World of Warcraft - Then and Now

MMORPG.com has an excellent feature up discussing the trajectory of World of Warcraft as it's progressed since its launch day. They touch on the recent honor system features, the added dungeons, and call Blizzard out on their inability to keep to a consistent update schedule. From the article: "So you may ask, 'How well has Blizzard delivered on their monthly content updates?' The simple answer is: they haven't. In fact, a couple months post launch some players challenged Blizzard as to their promise on scheduled updates. Official Blizzard posters denied making such claims but were quickly pointed to their own website where, in plain text, monthly content updates were promised. After some backtracking Blizzard announced that they would not be able to keep to a definitive content update schedule."

Comments

Re:Typical Marketing Department Booshwah

[Swanktastic]

Combine marketing's runaway imagination with the fact that devs always:

- underestimate the time required to complete each component of a project
- don't factor unexpected problems into the timeline
- never allocate enough time for QA

Now we've got a problem...

Re:Typical Marketing Department Booshwah

[the eric conspiracy]

I just want to say that most major businesses out there have at least one developer-type person who interacts with the marketing department to tell them "yes, we WILL be able to deliver on this promise".

Yes, and that developer-type person is usually a project manager looking for a promotion into marketing, rather than a real developer.