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WoW Burning Crusade Delayed until January 2007
Wowzer writes "Blizzard today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, the first expansion for World of Warcraft, is delayed until January 2007. From the article: 'By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.' While disappointing now, what will this mean for the yearly WoW expansions long term? As Blizzard COO Paul Sams revealed plans in August that 'Starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set.' 2008, 2009, ad infinitum?"
I'm a long time EQ player and I only have half the expansions. I got in on most of the betas (or a friend did) and if I didn't like where it was going, I didn't purchase it. Simple as that. If you don't have the balls to hang on to your $30 over a game you don't need then you have problems. Not getting a new expansion doesn't stop you from doing what you were already doing.
Expansions can make a game gone stale get great again. They can, though, also forever ruin a game never to be resurrected again. So Blizzard will definitly make certain that whatever this expansion brings won't cause too much of a ripple in the universe of WoW. After all, it still goes strong, so far the players aren't fleeing in large numbers, and the worst thing a very bad expansion can do is to make them do just that.
Game balance is the biggest issue an expansion has to solve before it may enter a game. Because one thing's certain: Once it's there, you can't make it leave again. An expansion is here, and it's here to stay. Mythic with DAoC was the only company that ever pulled a stunt and unplugged one of their expansions after a lot of complaints and many people leaving or in the process of leaving, and even they only did it by introducing new servers.
So the delay may very well be not a technical problem, be it stability or bug-freeness. My bet would be on balance. You can make or break balance very, very easily with an expansion that often not only introduces new items but also new classes. Classes are maybe the most difficult part of the balancing process in a game. New classes must first of all be that: new. You can't simply recycle some styles and gadgets from old classes and just give it new names, or people will complain. And that new spiffy thingamajigs you give them have to be in check and balanced, not only against the world but also against the other classes for PvP. They must not level faster than the old classes, they must not be stronger in solo fights (and neither must they be weaker), they must not even provide more "group value" than other classes, and of course they may not "replace" an existing class.
Now do that if you can.
Balancing is a very, very difficult task for expansion packs. And, honestly, if I played WoW, I'd rather give them 6 more months and have it done right than demanding it out now and having it break everything there is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My roommate has the BC beta and i've watched him play. Honestly, i'm surprised it's even in beta, i think it should still be in alpha status. Of the 5 or so hours of gameplay i've seen so far, i have witnessed:
/uninstall
1- Loot rolls being won, but the item doesn't go into your bag. The item was 'lost' since he couln't loot the body anymore.
2- Just clicking on a particular elite mob crashed wow to the desktop, twice.
3- There were several mobs that didn't have any animation assigned to them. they were just these floating statues and you couldn't tell who they were attacking or if they were even dead yet.
4- He has mostly tier 2.5 and 3 gear, and is a freakishly amazing pvper, yet he was easily killed by a rogue only 2 lvls higher. he used to be able to just laugh at rogues with his mail armor and shield, now it appears the lvls signify an overpowering leap in stats making it unfair.
5- I don't know about him, but if I had worked relentlessly, giving up my life to get the uber leet T3 armor, and then see GREEN everyday items drop in BC that are actually better the most sought after gear in the normal game......I'd get so bitter i would prolly logoff and uninstall right that second!
I have seen alot more than this, but all i can say is that the game is nowhere near ready for release. They need to realize that it affects over 6million of us now and most of us like it just the way it is. Also, we already have to deal with the dreaded 'patch day' every tuesday where our servers are offine, we can't play and then we get to read about how they changed the game yet again.
This is just my opinion of the game from what i have seen. I mean no harm to Blizz, and i'm sure that with $(6million X $15 / Month) they can afford to devolop the game into truly one for the recordbooks.
GG
I don't mind cooperation with other players. Actually, that's what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, "carebear" games (i.e. games where the game creator makes sure you don't have to feel any hard edges and stuffs you in bubblewrap) support the radically opposite kind of player: The greedy, selfish prick.
... everything! All your gear dropped to the ground, and if you could not get it back within a week, it's gone for good. Quests and encounters that actually REQUIRED you to use loopholes to be successful. There were quests where the dev team said flat out "We don't have a clue how to beat it. Good luck.". And a few more things that made this game simply and plainly unfairly evil and hard. I guess you could not get less "carebeary" than EQ was.
Let's take two very different (from a "carebear" attitude point of view) MMORPGs. EQ (the original one) and WoW.
In EQ, dying meant you lose
On the other end of the spectrum you find WoW. A minor loss in XP, "damage" to your equipment (which you kept) and if you're too lazy to get your gear back, the worst thing that happens to you is more damage to it. In a nutshell, you lose a little XP and gold. Quests are meant to be solved with a pre determined number of players and, let's be blunt here, that can be scripted if you're a halfway decent coder.
Now, when I look back at the playerbase of EQ, I'd be hard pressed to find real assholes. Sure, you had the occasional player or even group that was either loonies or outright bastards, but few of them survived for long. Simple reason: Being a jerk did not pay off. You DID need the other players, if for nothing else then for getting your gear back from the peak of mount whatever, within that certain week. Being a jerk meant that nobody would go out of his way and risk his gear for yours. I've seen raid parties of 30+ people tank their way through days worth of, from their point of view, "needless" quests, just to get the gear of one person back. Because you simply knew that he would do the same, or maybe he even already did.
In WoW... I've seen more jerks, idiots, morons and simple flat out assholes in that 4 months I played it than in my whole EQ time.
That's what I don't like about carebear games. They let you get away with being a jerk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In my experience, carebears are usually people that don't have that much time available for playing games and which often in their real lifes have to "spend several hours doing a repetitive task" (for example, adults with jobs) so they're hardly keen on going online only to do some other repetitive tasks.
In my experience, those that accuse others of being carebears are those which have plenty of free time and have no problem with doing the same thing over and over again to get some random rare drop. Typically these are NOT adults with jobs, and given the demographics of the online gaming comunity (there are not that many retired folks playing online) are mostly teenagers and kids.
It's thus hardly surprising that those accusing others of being carebears act childish in comparisson with the carbears, since those making the accusation tend to be immature teens and kids while those being accused tend to be adults.
PS (offtopic): Personally the thing that mostly turns me off of MMORPGs (and i've played quite a number over the years, including WoW) is having to deal with kids and immature teens hidding behind the anonymity of an online avatar. There are a couple of problems i see in mixing adults and non-adults in an online RPGs:
Personally i would love that MMORPGs had the option to join adults-only servers (just call it "casual gamer server" otherwise every teenager will try to get in).