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

Typical Marketing Department Booshwah

[the eric conspiracy]

Some guy in marketing thought it would be nice to promise monthly updates without realizing that the developers didn't have the resources to deliver anything like this.

Happens in every company, and the marketing guys should be held accountable for making such stupid promises.

Re:Typical Marketing Department Booshwah

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, as someone who's worked in marketing, 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".

Marketers are NOT as stupid as /.ers think. We know damn well that to make promises you can't keep with a product is a BAD THING. It gives negative buzz, and in highly competitive industries where customer retention absolutely relies on such a major thing, you can be damn sure they don't want to screw that up.

I'd say the blame lies on whichever tech person told them the monthly updates would be feasible.

Thoughts about Instancing

[vjmurphy]

First, let me say right off, I haven't played WoW nor do I plan to (too many games competing for my time as it is). But I have been playing City of Heroes and Guild Wars.

City of Heroes has instanced missions, but there are other zones that are free-for-alls. Works relatively well, I guess.

Guild Wars has instances for everything other than city zones and PVP areas (I guess, I've only been playing a little while).

I guess I don't get why people would want to play a MMORPG, but also want instances to make it into more of a Not-So-Massively-Multiplayer ORPG. I always thought that Everquest was kinda cool in that everyone was competing/cooperating with one another (and yes, I know the inherent problems that come with that: camping rare spawns, etc).

Guild Wars seems to go even further, basically making a game that has a bunch of different lobby areas (Cities) that allow you to join up for adventures (with up to 8 people). Is Guild Wars really a MMORPG, then (discounting the fact that no MMORPG is actually a RPG, really)? Now, I haven't done any PVP, so maybe that's where the MM part comes in, but it seems a little odd to me.

Not that I'm not enjoying the game: it's nice, simple, and cheap.

compared to other mmo's...

[j-joshers]

World of Warcraft is doing alright. Ive played SWG, EverQuest, and Ultima Online in the past, and honestly the biggest response people would get from those games is a big TS. Blizzard has been pretty damn generous with giving people extra days when the servers are having problems, and server stability *has* improved. And the amount of content so far delivered is nothing to sneeze at, its a lot more than Ive seen in the other MMOs Ive played in a six month time (SWG has basically been in beta since the game launched ~2 years ago, so I dont really count it, WOW was in much better shape). I really think Battlegrounds are gonna change the dynamic of the game, and almost give it a Planetside-style capture/control gameplay element. I really cant wait for it to happen.