Why BFA is out on 14'th of August ?

[The Stormbringer]

I think the people complaining the loudest are the ones who love to optimize, minmax, and hit the tops of the charts. As soon as that changes in any way, they freak out. Yes, there are other people who have issues with certain things (I'm sure even I'd find some problems, though I haven't seen any yet) that need to be addressed, but for the most part it seems like a lot of people over-reacting.

[Versy]

I always take family vacation in september so earlier this year i booked vacation in august because bfa was launching in september...thanks blizz for making me miss first 5 days of bfa....

[SoulSoBreezy]

Hey guys! Before release date was announced, Blizzard informed us that expansion will come out on or before 21'st of September. I'm not the game designer or developer, but I think those few more weeks of development would deliver a better product. What are your thoughts? Do you have any theory why Blizzard chose this date?

The chaos that would be caused at every level of development would more than erase the weeks that added from pushing back the expansion.

[Crazozourus]

The initial release date is always just a preliminary one, one that they put out simply so that they can start selling pre-orders.

Sorry (not sorry), but random nobodies on a forum pretending that the game would suddenly be a different product if it had only gotten 1 more month in development are hardly a metric of anything useful. Especially when said nobodies just keep harping on with the same "cuz Activision hurr"-speculation that we've been seeing for too long by now...Not to mention the overused points from hypocritical content creators...

I stated in my OP that I have nothing to do with games design or development.I asked because I don't know how those processes work, I only applied my own life experience , that if you put more time in to something you will get better results - it works in the field I'm in but it can be not applicable in the software creation. That's why I wanted other people opinion.

[phyrlord]

People have more money to burn in August than September.
Also it puts launch ahead of FF XIV's next big content patch.
Both Blizzard and Square Enix say their patch schedules have nothing to do with it but it's beyond coincidence.

100%, I remember Overwatches beta weekend the same weekend as some Huge game launch...

[Marrilaife]

Assuming all the classes are "broken"...then no...5 weeks would not be enough time to completely redesign them.

Not all of them are broken, some are completely fine despite endless tears coming from their communities (looking at you frost / fire mages and havoc demon hunters). Most people actually agree that the reworked classes like warlock, fury warrior and survival hunter are improved.

Personally I tried ele shaman and I feel there's way too many dead talents and the "recommended" ones completely misalign with the "fun" talents so I'm forced between playing what's "fun" and what's "optimal". I really hope the rework will fix at least some of the problems. Stuff like stormkeeper, icefury and elemental blast should not be "dead talents" since they're actually adding to your rotation. Now the totemic circle, can it already die in a fire? It's a boring maintenance "buff" that's annoying to re-plant in movement scenarios like dungeons.

There are still classes that call for "fury warrior" treatment namely pruning how many consecutive gcd buffs they put. Stuff like aspect of the wild into bestial wrath on bm hunter or avatar into demo shout on prot warrior are pretty annoying.

BM Hunter generally feels shitty to play atm, you have a "maintenance" buff you cannot reliably maintain, and it also has interactions with your major cooldown. Creating clunky unfun playstyle. "Braindead BM" is gone, people actually claim survival feels better to play than BM.

Arcane mage also feels kinda lame you can't stack "clearcasting" for missiles 3 times, I reckon there's a pvp talent like that but for dungeon / raid gameplay it feels like a downgrade from legion.

Brewmaster now runs out of energy even playing with rushing jade wind to pad extra non-energy costing globals, and that's also playing with leggo chest for more frequent breaths of fire. I can't imagine how it's gonna be with no leggos. It's pretty silly since monk used to have a fairly rigid rotation with no gaps before, if you picked specific talents. It also feels much worse without all the artifact traits that were massive quality of life upgrades. Same story with bear. It feels super bland and plain with no artifact traits.

And then there are the undertuned specs, which is just a matter of turning a few knobs, but I guess Blizzard doesn't care on pre-patch because they're buried under the mountain of bugs and broken shit. One prime example is marksman hunter, how come it's one of the worst specs in the game atm I have no idea. I was pretty hyped to try it after the rework, but why bother if it's so weak.

[Zka]

few more weeks of development would deliver a better product.

This is always true. Therefore they should never release anything.

[RoKPaNda]

Activision probably pushed them to release earlier. I don't think there's a single person who thinks bfa doesnt need more development time. Even the devs think so lol

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It would be enough time to fix classes they actively know are broken and arent fixing until 8.1

Here we go with the activision conspiracy theories. If Activision had as much clout as you think they do, we'd see more than like 2 mounts and a couple pets in the cash shop during an expansion. You've clearly never played an Activision game. Blizzard was doing things like this long before Activision came on the scene, this is just Blizzard continuing down that road. All those classic Blizzard games that we love to wax nostalgic about? Yeah those were released in a pretty buggy and unbalanced state too, including Vanilla WoW. Hell, StarCraft was a broken buggy mess until several patches into it's expansion.

There has yet to be a WoW expansion release where a couple specs and sometimes entire classes weren't totally fucked up. Put the blame there where it belongs, if you're one of those specs/classes, squarely on Blizzard's shoulders. Not the Activision boogeyman.

[Evilfish]

You know what? I'd take a mediocre release over countless delays any day. I guess people playing this game have it so good that they forgot how frustrating it is to be hit with several delays and still find problems with the game.

Blizz is being smart here. If they delay and the release isn't PERFECT they will never hear the end of it. So yeah, 14 August got said, 14 August it is.

[Seezer]

Hey guys! Before release date was announced, Blizzard informed us that expansion will come out on or before 21'st of September. I'm not the game designer or developer, but I think those few more weeks of development would deliver a better product. What are your thoughts? Do you have any theory why Blizzard chose this date?

Yeah, no. Legion is old, and by August it will be 2 years of it. BFA can't come soon enough. And like others said, 5 extra weeks isn't going to give you a much better product. The content is created. The only thing 5 weeks will do is help with bugs, but bug fixes are easy patches now. I'd like BFA to be out right now.

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I mean that would probably have been enough time to redesign all the broken classes with the feedback they got during beta, which is one of the biggest complains players have with BFA, so...

5 weeks isn't going to be nearly enough time to redesign a class. And classes being "Broken" is player hyperbole. Buffs and nerfs can be added. I'll play with a broken class any day of the week over more legion.

[Seezer]

Bake in every talent ele has as baseline and come up with new talents would be a start

To come up with new talents, test them, tune them, BFA would be delayed for another year. Fuck that shit. Ele is fun for me.

[Kathranis]

I mean that would probably have been enough time to redesign all the broken classes with the feedback they got during beta, which is one of the biggest complains players have with BFA, so...

5 weeks would be barely enough time to implement a preliminary set of changes and push it through one round of QA. It would probably take at least three months to commit major class rotation changes.

I knew people on these forums were naive about game development, but not this naive.

[Frolk]

I mean that would probably have been enough time to redesign all the broken classes with the feedback they got during beta, which is one of the biggest complains players have with BFA, so...

5 weeks to fix broken classes, where did u get ur degree in armchair dev`ing? a Happy meal?

That would take atleast 6months, if not longer, and that would hurt the game A LOT more than just releasing it and patching it later.

[yjmark]

I'd rather get the x-pac on Aug 14th than push things out another month to fix the tiny things that will get fixed anyways. I don't see any reason for a delay. The few specs that everyone is complaining about are not really that bad, and definitely not worth delaying an entire expansion for.

[Tharkkun]

The initial date is the drop dead date giving them enough cushion in case something goes drastically wrong during development. For example in MOP when they had to revamp the entire Jade Forest. It caused a few weeks of delay.

Once Blizzard is satisfied all the major components are done outside of class tuning they set the final date. Tuning will happen right up until the day before BFA is released. But major design is done.

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I mean that would probably have been enough time to redesign all the broken classes with the feedback they got during beta, which is one of the biggest complains players have with BFA, so...

Maybe the classes are exactly how Blizzard wants them to be? Feedback doesn't necessarily mean something will get an overhaul.

[Swalload]

I'm baffled by the ignorance in the replies. I thought people knew more about how markets work.

[tangers58]

Classes clearly need more time, which the devs know, yet its being rushed out anyway. Seems pretty obvious that Activision picked a date without any input from the people doing the work, business as usual.

[AlamarAtMMOC]

Hey guys! Before release date was announced, Blizzard informed us that expansion will come out on or before 21'st of September. I'm not the game designer or developer, but I think those few more weeks of development would deliver a better product. What are your thoughts? Do you have any theory why Blizzard chose this date?

Don't start a post by misquoting Blizzard...

Could they have used more time? Yes... Could they have used more time if it took an extra month, or three, or ten? Yes...

[Dahij]

5 weeks wouldn't have fixed much considering class changes/balance is an ongoing process, meaning it doesn't just happen for the start of each expansion but goes on in pretty much every single patch.

[Accendor]

Maybe the classes are exactly how Blizzard wants them to be? Feedback doesn't necessarily mean something will get an overhaul.

And that is exactly the reason why they already announced reworks for 8.1 and admitted in an QnA that they screwed some of them up?

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5 weeks to fix broken classes, where did u get ur degree in armchair dev`ing? a Happy meal?

That would take atleast 6months, if not longer, and that would hurt the game A LOT more than just releasing it and patching it later.

Not all of them obv, but at least some of them. You say 6 months, but do you really expect 8.1 6 months into the expansion?

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5 weeks would be barely enough time to implement a preliminary set of changes and push it through one round of QA. It would probably take at least three months to commit major class rotation changes.

I knew people on these forums were naive about game development, but not this naive.

But the classes in question were already in more than round of QA, so...

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Assuming all the classes are "broken"...then no...5 weeks would not be enough time to completely redesign them.

Fair enough. While I agree most of them are broken, some are even more broken than others.