Ladies and gentlegnomes,
Last week we got some clarification on Friends and Family EMPLOYEE Alpha going on. What do you expect to hear this week? Place your bets!
Also, Over/Under on this week’s blue post:
Friday 2pm EST UNDER +105
Friday 2pm EST OVER --110
Edited as not to mislead
I learned a long time ago that if you expect nothing from Blizzard, you’ll rarely be disappointed.
At a minimum, don’t start rumours by failing to read posts.
Major Update Posts:
Minor Update Posts:
I expect a major blue post around the first week of May.
But aren’t these the same? When all you have is work, work, work, your employees are your friends and family. ![:thinking:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")
I hear what you are saying – no malice intended!
They’re vastly different animals.
When they say ‘phase of employee alpha’ they just mean that they were testing the deployment from the client. We’re unlikely to see a ton of builds going up there, because they were testing the mechanism, not using the mechanism to deploy their own internal builds.
Friends and Family Alpha implies that the product is ready for non-employees to give feedback on it. That’s a big step and essentially says “We think we’re mostly done, tell us where we have to put the finishing touches”.
All in, parlay the over 2pm EST Friday with a Monday April 29th announcement about Release Date exacta.
The addition of a gnomish cannon at Menethil Harbor so Night Elves can avoid the Wetlands death run!
J/k - I think if we get an update it will be a generalized update that things are going well and they just have a little tweaking on “this and that”.
Nothing this week from Blizzard. Lots of posts trying to coax a release date or more data, in spite of a pretty clear “we don’t have more to say yet”.
I want to hear word on the Server List, including Oceanic Servers, but I doubt I will.
My prediction: no tangible news this week. Possible commentary posts in fun threads.
I am expecting to be playing by Labor Day. Though it may only be Beta.
Yellow bids 100 Quatloo’s on over.
I’m betting under.
They’ve been going good with a decent update every week besides these past 2 weeks.
We did get the loot trading update and the post about what we saw on the CDN which might of just been a PR move since we were going ape for a bit.
I think we’re overdue for a big update regarding something we’ve heard nothing about yet.
I’m inclined to think they wouldn’t be “testing deployment from the client” unless they were getting ready deploy the client through their CDN. The only reason they’d be getting ready to use the CDN is because they’re preparing to make the client available to people outside of Blizzard’s offices.
Ergo, F&F phase of the Alpha is about to begin.
The other “Tell” is they added the “alpha” to the CDN and called it “beta” on the CDN so that tends to point to the Alpha likely being in its final stages at this point. Basically, the dev team may be calling it Alpha in an official sense. But they consider it to be post-alpha/pre-beta at this stage. It’s just working through the final steps to “make it official” that they’ve reached beta.
Much of the speculation regarding July 16th was predicated on the idea that Blizzard will announce a release date this week. We’ll see.
I tend to agree that it should be soon. They are really only adapting the code, not creating all new. Heck, I would be surprised if the testing phases didnt tick along quite rapidly.
I’m hoping you’re right. But on the checklist of things to do before release, “Test the deployment CDN can successfully deploy a new product” is definitely not last on the list of important tasks. The Classic client needs to ensure it works like the PTR client and doesn’t interfere with Retail, while still relying on retail assets. The failures early on and the stopping of the builds once that failure was resolved, indicates to me that that’s all that it was and that phase is already over (except for later retesting).
On the naming point, the CDN is far more annoying to change monikers (because it appears to actually be adding them only) than the client itself. So likely that is simply an SOP to call it beta so that you can use it for the FnF and general betas.
Which would be a reason to introduce the F&F Alpha stage of testing in short order, as that would verify that it is working(at some degree of scale) as intended. Once they’re certain that the deployment issues are resolved, it can quickly transition into Beta. Given the amount of overlap between Retail and Classic WoW, I really do expect the Classic F&F Alpha and even the Beta Testing phases are going to be compressed time wise. They don’t need to test everything, they just need certain (very large) portions of the client and the game world put to the test. Because there are differences between the two.