So was it without due formalities and abrupt, or did they do their due diligence and tried to make it work?
If both, I assume the main thing you're upset about the fact that you weren't kept abreast with frequent updates about a closed beta.
It's both. I'm sure they put effort into making it work, but they ended up dropping it which was disappointing. I have been keeping up with everything that's been released in the Alpha so far thanks to the nature of the internet, so yeah, this was pretty abrupt. This wasn't simply an "update", this was the removal of a key advertised feature of the upcoming expansion.
I'm not sure where your confusion is coming from here.
The fact that you called it unceremonious, when it clearly wasn't. Just because you weren't kept updated on everything that they were doing to make it work doesn't mean the process was quick or done without due diligence, or abrupt.
Blizzard explained this CLEARLY in the VERY SAME RELEASE THAT STATED THE CUT.
It was never unceremonious at any point in time - except in your imagination.
So we're arguing the definition of abrupt or the perception of it? The general public's perception was thus:
-PttT announced
-nothing happens
-nothing happens
-nothing happens
-PotT is dropped
As far as the people not in the know are concerned, that was abrupt. Just because time passed in between those two events doesn't nullify that meaning. Let me see if I can clarify it a bit:
Let's say you're in a relationship with someone and you propose to them. You're both ecstatic, life is grand. You go about your business for a while but in secret, you become unhappy with the relationship. But, you don't want to upset your partner, so you say nothing. Three months later, you cancel the engagement. To your partner, that was abrupt. Even though you struggled with it in your mind but ultimately came to that conclusion, it was still unceremonious according to the other person.
The dance studio they talked about before Wrath never making into the game sucks way more than PotT getting dropped. And I'm way more bummed to hear that we may have to wait until halfway through Cata's life cycle to get heroic SFK and Deadmines. =(
That analogy doesn't do it for me, because it precludes the ability to make effort to fix the relationship that your partner is completely unaware of.
It would be more like if two of your friends were going to get married, and you were looking forward to the wedding and chowing down, and a couple months down the line they decide to call it off. It seems out of the blue to you, but the couple has been trying to work out their problems in private before committing permanently.
I think that that's a better analogy... but it's still a pretty bad one.
I'm willing to concede that it seems abrupt to players, but I have to look at this from the side of the developers, too. They've worked hard to try and get PotT to something that they feel would please 10 million subscribers, and had to make the unfortunate - but necessary - step of cutting and modifying it to meet their schedule.
If I were them, I'd be pretty irritated if players started claiming I didn't give them a warning about it/work on it hard enough/just made a decision arbitrarily/unceremonious etc., especially when the game is in an early, closed stage of development. Just because you're used to getting a ton of leaks off MMO-Champion and similar sites does NOT mean that you are entitled to know every change made in closed beta.
So yeah, it might seem unceremonious to YOU, but please try to think of this from the other side of the fence.
That analogy doesn't do it for me, because it precludes the ability to make effort to fix the relationship that your partner is completely unaware of.
It would be more like if two of your friends were going to get married, and you were looking forward to the wedding and chowing down, and a couple months down the line they decide to call it off. It seems out of the blue to you, but the couple has been trying to work out their problems in private before committing permanently.
I think that that's a better analogy... but it's still a pretty bad one.
I'm willing to concede that it seems abrupt to players, but I have to look at this from the side of the developers, too. They've worked hard to try and get PotT to something that they feel would please 10 million subscribers, and had to make the unfortunate - but necessary - step of cutting and modifying it to meet their schedule.
If I were them, I'd be pretty irritated if players started claiming I didn't give them a warning about it/work on it hard enough/just made a decision arbitrarily/unceremonious etc., especially when the game is in an early, closed stage of development. Just because you're used to getting a ton of leaks off MMO-Champion and similar sites does NOT mean that you are entitled to know every change made in closed beta.
So yeah, it might seem unceremonious to YOU, but please try to think of this from the other side of the fence.
I never claimed that I was entitled to anything, nor do I feel that way. In no way was I disparaging the developers or their efforts, in fact on the contrary I stated that I'm sure they did their due diligence, whatever that would have been. I simply am disappointed that a seemingly significant feature of the upcoming expansion was dropped this long after it was announced (it's been ten months now) and replaced with something far less exciting (to me).
So, how about this: we agree to disagree that this was an unceremonious cut. We can move forward with our own perceptions about the definition of abrupt/unceremonious and go back to living our lives, da?
The dance studio they talked about before Wrath never making into the game sucks way more than PotT getting dropped. And I'm way more bummed to hear that we may have to wait until halfway through Cata's life cycle to get heroic SFK and Deadmines. =(
To paraphrase: "Our merger with Activision will have no effect on how Blizzard is run."
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
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Liquid GhostDO YOU HEAR THE VOICES, TOO?!Registered Userregular
The dance studio they talked about before Wrath never making into the game sucks way more than PotT getting dropped. And I'm way more bummed to hear that we may have to wait until halfway through Cata's life cycle to get heroic SFK and Deadmines. =(
To paraphrase: "Our merger with Activision will have no effect on how Blizzard is run."
I'm not sure you can blame activision on this one. The reality of the game right now is that it essentially ended last patch, for all intents and purposes, and it launched december 8th. The only announced content between now and cataclysm is a tiny raid instance and maybe a new daily hub. The expansion needs to come out this year, or else that will be just a ridiculous stretch without content.
And I'm way more bummed to hear that we may have to wait until halfway through Cata's life cycle to get heroic SFK and Deadmines. =(
What.
Heroic SFK and Deadmines are not going to be ready at Cata launch.
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Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
Which is pretty funny considering all they really have to do is change mob's levels, hp, damage, and loot tables. Making a copy of DeadMines and changing some numbers around shouldn't take one guy longer than an afternoon.
Monkey Ball Warrior on
"I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
Which is pretty funny considering all they really have to do is change mob's levels, hp, damage, and loot tables. Making a copy of DeadMines and changing some numbers around shouldn't take one guy longer than an afternoon.
I'm glad you know so much about developing video games, especially super complicated MMOs.
Also I'm sure they want to do more than just copy the dungeons to give people incentive to play them more than once you need to make new encounters that are at least somewhat interesting. I'm sure they will change the layout some too what with everything getting sunk under water and exploding.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
Yeah, but all that revampy stuff is done for the regular Deadmines as well. So, Monkey Ball's point that all the heroic version needs is higher level mobs with higher damage and better loot stands.
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Liquid GhostDO YOU HEAR THE VOICES, TOO?!Registered Userregular
Which is pretty funny considering all they really have to do is change mob's levels, hp, damage, and loot tables. Making a copy of DeadMines and changing some numbers around shouldn't take one guy longer than an afternoon.
From what I've seen regarding the Deadmines stuff, as well as almost the entirety of Westfall, there will be some significant developments in the continuing storyline and, therefore, the sort of stuff you'll find inside DM.
However, you may be on the right track. A lot of what will happen may not really amount to much more than dudes being shifted in and out of the current set-up. So we'll see.
He can't be talking about that because it's a shitty and terrible quest line.
Only because you had to run back and forth.
Well, yeah. Like five or six times.
Also, there's a quest to gather twenty or so human skulls (with ridiculously low drop rate, one might add, considering that most humans I know have a skull) but you don't get that fucking quest until you've already been to the fucking place killing humans once or twice already. Eff that es in the effing A.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited June 2010
Uh.
The human skull gathering quest is like 100% drop.
Yeah, but if the questlines were all "Loo loo, I've got some apples!" then it wouldn't be remembered as well, and some of the more retarded questlines are amusing to a degree.
reVerse is right. That quest line is horrible in terms of running back and forth. Sure, it's easy now that at level 20 you already have a mount and every class can solo better and people have heirlooms, but it sucked a heavy dose of dick doing it before.
Joshmvii on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Maybe nowadays, but it sure as hell hasn't always been like that.
Also, elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere.
Oh God, that elite part was fucking bullshit. I still use to try to solo it.
I'll never forget one day I tried to run the quests there with some guildies. Some assholes pulled mobs into us, so we started to run away from the place to get out of it. Only, combat wasn't exited. The dwarves kept following us almost to the river.
Also, I think you get the quest for skulls with no prerequisites now.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited June 2010
You know what, having been reminded of that horrible, hideous, heinous quest line got me a little bit pissed off.
First you had to do all the fucking running back and forth, doing the piss easy early parts of the quest (aside from the part that took place inside the town hall, that shit was fucking brutal). Then, you get to run some more to go to the fucking mine, because we all love these narrow, small areas with more mobs than ants in an anthill, and because all the mobs in there are humanoids they run away at 20% health and you have to try to snare them and kill them quick so they don't alert seven of their fucking friends to join the fucking fight.
Then, when you've killed them all and got to the named mob you're supposed to kill for the quest, you get to fight him and couple of his friends. Depending on your level it's very likely that he was an orange mob in stark contrast to all the fucking green and yellow mobs you've been killing thus far, except for the elite in the town hall who was also orange. This guy, whoever, at least isn't an elite so you kill his buddies and then him with a sliver of your health left, and then.
Elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere.
The moment the fucking named mob goes down elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere spawn to gank your fucking ass. You can't run away because you're deep underground in a fucking mine and all the mobs you killed to get to this point have already respawned, so all you can really do is try to fight them, but because all you're wearing is gear with fucking +spirit on it because vanilla quest rewards were fun like that, you get your ass handed to you in two seconds flat, and then you can either corpse run back to the mine so you can recover your body, fight back to the surface and run back to the fucking town, or you can just take the durability hit and do jack fucking all for the next 15 minutes.
That whole quest line always made me think that Blizzard has some really lax recruitment standards. Like, there's this developmentally handicapped monkey coming in to interview for a quest designer spot and he gets hired immediately because at least he has opposable thumbs. Who in their right mind thinks that elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere coming to gank your ass after an already tough battle was good design? Seriously, who designed that quest, fucking Satan, the Lord of Darkness? "Hey, I know what would be completely horrible, elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere, yes, this shall provide an accurate taste for people what my dominion is all about". What the fuck?
In short, fuck every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers.
I remember doing that on my warlock I was so proud I solo'ed the dwarves and completed the chain. I forgot but I am going to miss releasing Helcular on Southshore
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
In short, fuck every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers.
Of course when you consider the state of MMO's 5 years ago, even quest designs like this were fucking years ahead of the other shit we had to deal with.
In short, cheers to every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers, and cheers to everything they've learned and implemented since then.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
In short, fuck every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers.
Of course when you consider the state of MMO's 5 years ago, even quest designs like this were fucking years ahead of the other shit we had to deal with.
In short, cheers to every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers, and cheers to everything they've learned and implemented since then.
No. No. Just because the shit you shit out is slightly less shitty than than the shittier shit other people shit out doesn't make it good or commendable. When you make shit, it's shit, and I refuse to believe that at any point any person could sit down on their designing table and think "elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere bum raping you" is anything other than shitty design.
In my world, in a just and reasonable world, you get cheers for not making shit.
Posts
-PttT announced
-nothing happens
-nothing happens
-nothing happens
-PotT is dropped
As far as the people not in the know are concerned, that was abrupt. Just because time passed in between those two events doesn't nullify that meaning. Let me see if I can clarify it a bit:
Let's say you're in a relationship with someone and you propose to them. You're both ecstatic, life is grand. You go about your business for a while but in secret, you become unhappy with the relationship. But, you don't want to upset your partner, so you say nothing. Three months later, you cancel the engagement. To your partner, that was abrupt. Even though you struggled with it in your mind but ultimately came to that conclusion, it was still unceremonious according to the other person.
Doubtful. Archaeology looks like its for lore nerds like myself and that's about it.
What.
That analogy doesn't do it for me, because it precludes the ability to make effort to fix the relationship that your partner is completely unaware of.
It would be more like if two of your friends were going to get married, and you were looking forward to the wedding and chowing down, and a couple months down the line they decide to call it off. It seems out of the blue to you, but the couple has been trying to work out their problems in private before committing permanently.
I think that that's a better analogy... but it's still a pretty bad one.
I'm willing to concede that it seems abrupt to players, but I have to look at this from the side of the developers, too. They've worked hard to try and get PotT to something that they feel would please 10 million subscribers, and had to make the unfortunate - but necessary - step of cutting and modifying it to meet their schedule.
If I were them, I'd be pretty irritated if players started claiming I didn't give them a warning about it/work on it hard enough/just made a decision arbitrarily/unceremonious etc., especially when the game is in an early, closed stage of development. Just because you're used to getting a ton of leaks off MMO-Champion and similar sites does NOT mean that you are entitled to know every change made in closed beta.
So yeah, it might seem unceremonious to YOU, but please try to think of this from the other side of the fence.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
So, how about this: we agree to disagree that this was an unceremonious cut. We can move forward with our own perceptions about the definition of abrupt/unceremonious and go back to living our lives, da?
To paraphrase: "Our merger with Activision will have no effect on how Blizzard is run."
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I'm not sure you can blame activision on this one. The reality of the game right now is that it essentially ended last patch, for all intents and purposes, and it launched december 8th. The only announced content between now and cataclysm is a tiny raid instance and maybe a new daily hub. The expansion needs to come out this year, or else that will be just a ridiculous stretch without content.
LoL: failboattootoot
The Archaeology trainer better be Harrison Jones.
Heroic SFK and Deadmines are not going to be ready at Cata launch.
I'm glad you know so much about developing video games, especially super complicated MMOs.
Also I'm sure they want to do more than just copy the dungeons to give people incentive to play them more than once you need to make new encounters that are at least somewhat interesting. I'm sure they will change the layout some too what with everything getting sunk under water and exploding.
From what I've seen regarding the Deadmines stuff, as well as almost the entirety of Westfall, there will be some significant developments in the continuing storyline and, therefore, the sort of stuff you'll find inside DM.
However, you may be on the right track. A lot of what will happen may not really amount to much more than dudes being shifted in and out of the current set-up. So we'll see.
EDIT: Nevermind. Useless post on my end.
Another important one people miss these days on Horde is the awesome undead quest line in Tarren Mill.
Only because you had to run back and forth. Similar quests are in TBC and WotLK in a way but the quest hub is really close by.
Well, yeah. Like five or six times.
Also, there's a quest to gather twenty or so human skulls (with ridiculously low drop rate, one might add, considering that most humans I know have a skull) but you don't get that fucking quest until you've already been to the fucking place killing humans once or twice already. Eff that es in the effing A.
The human skull gathering quest is like 100% drop.
Also, elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Oh God, that elite part was fucking bullshit. I still use to try to solo it.
I'll never forget one day I tried to run the quests there with some guildies. Some assholes pulled mobs into us, so we started to run away from the place to get out of it. Only, combat wasn't exited. The dwarves kept following us almost to the river.
Bugged mob aggro is fun sometimes. <_<
First you had to do all the fucking running back and forth, doing the piss easy early parts of the quest (aside from the part that took place inside the town hall, that shit was fucking brutal). Then, you get to run some more to go to the fucking mine, because we all love these narrow, small areas with more mobs than ants in an anthill, and because all the mobs in there are humanoids they run away at 20% health and you have to try to snare them and kill them quick so they don't alert seven of their fucking friends to join the fucking fight.
Then, when you've killed them all and got to the named mob you're supposed to kill for the quest, you get to fight him and couple of his friends. Depending on your level it's very likely that he was an orange mob in stark contrast to all the fucking green and yellow mobs you've been killing thus far, except for the elite in the town hall who was also orange. This guy, whoever, at least isn't an elite so you kill his buddies and then him with a sliver of your health left, and then.
Elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere.
The moment the fucking named mob goes down elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere spawn to gank your fucking ass. You can't run away because you're deep underground in a fucking mine and all the mobs you killed to get to this point have already respawned, so all you can really do is try to fight them, but because all you're wearing is gear with fucking +spirit on it because vanilla quest rewards were fun like that, you get your ass handed to you in two seconds flat, and then you can either corpse run back to the mine so you can recover your body, fight back to the surface and run back to the fucking town, or you can just take the durability hit and do jack fucking all for the next 15 minutes.
That whole quest line always made me think that Blizzard has some really lax recruitment standards. Like, there's this developmentally handicapped monkey coming in to interview for a quest designer spot and he gets hired immediately because at least he has opposable thumbs. Who in their right mind thinks that elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere coming to gank your ass after an already tough battle was good design? Seriously, who designed that quest, fucking Satan, the Lord of Darkness? "Hey, I know what would be completely horrible, elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere, yes, this shall provide an accurate taste for people what my dominion is all about". What the fuck?
In short, fuck every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers.
Indeed. This is why we speak of it in past tense.
Of course when you consider the state of MMO's 5 years ago, even quest designs like this were fucking years ahead of the other shit we had to deal with.
In short, cheers to every single one of Blizzard's vanilla era quest designers, and cheers to everything they've learned and implemented since then.
No. No. Just because the shit you shit out is slightly less shitty than than the shittier shit other people shit out doesn't make it good or commendable. When you make shit, it's shit, and I refuse to believe that at any point any person could sit down on their designing table and think "elite dwarves out of fucking nowhere bum raping you" is anything other than shitty design.
In my world, in a just and reasonable world, you get cheers for not making shit.
EDIT: A for the record, the questing system in WoW, even at launch of vastly superior to any MMO prior or contemporary.