Should Blizz delay Shadowland launch to make sure it starts in a good state?

[Demolished]

No you are making BS claims that you LITERALLY can't when I am proof you obviously can. Also, I was leveling 2 weeks ago. You are obviously exaggerating to push a narrative.

Literally linked the two bug reports with dozens of people saying they couldn't level, nice try though mr no proof.

[Binaris]

Literally linked the two bug reports with dozens of people saying they couldn't level, nice try though mr no proof.

Oh my!!! dozens!!

[Cerilo]

Pal, I don't need you to lecture me on "other MMOs," and I sure as fuck don't need you to tell me that my opinion about a video game company is or isn't healthy. (It's especially ironic given the number of times people on this forum have accused me of being a "Blizzard shill" for defending some of their decisions.) The question was whether Blizzard would release a half-assed product to meet some imaginary fucking deadline that matters to nobody other than people who could give a fuck whether the game is a half-aborted fetus on launch so long as engagement metrics are where they need to be.

They are meant to provide you with entertainment, you pay monthly to be entertained. The vitriol you defend your hatred of a company you continue to financially support seems counterintuitive. Claiming that, that is unhealthy and shows signs of addiction, isn't exactly the farthest stretch one could come up with.

Pal, buddy, budderino, friendo, champ, captain, liege.

[Thetruth1400]

Would they be better? Yes.

Considering they don't have the desire to pull the ripcord and they've built the entire expansion around the covenants. No.

They're too committed and the only way they could actually fix the issues we are going to see is if they scrapped the entire covenant system and redesigned it from the ground up while giving us more than just a few dungeons, raids, and leveling zones as content for a full priced expansion.

I'd be willing to take almost any bet that we will see a greater than 5% difference between things as usual, and therefore they'll have failed at the one thing they promised won't happen with covenants.

[Relapses]

They are meant to provide you with entertainment, you pay monthly to be entertained. The vitriol you defend your hatred of a company you continue to financially support seems counterintuitive. Claiming that, that is unhealthy and shows signs of addiction, isn't exactly the farthest stretch one could come up with.

Pal, buddy, budderino, friendo, champ, captain, liege.

I don't hate Blizzard. I hate that Blizzard would rather hit a fucking deadline than release a product in a finished state. I could give the faintest fuck about some "addiction" you think I have because that isn't the topic of discussion.

[Demolished]

Oh my!!! dozens!!

Contrary to popular belief most of the people with beta access do not bug report post on the forums, if at all.

[MrFawlty]

...and OP still isn't getting the 90+% voting yes, he expected.

Maybe the poll options of "Yes", "No", "Don’t Care" aren’t quite as biased as paranoid fanboys think they are.

[LostLocket]

At this point I would say yes.

Right now with sims we are seeing differences between specs of the same class hit 30% with systems that scale with gear meaning that the more gear you have the larger this problem grows... windwalker monkers are doing roughly tank damage and have been broken throughout beta with only a month remaining and pvp right now is simply watching classes one shot each other with ret pally's climbing to the top of the pile by virtue of divine shield protecting them from oneshots.

The systems blizzard gambled on have all imploded as predicted and I can't see how they can fix it with the time they have left without flat out removing all of them and I know full well they wont.

Shadowlands is going to be the expansion that will have us looking back fondly on how fair and balanced azerite armor, essences, and even corruptions were balanced.

[MrFawlty]

..or maybe people can see beyond it.

Nothing to see through - Its hard to imagine a simplier more straight forward poll though than "yes" "no" "dont care" isnt it?

Had it actually been biased but on Blizzard's side however, I VERY much doubt you would have commented.

[Dystemper]

At this point I would say yes.

Right now with sims we are seeing differences between specs of the same class hit 30% with systems that scale with gear meaning that the more gear you have the larger this problem grows... windwalker monkers are doing roughly tank damage and have been broken throughout beta with only a month remaining and pvp right now is simply watching classes one shot each other with ret pally's climbing to the top of the pile by virtue of divine shield protecting them from oneshots.

The systems blizzard gambled on have all imploded as predicted and I can't see how they can fix it with the time they have left without flat out removing all of them and I know full well they wont.

Shadowlands is going to be the expansion that will have us looking back fondly on how fair and balanced azerite armor, essences, and even corruptions were balanced.

This is why I wont be playing it until atleast after 9.1, if at all. I am not real impressed with everything that i have seen , and so far covenants look tto be a big deal breaker

[tomten]

No it doesn't. Blizzard will be profitable whether they release Shadowlands now, or in 2021. This whole notion that stockholders are going to be mad if Shadowlands doesn't release now is ridiculous because stockholders do not care when a specific game releases. They only care that when the quarter report comes, the company as a whole has a profit. WoW is not the only game Blizzard has and they are all making money. The only one who is naive is the one that uses "stockholders" in their argument to begin with.

They dont exist in a vacuum, do they? At some point there's gonna be a delay or even loss in profit too, which shareholders don't agree with. How is that a hard concept for you to grasp?

[LostLocket]

This is why I wont be playing it until atleast after 9.1, if at all. I am not real impressed with everything that i have seen , and so far covenants look tto be a big deal breaker

They do look like a mess but I can say they are less grindy at least then previous systems though the conduit item might change that. I have been hearing reports from my guild testing mythic+ that conduit upgrades are obtainable from that though.

[WarTV]

biased poll.

[HumbleDuck]

I don't think delaying the launch would help anything. The more serious problems with shadowlands are not "simple" bug fixes which can be addressed in a couple of weeks, they are design decisions which blizzard seem to be very protective of.

[Inukashi]

I wanna be honest. I don't care. Can't vote now though.
Delaying it won't help the balance. Really, what do they need? More testdata? More 'time'? How long can it take to calculate some formulas? Don't they get anything done in a regular 8 hour work day? And yeah I'm not asking this because I don't have a idea, I'm asking because I've done things like this myself.
And if you take this long you either have no Idea what you are doing or you are just slacking off.

Why don't they create some testing room where bots run dps on 5 dummy targets or 1 dummy target and let them dps for 12 hours straight with increased speed. That way they could run tests within seconds and see if someone does enough dps or doesn't and than just adjust the values and run the test again. This isn't something exotic and having testing environments like this is quit common in development.

So if they didn't balance it till now, they won't balance it better in 5 month more time.

They also should have enough testdata from the beta testers by now.

If they wanna remove bugs on the other side, more time is always a good thing.

BUT delaying the pre-patch that long without communication is just bad. People could do all the other stuff the pre-patch gets us, including leveling the chars they want to play in SL.

[Protean]

Title says it all. Thoughts?

As my teacher in Project Planning said: Extending deadlines don't work, because people don't put in the work until the end. Better with a tight deadline because the rush to fix continues past it.

You could move the deadline 2 years into the future and it still wouldn't be done in time. Also a factor that they don't know what to fix until they see how players interact with the expansion on a large scale.

[GreenJesus]

What should be cancelled is the never ending thread creations of how SL is unfinished, trash, “filler” and so on.

What should be cancelled is the fact SL is unfinished not the fact people notice it.

[Morgaith]

As a mythic raider they can delay it for as long as they want to (a year +) and i couldn't be happier given all the great games that are coming out soon.

[Zeek Daniels]

Its fine that blizzard launches shadowlands in an unbalanced state. Because they launch every expansion in an unbalanced state. They usually wait till mythic releases to do final balancing. Im assuming borrowed power wont max out by the time mythic comes out or even weeks after. So its really impossible for them to see where players take classes, covenants and conduits. Sure we all know some covenant spec combos work better than others. It was stupid for blizz to put this permanent choice on us when they know damn well ppl are going to go for this highest dps one. But that doesnt mean the whole xpac should be delayed.

At the end of the day people will voice their opinion best by voting with their wallet. Unsubscribing till blizz learns that this version of borrowed power was a step too far.

[pinkz]

WOD was released unfinished, and never was finished. the largest reneged expac in warcraft history, WOTLK is second.