I’m speculating right now whether they can get all the bugs in 9.1 fixed by August.
I mean, it DID put them behind. How do you think they can make up, say, 2 months of mandatory lockdown + another 2 months of a shaky transition to remote work? Estimated numbers, of course, but let’s just say the initial Covid response halted or severely hindered their progress for 4 months.
How do they make that time up? It obviously put them behind schedule. This industry already does stupid amounts of crunch. So why does it stop being a valid excuse?
I feel like saying “Blizzard handled Covid poorly” is more valid than “Covid is no longer an excuse”. At least in terms of explaining why releases are coming late.
Even though I don’t think there will be a 9.3 ,I’ve also said if there is it probably won’t be a raid tier patch and will just be a wrap up before the 10.0 prepatch later next year.
They could do it like Legion and do it at some other event . They could do the announcement this year giving us a basic idea of what is to come then give us more details at the Blizzcon in Feb.
Ok I will give a little slack for covid even though others in the industry have seemed to have done fine working from home . As for not testing the game how he like ?
WTF does he expect us to all be yes man and agree with him 100 % ? People have been saying since Legion what issues the systems have and they keep doubling down on them .
Does he honestly think as they keep recycling them with whatever the newest expansions skin is , that we will honestly start to like them or does he honestly think we will break down and surrender to his madness?.
I think the answer to this question depends on whether releasing 9.3 will give Blizz more or less time in developing 10.0.
If releasing 9.3 means more time for devs to reflect what they have done wrong, and where they can improve and develop 10.0, then I’m willing to wait longer.
If releasing 9.3 does not affect the development of 10.0, it will be better for WOW to end it sooner.
Nah they only pay with gold to really get one over on Blizz.
As long as they ignore the fact Blizzard gets an extra five bucks per token.
Let SL end.
I can’t wait for this to be over.
My guess is 9.3 will be 7 months, a 3 boss mini raid that ends the story, new time gated gear grind system to keep us busy and the reason they’re taking so long is they’ve shifted most of their production to 10.0
He did not say this. The quote that people kept twisting into that was taken 100% out of context.
The actual quote was talking about Torghast’s initial difficulty and how players complained about how punishing it was due to the restrictive death-cap and the fact that you get nothing if you fail a run. When the PTR/Beta was brought up, Ion stated that the reason this issue wasn’t picked up during the PTR/Beta was because the players testing Torghast weren’t leaving that type of feedback.
They were leaving feedback, useful feedback at that, but it was feedback focused on the structure of the tower, the mechanics, the anima powers. They were pushing themselves to see how far they could go with their class and leaving feedback about scaling and where things could be improved. But they weren’t leaving feedback from the point of view of a casual player who jumps in to Torghast to get their weekly run done and then jumps right back out.
This meant that the uncompromising penalty system that Torghast had in the beta/ptr went straight to the live realms, and that’s when Blizzard started getting the feedback from the casual player who only jumped in for their weekly soul ash before jumping right back out. This is when they got the feedback that the uncompromising penalty system that Torghast came with was too punishing, which is why they nerfed it considerably. So that everyone could jump in and do Torghast, regardless of skill level. But making that change also pissed off the people who liked the difficulty just the way it was. To them Torghast was now ‘too easy’ and ‘flat’.
All in all, the answer Ion gave makes sense, is accurate and covers all his bases, but what did the writers at MMO-Champion do when they wrote down the notes for this particular point of the interview? They deliberately paraphrased the answer to make it look like Ion was blaming the players for not testing perfectly and the forums ran with it because they’ll take any chance they can get to bash Ion or Blizzard.