f13.net

Where does Blizzard keep the list of the stuff they "plan to implement." That kind of shit goes a long way towards retention.

I'd love to have a shop open that I can call Hello Leatherworking and the little snappy undead girl cashier in it be named Hello Kitty. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyone know where a list of futurestuff (tm) may be found?

For Arrr-PEEE reasons her name should be "Hello Dead Kitty".

The silence has been deafening. I get the feeling that blizzard can't shake their single-player traditions and thus have all taken a month off.

Its been 8 days since release with the servers needing almost constant attention. And even in beta they only patched about once a month. Don't expect anything for a while.

Their community people have sucked since retail launched. They are giving out almost no information. They do nothing at all to build up the community. They give responses that show their stress, which they should not do. All they are doing is silently moderating and locking threads.

Blizzard is pretty tight lipped about upcomming patches. They usualyl post a patch sneek peek a week or two before the patch. But they dont post patch notes untill the patch actually is released. Also, I know they havent taken the month off. I know 4 people working at Blizzard, and right now all of them are working 60 hours weeks, 6 days a week.

I really don't fault them for that. The whining on those forums (a lot of it justified) is incredible -- Hell hath no fury like a Blizzard fanboy scorned. I'm actually impressed the CMs can still give coherent responses.

There was a stealth patch on 12-1.  I know because a couple of well known bugs all of a sudden went away that morning. No notes or annoucements though which has me a little concerned. What else did they "fix?"

Fishing.  You can't fish zones higher level than your fishing skill now.

Stealth-patches. . I have to think about that one.  I think I approve.

Someone should register on the WorldofWar.net forum :)

They link to the patch notes, but I can't see 'em because I'm not registered (and I don't need to see them enough to register for another darn forum imo).

FYI.

Is true?  It was my understanding they shut down fishing in all higher level zones.  Like 30+ zones, I think.  I'm an idiot, though, so who knows...

From what they said on the official forums this was due to fishing bots.

Let the bots begin!!

One of the neat things about WoW is their ability to change alot of things in the game without a client-side patch...  Any time the servers are down, they can be editing data files and fixing bugs.

Or they can be sitting back a sipping Kahlua.  Who knows?

Alkiera

I have it on good authority that they took the servers down today to enjoy a quiet schnapps.

I bet they do drink Schnapps. Buncha west coast pussies.

Nothing pussy about schnapps.  My grandfather drank schnapps and he was a professional boxer.  He would have fed you your own balls for calling him a pussy.

Blizzard is doing a pretty bad job. The PvP stuff has been a debacle in a lot of ways, which I will count off.

1: They announced something, then didn't do it.

2: The reason they didn't do it was that it wouldn't work - so why did they announce it? Maybe they should announce something AFTER thinking about it a bit?

3: The hilarious "if you can get rewarded for PvP against a player of your level, why would you waste time attacking lower-level players?" This is either the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard, or they are being purposely dishonest. Why? Because you can, and it's fun (for griefers). EVERYONE knows that. Why grief at all?

4: If you want a good contest for player skill but don't like the lame PvP, you can fight in battlefields - no wait, you can if you have a time machine.

The whole thing has been handled very poorly. Step 1 is to acknowledge you have a problem, and the quote above shows they can't even do that.

The CSR's are particularly bad. Introducing daily server downtime with a cryptic, vague and ambiguous post was poor and then they let the boards flame for days without clarification. Likewise their backflip on PvP was frightening. They have an extremely large number of PvP servers that are highly likely to be under-populated unless they show evidence of a plan.

And it doesn't particularly have to be actions now. Just a sign that they're in control.

One of the CSR posts was a classic though, "server maintenance will be continually extended" when what he meant to say was the gap between downtimes would grow over time. Is it too much to proof read you own posts when making such announcements is your job?

That said the game is truly spectacular. The pattern of its growth remains to be seen, but it would be extremely hard to return to EQ after playing WoW.

The PvP thing is just terrible, because they have no explanation other than "yeah, you know that thing we were going to do - well we tried it and it didn't work so um forget it." They make it sound so obvious in retrospect, it's like what comic book people call retroactive continuity. At the drop of a hat we'll just take back everything we said we would do.

They could at least say that their scheme didn't work and they are looking into better schemes. Right now the PvP honor system involves NPCs only!

Kind of calls into question the other things they have said they are going to do. Hero classes, more raid stuff, battlegrounds, etc.

My favorite is when they announce a change that removes or edits something that was fun and say "Well, it was going to be that way all along.  Now it's just more in line with our original vision."

I opened a ticket for the broken Arachanphobia (sic) quest, where Besseleth the elite spider (which is bloody easy to kill) drops nothing. Of course, I got no realtime response, and I decided to leave the ticket there to see how long it would take to get a response. I had a CSR contact me two and a half days later at 4AM EST. He checked the logs, and gave me the required fang to complete the quest. This is at least a better response than some MMOGs out there.

At least they're doing the right thing, albeit slowly. Hopefully their GM training program churns out quality GMs quickly and they can get their response time down.

Had a similar CS experience, lost my Hunter's pet skills and paged a GM who didn't get to me that night.  When I logged on saturday morning she responded right as I logged on, and even rezzed me as the last server reset put me in a bad camp.

Is the constant changing of avatars trying to tell us a story or something, Shockeye?

Not really. I may keep this one for awhile because the story behind it (http://www.local6.com/news/3976524/detail.html) is just fabulous.

Ah... that was uplifting.  It's always a joy to see our law enforcement heroes in action.

Don't mock. Remember 9/11.

I really am laughing out loud.

Ha.