda site you have a shit ton of people who were *not* the mod creators posting mods on beth.net without the original mod creators permission.

So having said all that how would you prevent or police content so that companies do not end up buying player created content (or concepts or story ideas) that weren't stolen or plagiarized?

[SkagenRora]

http://i.imgur.com/i7FxeGa.jpg That's one of the comment threads from the reddit thread.

It just blows my mind that they think content is so easy to make

[GennGreymane]

Depends on the game type.

[Tommy T]

Unfortunately, the devs can never win in this department.

There's always going to be a large swell of players who rush through content ASAP and then come on to the forums to cry about 'lack of content'.

"Herr Durr Gating"
"Herr Durr Grinding"

They simply cannot win with this people.

[kail]

But, those raid tiers!

[Blueobelisk]

It just blows my mind that they think content is so easy to make

Content is easy to make. Especially for a huge successful company like Blizzard.

[Deleted]

It's a easy question to answer
x = How many days takes to develop any content, like a dungeon or a raid even in WoW.
y = How many days will it take for that content to be completed by players and for players to get bored by it?

This is on the assumption that the content is not made artificially more difficult just for the sake of "prolonging" it's life, that also may really not have that effect but just having people stop doing it due to frustration

As long as x > y then it's never possible to have devs churn out content faster than people consume.

Development also include QA internal testing and PTR testing.

- - - Updated - - -

I dunno, it seems like an iffy thing to me.

We all know full well that Blizzard could release - say, dungeons - faster than they do. Generally speaking they use all the same models, doodads, "tilesets" and so on. Mob tuning is rarely all that tight and abilities are often just rehashes or new versions of old ideas. (Stay out of the fire, stay out of the void zone, stay out of the water, stay out of the electricity, stay out of...ok, ok.)

Not to mention that I'm sure they have in-house tools of some sort to make the creation of this stuff a lot easier while keeping in the vein of "proper WoW style".

So no, I don't think that just raw "content" is that hard to churn out. But at some point it'd just lose all meaning, not to mention that surely thematic elements would suffer. I guarantee that "level designers" at Blizzard could certainly churn out 79 different "dungeons" populated with mobs tomorrow if they wanted to, but that just seems pointless, especially if the polish and thematic/lore connections are all but gone in the process. Either way, players would be liable to burn out on the type of content just as quickly, regardless of how many different tilesets and layouts they're presented with.

Raids, of course, are a different animal entirely, since we tend to expect a lot more out of the tuning and abilities presented to us there.

All that said, though, I still feel that some of Blizzards' "content droughts" are inexcusable. I'm amazed that customers continue to pay subscriptions during those periods, it's insulting to the players and there's no good reason for it.

that would be true if the release of a content like a dungeon would be a self contained piece of runnable content with no tie in whatsoever within the game continuity. But all dungeons have writing, and lore design involved, scripted events (than need to be thoroughly tested to avoid them being stuck or whatnot) And yes, they *could* use the same tile set and other shit continuously then player would bitch and moan about reashes and the fact that stuff is boring cause it looks all the same that they're using the same models and skeletons. I've already seen this happening. Since TBC

[robgoblin]

They can push out content as fast as we can make whiney forums posts about lack of content goddammit! Right guys?.... right?

For real though, it depends on so many things, the number of devs, the art style, the width/depth of play options/playstyles, even the genre can make a hell of a difference. Making a new multiplayer class for say, mass effect, or a new weapon for gears or whatever is fine and dandy, its just multiplayer PvE in a simplistic shooter environment, regardless of the bells and whistles, the end goal is to point at guys and spray bullets till they fall down. But on the other hand, for something like LoL or HotS, a new character can UTTERLY shake the game to its foundations.

Looking at it from a wow perspective, you aren't talking just throwing together a new raid or battleground using existing assets and calling it a day, you need artists, working, interactable 3D models and layers upon LAYERS of texturing for every single thing on screen, that's before you talk about map/raid balance or tuning, and behind all that you have to make sure its FUN, look at ashran, tonnes of quality game map design there, excellent options for different methods of attack, but it all fell flat because its devolved to "do the side objectives or fight in the middle".

Game design is different per game, per team, per genre and per individual activity WITHIN a game, its impossible to put a quantitative value on it, game devs are only human, and in todays culture, ONLY the tippy toppest of quality is considered "acceptable", just look at mass effect: Andromeda, a perfectly enjoyable game, memeified to hell for some hokey character models and questionable dialogue

[Blueobelisk]

It's a easy question to answer
x = How many days takes to develop any content, like a dungeon or a raid even in WoW.
y = How many days will it take for that content to be completed by players and for players to get bored by it?

What you're talking about is a business decision. The question is "can Blizzard push content out faster." Yes, they can. Doesn't mean it's in their best interest to do so, though..

[Deleted]

Why do they have to push out content fast? I would rather wait a bit longer and have less bugs.... and more time to actually play all of current content on my alts.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Probably management is more of an issue for ppl like Blizzard.