Blizzard seems to be annoyed with their own teaser methods. wtf?

[Deleted]

Blizz has always been teasing before a new big patch or an expansion, lifting the curtain for this and that, stirring up expectations (read adding resubs-keeping subs).

This time, we have seen blizzard employees with GC in front, being annoyed with the hype, they have themselves been creating, using words and sentences, and hinting the new "big unnaounced feature".

Now i for one am all for the feature, i think its great, and would have saved great many guilds from disbanding over the years would it have been implemented ealier but playing a hype down? It seems to me, that the "feature" blizz has been promoting, has been something else entirely, which was scraped.

Am i the only one seeing this unusual behavior from blizzard, thinking the same?

[Deleted]

I think they're doing good this way. Hyping stuff is overrated and create impossible-to-met expectations. Toning it down is the right way to manage expectations and make sure that features do not becomes big blob of unrealistic awesomeness in the player minds that then will end up being disappointed

[lunchbox2042]

It reminds of when they hyped the crap out of D3 then Bashiok came out and tried to unhype it.

[Scunosi]

I think they, like anyone else, tend to get excited when they have a big project coming up and want to preen and show themselves off. But as the community's gotten less worshiping and more critical over the years, they've been hit with more criticism over their "allegedly" awesome features, so it makes sense they don't want get people's hopes up too much if they know it won't appeal to everyone, or will be more of a technical thing.
I do think they're still having problems holding their old selves back though, which is why we're seeing this weird backtracking. Some of that, too, has to be blamed on the community though, since we tend to speculate wildly over every little thing, hyping ourselves up where Blizzard won't. They'd probably seen some of the more popular theories gaining traction, and didn't want people going into the patch notes expecting WoW 2.0 or something.

Plus they were also recently stung with that whole Diablo thing, which I didn't play but I do recall reading a lot about at release, and it wasn't all very nice.

[willtron]

Blizzard are getting annoyed with the hype players make - blizzard give an inch, most players take a mile.

[stumpy]

using words and sentences

Those bastards.

The entire "hype" generated by Blizzard consisted of a couple of individual sentences in separate press releases about how there was a major feature that players had been asking for which they were going to get into 5.4. Everything else was generated by MMO-Champ and its community. Realizing that MMO-C forumites aren't a particularly responsible or well-adjusted group of people isn't really "unusual behavior" except in the sense that Blizzard has finally decided they should just be shut down cold instead of humoring them.

[MoanaLisa]

The bigger problem is that they lose whatever they do:

1. Announce something straight out before it's quite ready (rare): Endless complaining about it before it's ever seen and if they decide to scrap it endless bitching about that afterwards forever and ever. See 'dance studio' and 'Abyssal Maw'.

2. Tease something (about to be a lot more rare): Speculation begins with everyone going on and on about the glories of their own pet idea until expectations are well out of control even if they never say another thing about it. See 'unannounced feature'.

3. Keep quiet about everything (generally their default on new stuff): "You never tell us stuff so that we can give input on it." (See just about everything else).

[ablib]

Most of the talk on the forums was about the ridiculous idea that all of a sudden in the middle of an expansion, Blizzard was going to re-release EVERY raid and dungeon in the game via player or gear scaling (ridiculous because this is a new expansion feature, not a middle of the expansion patch-in).

Ghostcrawler has no choice but to simmer the people down a little.

[Pull My Finger]

the hype, they have themselves been creating

It's not gonna become any more true if more people keep saying it.

[Alvito]

It reminds of when they hyped the crap out of D3 then Bashiok came out and tried to unhype it.

The "they" that over hyped D3 was the fan base and internet folks. They didn't do much more then advertise it like any company would have.

[Damax]

Players heard awesome new feature. all they thought was new character models, 4th spec, tri spec, old raid scaling. not some dumb 3th way to raid the same raid we already can/have to twice a week.

Many player suggestions got ALOT of attention, they probably even used one of their toon/friends to make a thread suggesting the flex raid http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/2...ion-flex-raid/ and it got 0 attention and died forever.

GC finally got off his high horse and realised the hype is getting out of hand. such a strong hype can only be broken (diablo 3)

[zenyatta]

Well, the unannounced feature could have been anything, and they said it was "something we've being toying with for a long time". A lot of us were hoping it would be something to get us into old content like LFR that scaled down max level players. Or maybe a compromise on legendary transmogs. Or some graphic updates. Instead we got "If you're not good enough to down normal mode and prefer the trade chat queue to the automated LFR queue, here's the raid for you!"

As an aside, if I see two people in trade saying
PlayerA: need one healer for Flex then G2G
PlayerB: need healer for reg ToT, pst

Guess which one I'm going to take. Hint; it won't be Flex.

[Veyne]

Blizzard always tries to dial things back a bit when players get way too hyped about something.

Hell, I remember before Diablo III came out, one of the developers posted saying that players have unrealistic expectations for Diablo III. That it'd be a solid, good game, but not to expect it to be the most amazing game ever, or something like that.

Alright, always might not be accurate, but they have been doing it for a while.

---------- Post added 2013-06-08 at 04:38 PM ----------

Instead we got "If you're not good enough to down normal mode and prefer the trade chat queue to the automated LFR queue, here's the raid for you!"

As an aside, if I see two people in trade saying
PlayerA: need one healer for Flex then G2G
PlayerB: need healer for reg ToT, pst

Guess which one I'm going to take. Hint; it won't be Flex.

Innacurate. Have you ever been in a guild on a server that struggled with recruitment? A guild that wanted to be a 25 man guild, but simply couldn't get the roster filled? Or have been in a 25 man guild and a couple of your regulars couldn't make it that week, and you didn't have a solid bench? In these scenarios, you could still raid, without resorting to dwindling down to a 10 man.

I see this as an experiment, and if it pans out well, Flex will be no longer be a separate entity, and it will be incorporated into normal and heroic raids.

[Pejo]

Well, the unannounced feature could have been anything, and they said it was "something we've being toying with for a long time". A lot of us were hoping it would be something to get us into old content like LFR that scaled down max level players. Or maybe a compromise on legendary transmogs. Or some graphic updates. Instead we got "If you're not good enough to down normal mode and prefer the trade chat queue to the automated LFR queue, here's the raid for you!"

As an aside, if I see two people in trade saying
PlayerA: need one healer for Flex then G2G
PlayerB: need healer for reg ToT, pst

Guess which one I'm going to take. Hint; it won't be Flex.

A helluva lot of people, even on MMO Champ, complained when Blizzard combined the lockouts (even though a huge amount of people were complaining that they 'had' to do ICC so many times in a week. People complained that they no longer see PUGs being made in trade chat. People complained that the difficulty of 10 mans were too hard for them and were getting stuck after Jin'rohk. This solution will help with every single one of those.

And for your PUG example, I would choose B. You know nothing of the skill of the group. Option B gives you a better chance at progressing through the raid. If you find it more fun to do normal mode with people you don't know, more power to you.

[Deleted]

Think it's that they are trying to temper unrealistically high expectations of some of the more deluded playerbase, not being ''annoyed at their own methods.''.

[MoanaLisa]

As an aside, if I see two people in trade saying
PlayerA: need one healer for Flex then G2G
PlayerB: need healer for reg ToT, pst

Guess which one I'm going to take. Hint; it won't be Flex.

Let's see if we can stick to the topic. Which is something other than what I quoted.