The three stooges

[Netevolution]

What does "Wrath of Lich King" Starcraft 2" and "Diablo 3" have in common?

Fansy trailers, a lot of tough talk, and months of development ahead. It's Blizzards trademark:grin:!

[det]

What do all the posts made by you have in common?

Troll bait, readymade for Fluffy. It is your trademark :grin:

[Eileithyia]

http://www.forumspile.com/Misc-Do_not_feed_the_trolls_(2).jpg

[Wintrow]

On a related, but less trolling note:

I played the deathknight at the WWI08. Looking very good. Absolutely LOVE the Death Grip-skill.

[MrBCorp]

...readymade for Fluffy...

http://img467.imageshack.us/img467/4886/fluffy8uo.jpg

[Valas Azuviir]

Me thinks that some folks need a refresher course in our forum rules (http://www.worldofwar.net/forums/rules).

Read them, learn them, live by them and love them.

Because if you don't...

*unhooks bakka hammer*

:evil2:

[Eileithyia]

eek!

/hides

[elsegundo]

i guess the title was a bit clever. lol

but yes... keep those fansy trailers coming! i love to see a company continuing to develop more great games to keep their fans, players, supporters, and investors interested and excited.

[Kasal]

Me thinks that some folks need a refresher course in our forum rules (http://www.worldofwar.net/forums/rules).

Read them, learn them, live by them and love them.

Because if you don't...

*unhooks bakka hammer*

:evil2:

Referring to the OP, the replies or both? Just so I know who to tease. :wink:

[Valas Azuviir]

Referring to the OP, the replies or both? Just so I know who to tease. :wink:

Now that would be telling. :neener:

I think that the one(s) who has/have been naughty, has/have a fairly good idea whom I'm addressing with that warning. Whether or not s/he/they'll heed the warning is another issue all together.

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

What does "Wrath of Lich King" Starcraft 2" and "Diablo 3" have in common?

Fansy trailers, a lot of tough talk, and months of development ahead. It's Blizzards trademark:grin:!

Blizzard always follows the pattern of releasing "when it is ready", rather than hard, artificial deadlines. The one time they were forced to release ahead of schedule cause 8 months of hell -- that would be the World of Warcraft launch, and because of it, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years were canceled at Blizzard HQ for 2004, and Vivendi Universal learned a very important thing -- Blizzard knows when Blizzard's ready with a game better than Vivendi does. And with TBC's very smooth launch, Blizzard proved that.

I'd rather Blizzard takes their time and gets the games right, than rushes out half-completed tripe like most of the other game developers do nowadays (with the broken philosophy of "we'll just patch it up later").

[Netevolution]

Think of Toyota anoucing a car at some car expo and then saying;"This car is still in development" Would that increase the reliablity of Toyota:shocked:?

[Aerath]

Think of Toyota anoucing a car at some car expo and then saying;"This car is still in development" Would that increase the reliablity of Toyota:shocked:?

Know what ? That's exactly what they do. They show you a model, a non-functional one-off at special car shows. Way before they even hit the production lines.

I do appreciate the efforts at comedy, but this was a bit too silly.

[MrBCorp]

Blizzard always follows the pattern of releasing "when it is ready", rather than hard, artificial deadlines. The one time they were forced to release ahead of schedule cause 8 months of hell -- that would be the World of Warcraft launch, and because of it, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years were canceled at Blizzard HQ for 2004, and Vivendi Universal learned a very important thing -- Blizzard knows when Blizzard's ready with a game better than Vivendi does. And with TBC's very smooth launch, Blizzard proved that...

Could we get a link for that please? Sounds interesting. I didn't know Blizzard were rolled-on by their parent company...

[Aerath]

Could we get a link for that please? Sounds interesting. I didn't know Blizzard were rolled-on by their parent company...

Not sure they're still around - and I thought it was common knowledge the release was rushed and pressured. Some classes weren't even fully developed by the time the game hit launch.

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

Could we get a link for that please? Sounds interesting. I didn't know Blizzard were rolled-on by their parent company...

It used to be common knowledge, and there might be still some old archived news items on this site, if the news goes back to 2005. But basically, Vivendi was losing money fast, and was actually looking to sell Blizzard and the whole Vivendi Games department. Blizzard was taking far too long (for Vivendi), and too much money to get WoW out, and Vivendi pushed Blizzard to release about 6 - 8 months before Blizzard wanted to.

The result of this was that Blizzard's servers were *not* ready for it. Blizzard had horrifically underestimated their own popularity, the servers were quickly overloaded, and the database structure that was in place couldn't handle the surge of requests to it... The infamous "loot lag" situation had started in the game... It could take up to 15-30 minutes just to loot a single item from a corpse (or rather, the last item in the corpse). People were getting stuck mining, would leave, and it broke mining nodes... Anything involving a database writing query was becoming massively backed up on servers.

A "quick fix" Blizzard implemented was they limited the number of players per server... resuling in the queues that still occasionally show up, but back then a lot of servers had 4-digit queues. But that only partially helped. Blizzard also had WoW pulled off of the store shelves.... for about 4-5 months -- to stop new people from joining the game, when they couldn't even handle the population they currently had. Blizzard's developers ended up spending many long hours for many weeks trying to get the game stable... straight through the 2004 holiday season (since it was an early November 2004 launch). It was pretty crazy.... there was a bizarre set of bugs that were being rapidly discovered... Blizzard had within the first two weeks surpassed what they believed was the cap they *might* have population-wise in a couple years (200,000 accounts). They doubled their servers, doubled them again, and doubled them yet again, then continued to add new ones for a while... and after about 6 - 8 months of hell, the game became much more stabilized, and the boxes started showing up on store shelves again... Server crashes, loot-lag, etc slowly faded down to a very small problem... and the server queues were still a problem, but Blizzard started forcing people to move to new empty servers for a bit to split them up.

Basically, Blizzard and Vivendi were caught with their pants down... However, WoW's success turned Vivendi's situation around 180 degrees... Blizzard went from being a company that was potentially being sold off for bottom dollar to becoming a massive juggernaut in the gaming world, which increased its size rapidly, hiring a massive number of people into new positions (including the legion of support people added just for WoW). Blizzard quite literally went from sucking Vivendi's pocketbooks dry to making them overflow... When TBC was launched, Blizzard got to launch it when they felt it was ready... and it went incredibly smooth. So Vivendi and Blizzard have definite confirmation that Blizzard kinda knows what they are talking about when it comes to when to launch a product.

[Valas Azuviir]

Could we get a link for that please? Sounds interesting. I didn't know Blizzard were rolled-on by their parent company...

Some bigwig of Vivendi made comments about WoW being released in time for X-mas 2004. Blizzard themselves denied this, said they'd release when they deemed the game ready, well, the game was released prior to X-mas.

See also:
here (http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/nov/1094783.htm)
here (http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2004/06/21/vivendi-universal-games-announces-reorganization-350-layoffs)
here (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/worldofwarcraft/news.html?sid=6112765&mode=news)
here (http://www.armchairempire.com/videogame-news/PC-Games/December-2004/world-warcraft-breaks-records.htm)

For additional info as well as some of the stuff that Xlorep mentioned.
Can't seem to find the article with the blabbing bigwig, but eh. You get the general idea.

[elsegundo]

So now that Vivendi games is owned by Activision, which means Blizz is under Activision, do you think they'd make the same mistake?

I can understand why the blabbing bigwig would say what he said. but in the end, it makes for a buggy game. so what? appease the stockholders and the management now, but end up nearly sabotaging the entire game in the end? thats a big risk many companies make. im glad WoW was able to get through all that.

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

So now that Vivendi games is owned by Activision, which means Blizz is under Activision, do you think they'd make the same mistake?

Just means that Activision is now getting Blizzard's coffee and donuts, rather than Vivendi.

[clevins]

I can understand why the blabbing bigwig would say what he said. but in the end, it makes for a buggy game. so what? appease the stockholders and the management now, but end up nearly sabotaging the entire game in the end? thats a big risk many companies make. im glad WoW was able to get through all that.

Well let me give that point of view since much of my career has been spent being the interface between biz and dev...

It's easy to mock the suit, but from their point of view they had a bunch of guys costing them money. They might well have been looking at financial results that meant layoffs. At the very least they wanted to sell the company and selling a company with a shipping product is easier than one with some vaporware. Also, the common wisdom is that you want to release entertainment software during the holidays. Combine that with a reputation developers have in some quarters of sandbagging schedules and being perfectionists... and you can pretty easily get to the result they did. After all, the best game in the world isn't worth much if it doesn't ship...

Blizzard made some errors too - in estimating popularity/load, in design, etc. But it worked out, didn't kill the company and along with the success of the game established that Blizzard was closer to right than the suits.