How about for starters, set realistic goals for your company and all the teams involved.
Secondly, if you aren’t going to make the deadline don’t say something the day of.
Chances are you know a couple days out and could have communicated it ahead of time instead of drop a surprise on the community which causes a majority of the uproar imo.
I know if I have a deadline at work and tell me boss I need an extension 3-5 days ahead of time it’s usually no problem. If I tell him the day of that it won’t be done I may be looking for a new job
Can’t wait for the monthly blue post that tells us nothing of signifigance. May have gotten that already though with the slam hotfix. See you guys in February when they issue a hotfix for a mob in scholo that sometimes walks through walls.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Blues were much more active in those days and any blue post, no matter how innocent, was a magnet for constant abuse and ridicule. This culminated in things like the Shaman forums hoping Eyonix got hit by a bus or the Tseric Down YTMND. Ghostcrawler dealt with similar garbage when he was active on the forums.
The WoW forums are a cesspit, always have been, and if anything Classic General has been worse. The CMs handle moderation and they observe them for major trends that they then report back to the devs. The community has long since burnt any chance of there being any more. There’s a reason major game developers rarely engage with their community unfiltered and a reason Blues barely post around here any more. MMO players aren’t worth dealing with in the slightest.
One thing i guess is that with classic there’s less impetuous from blizzard to release info on stuff-- Classic is classic. you already KNOW what’s coming down the pipe. There’s no class change info they need to share, no info about stuff they’re thinking about doing, ect.
its all kind of set in stone, the only question is the timeframe.
Let’s not forget the death threats sent by a streamer’s followers to a CM who posted his/her opinions on Classic after this forum opened because said streamer didn’t like CM’s opinion.
And the posters here who shrugged and said the CM shouldn’t have posted his/her opinion to begin with.
Blizzard used to do that – a lot – back in 2005-2008. Then they got badly burned – by players. Why? Because many players consider any statement a PROMISE, and if the date changes AT ALL those players will post “We all know that Blizzard LIES to players” threads for literally YEARS afterwards.
That is what happened. I saw it happen. Lots of toxic players here.
Maybe Blizzard should keep trying. Maybe they could do better then they’ve done. I’m just saying this is the reason.
“Realistic goals”? You obviously never worked on 100-200 member software team, like I did for decades. In software, all schedules slip. All deadlines are missed. Nothing is predictable. Nothing takes the “scheduled” amount of time. Some things are much faster, and some things are much slower, and some things turn out to be impossible.
And you can’t just hand assignments out to random people. Each person trains on their area. I usually had around 60,000 lines of code that were “my group’s code”. 1 to 5 people were trained on that code. Any change to that code were done by those 1-5 people. Bug fixes, new features, feature changes, anything.
Not having a BWL date at this point is really bad.
30min horde AV queues with Warsong Gulch being basically dead with no comment is bad.
I’m also kind of miffed about the lack of communication around Onyxia and Ragnaros PlayerId behavior stuff. I kind of understand the fixes, but we never got an explanation of how either fight behaved in Vanilla or why changes were made. Was it a bug porting over the old scripts? How were the raid encounters reconstructed? If a retail fight even gets looked at, we get more feedback than this.
Can’t wait for something dumb to be found in BWL, then changed with minimal Blue response.
You forgot the part where people take things completely out of context and then say that Blizzard said such and such when they never actually said it at all. That’s my personal favorite.
That response you’re describing by players – even if it were true – is just as unreasonable as Blizzard’s actions.
Yes, there are a lot of “insane” people in the world, and they have no filter when communicating online.
No, you should not take them as indicative of general opinion, nor should you design communication policies around them.
That said, of course Blizzard is free to design communication policies around the crazies, but that comes at a cost: When you never respond to the community or give them insight into your thought processes, the community will make negative and cynical assumptions which are much more corrupting to public opinion and difficult to uproot, than “OMG Blizzard lies because a piece of content was delayed.”
What you see before you is the corpse of a legendary game developer being worn by activision. Unless it involves making money or micro transactions I wouldn’t count on them doing anything. Classic was only made to counter p servers. the bean counters hate us for it and wishes nothing more then see it fail so we can go play retail.