115015-holiday-event-removal-not-a-big-deal-page-4

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I still don't understand how much testing the Halloween event really needed considering the event was shown to the press/during some event. Can't been all that much to do with it if it's good enough to show.
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so the holiday was being made for at least 6 months and relied on something else to be added to the standard game at least 3 months after launch...
 
please tell me part of the events took place in the defile and that's what you meant because otherwise that is a vexing thought 	
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Let me make it simple for you Vic: you should "lambast[sic]" Carbine for making the choice that they did because it was both the wrong choice, and their choice to make.
 
Your tendency to refer back to what "the community" was asking for months ago seems almost like a verbal (written?) tic, as if motivated by a desperate desire to protect Carbine from the terrible ramification of their decisions. As I said before, we don't even know that the people who voiced these concerns in the first place are still playing! 
 
For all the invocation of what "the community" said in August, you never seem to appreciate that Carbine may be chasing phantoms, players that have left for good and are unlikely to come back. 
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I also appreciate Caydiem coming in to talk with us a bit, and it does help to know that the devs who worked hard on this content share our disappointment and are looking forward to a time when we CAN experience it. Caydiem, for what it's worth I found your arguments to be well explained and well reasoned. I agree that it's a lot easier to talk about how OK you'll be with bugs that you're not experiencing than it is to actually BE OK with them when they're keeping you from collecting 100 whatsits to obtain your whosawhoopsie badge.
 
That being said, I also honed in on the same line that Vic did as the new element in the post. Vic is inclined to nod wisely at how the delay in drop 3 clearly makes Shade's Eve impossible, but I'll admit that I am more inclined to scratch my head and wonder even more than I already was about why the total lockdown on drop 3's content was enacted in the first place, seeing as it was guaranteed to reverberate through not just the drop schedule but the seasonal content as well. 
 
That one decision seems to me like it was guaranteed to lead to a string of cancellations and disappointments for the rest of the calendar year. I guess I'll hold out hope that this will be the last shoe to drop from that decision.
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isn't that the exact same thing you said earlier in this same thread just reworded a little bit?
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Let me make it simple for you Vic: you should "lambast[sic]" Carbine for making the choice that they did because it was both the wrong choice, and their choice to make.
 
Your tendency to refer back to what "the community" was asking for months ago seems almost like a verbal (written?) tic, as if motivated by a desperate desire to protect Carbine from the terrible ramification of their decisions. As I said before, we don't even know that the people who voiced these concerns in the first place are still playing! 
 
For all the invocation of what "the community" said in August, you never seem to appreciate that Carbine may be chasing phantoms, players that have left for good and are unlikely to come back. 
 
 
I feel bad for Caydiem, I really do. The problem is that the more we are let in and understand what is going on, the more clear it is that Carbine in a studio in crisis mode: as I mentioned before, what we are seeing is triage.
 
Let's be clear-eyed about things: for the people that would be most interested in content like seasonal events, there is now nothing for the entire rest of the year. Maybe we'll see something next year, but who knows? The only other holiday that I had noticed being primed (and I very well could be wrong here) was something for July 4th. That's an amazing amount of time for this kind of content dearth.
 
I look at Drop 3, and I wonder: if you're the kind of player that is going to be really disappointing by the loss of Halloween, what in Drop 3 is going to be a "plus" for them, and I'm honestly drawing a blank. Earlier there was some talk about the Omnicore, but that seems to be less then hoped.
 
Ultimately, the problem is that we are now in a situation where two months worth of accessible content has been cut. Gone without so much as a candy wrapper or strand of tinsel to mark its passing. In its place we have Drop 3, with (as near as I can tell) no comparable content and an enormous burden of expectations.
 
I mean this with all due humility: is there something that I don't know about in Drop 3 that is going to make everyone say "yeah, definitely worth canceling Christmas and Halloween for X", because I guarantee there are going to be people saying "they cancelled Christmas and Halloween for X? Whaaaa?"
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I'm not sure what you think Carbine is supposed to be doing, but I'll make the fairly obvious counterpoint.
 
Whatever you think of my point, I think it's abundantly clear that answering those concerns is the right course.  It may not work out, but it's obvious to any even casual observer that making you and I happy will not generate enough subscribers.  Those people left who may or may not be playing and may or may not come back are not "phantoms", those are very real people who paid very real money and gave very real feedback.  And if those players don't come back (or NCSoft and Carbine can't generate a lot more real numbers) then this game is as good as dead.
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So I want to clear up a few things and talk about how the sausage is made a little.
 
I'm seeing the "12-16 months' worth of content prepared" thing bandied about, and this is actually the result of a statement being repeated enough where the words change enough to change the meaning. Prepared isn't the correct term and was never actually said to my knowledge. The correct term is "in pre-production," which is closer to planned than prepared. Pre-production means the content exists in design documents, concept art, and maybe a prototype or two. It hasn't even begun becoming real content yet. Having a lot of things planned out like this is great, as you can then shift the schedule according to what you see your game needs as things progress on live. Having a fixed schedule that didn't change in reaction to live game information would have been a mistake, and the schedule did shift accordingly.
 
So now let's talk a bit about holidays and why saying "No Winterfest" mid-Autumn isn't as crazy as it sounds.
 
I was working on Shade's Eve in April.
 
I realize that sounds a bit insane, but that isn't out of the ordinary. I've worked on other games where the same was very much true. Unlike most other things in game design, holidays based around real-world times of the year are immutable. You want to harness the energy they bring, and so it's very advantageous to schedule around them, but that means starting things early so you have a buffer.
 
Now, holidays are great, but they're not as important as making sure the live game is working well. We took the time we needed to fix things players were already experiencing -- all of the departments -- and that meant that the schedule changed to account for it. But Halloween and Christmas weren't interested in our bug fixes and didn't change their schedules for us.
 
When it came to Drop 3, Shade's Eve was more or less done, but it still needed a lot of proper, rigorous testing. With limited-time events, it's even more imperative that your content work and work well, because if there's a show-stopping bug that happens, every hour you spend fixing it is an hour players miss of that content for the year. QA time was vital, therefore -- particularly with some new bits of tech we received. But QA had Drop 3 on their plate, and Drop 3 -- full of many bug fixes and content that would be around all year -- was rightly deemed more important for QA to focus on. Would we have liked to get Shade's Eve in? Of course! But with finite resources, we picked giving Drop 3 the most thorough testing it could get, and it was the right call.
 
Winterfest wasn't in the same state Shade's Eve was when we stopped -- it was a rough li'l bit of content at the time. Fun, but rough. Even if we started the train back up now, finishing some part of it, testing it, and getting it out by Christmas would be a tough prospect with everything else cooking. We'd much rather deliver something that's full-featured, fun, and high quality.
 
I've been doing holiday content in this industry a long time, and I really want to show you folks what we cooked up, because I'm very proud of it. I hope you'll enjoy it next year. :)
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Before I imagined your references to "the community" were a tic, now I see it's more a talisman: an invocation intended to ward off the situation that Carbine has gotten itself into. Let's be honest here, you really think that Drop 3 is going to bring back people that stopped playing this game after something like 60 days? What exactly is in Drop 3 that will cause people (people that you are kinda describing in not the best of terms here) to flock back in droves?
 
 
You still don't get it, do you? You think that Carbine took the tough middle road that satisfies the maximum number of people, but you're wrong. For the purpose of this discussion, let's imagine that Carbine's audience is divided into two (it's obviously many more factions, but let's be simple for the argument); people that can't stand the bugs even with new content, and people that can stand the bugs if they have new content.
 
The people that can't stand the bugs said "what are you doing? Stop putting out content and fix the bugs!" Ah, but here's the thing: what they really meant was "fix the bugs NOW!"
 
But that's not what carbine apparently heard, is it? Because they didn't fix the bugs that were driving people out in August. They didn't even fix the bugs in September, nor October. No, the bugs that were intolerable in August will be fixed in... November.
 
This is the terrible math of it, because carbine thought there were two choices, but in reality there were three;
-Fix the bugs and put a break on content, (this is the option they thought they took)
-Put out new content and accept there will be bugs, (this is the hard choice they thought they were sacrificing)
 
But the reality is they actually took Door #3;
-Cut their Content, and fix the bugs way too late for the people that found them intolerable. The path of maximal unhappiness; the path that gives everyone something to be unhappy about.
 
And that's the good view! There is an even darker possibility:  what if the reason a lot of people left has nothing to do with the bugs, but is instead due to a lack of content? That's the thing, people complain about bugs because they are there and easy to quantify. It's much more difficult to complain (at least cogently) about nothing: a lack, an emptiness. The reality is though that there are a lot of playstyles that aren't really all that well supported in Wildstar: people that like a lot of alts, for example, find that leveling becomes repetitive extremely quickly. People that like solo playing, or just don't have the time or co-ordination for group content. People that (naturally) like the frivolity of holiday content. 
 
None of this is to say that Carbine didn't need to fix these bugs (that is, the bugs that haven't been fixed yet), only to say that the way carbine went about fixing those bugs may have been entirely counterproductive. They've already lost one group of people, now they are poised to lose a different group of people. 
 
This is not the first time you have said this, and it's not the first time I respond thusly: you're saying that Wildstar is actually two games, the game in the game world and the game for the game world, played out by shouting on the forums. If indeed that is the nature of this game then I refuse to play it, because I refuse to patronize developers so facile, so rudderless, so flaccid that they will tack in whatever direction the wind blows most strongly off the forums. 
 
Besides that, I think you may simply be wrong. When I look around at other forums, the main reason I see quoted for why people tried and left isn't the bugs... it's the "Hardcore!". in other words... it's the content.
 
By the by, in that CAD comic linked above, the author says the following;
Here's the thing: in talking about what caused him to quit and what would get him back, Tim mentions "content" three times. He never mentions bugs. Reading over his article, I don't get the feeling that bug fixes would bring him back. I can't say that Holiday content would either, but it does seem a fair bit closer to what he is asking for.
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I'm not sure why you're trying to read more into my post than there is.  I'm stating exactly what I saw, because I was there.  In fact, I've quoted several of the exact posts from exactly when I said they were posted completely calling out the fact that there was an extremely high volume of people who said "stop dropping content, fix the game."  There were plenty of quitting threads that said they'd be back to see the changes.  I can start combing back through if you want to see more of those.  It's not a "talisman", nor is it a defense mechanism, it's the way it was....<snip>
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What's in drop 3 that will bring people back?
 
The rube changes. It may work, it may not. But it has a MUCh better chance that the holding stuff.
 
If they could not deliver the rube changes and the holiday content (which I suspect is true) then they absolutely made the right call.
 
Anyone who thinks the rube changes are less important than the holiday content is out of touch with the general player base.	
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			Sigh- posting from my phone. Rune changes.	
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Aside from raiding 2-3 days a week there is nothing at all in this game that I want to do. The holiday events were promising to me because they had the potential to interest me in logging in. Now that they are cancelled I cant make myself go forward with the game anymore.
 
Drop 3 seems to be bringing about some serious tedium rather than exciting new content with all of the gear/stat/rune changes on the way. While I agree that the itemization in this game needed an overhaul, the idea of having to spend days grinding everything in a game I already don't want to log into on non-raid days is too much.
 
I honestly hope from the bottom of my heart that I can come back a year from now and pick this game up to find it healthy and active and everything I always wanted, but I am done for now. I'll always remember Wildstar as the game that cancelled Christmas. 	
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Why?  Does that seem weird that Carbine is consistently adding new bit of programming to the game?  Making the "plugs" for Shade's Eve and showing what it would look like isn't nearly as complicated as implementation, which is also where all the major testing has to be done.
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Been reading this thread over the past while, and I have a few clarifications.
 
Q. If Shade's Eve is ready to go, why not put it out, bugs or no? We won't mind bugs.
 
Design being more or less done with it isn't quite the same thing as ready to go. QA is a seriously important part of the process of releasing anything. You can say you won't mind bugs now, when you're not experiencing them and they're only hypothetical. As someone who's designed a ton of holiday content in the past, though, that never bears out. Bugs in limited-time content are in many ways worse than the usual, since there's a definite time where the content will disappear for a while. That means players want to get the most time they can with the content, and if any bug stops them from doing that, they are losing a significant percentage of their time with the content to these problems. It's a huge deal. Putting the content out there without having proper testing would make the chances of that kind of thing considerably higher.
 
The other major thing is that Shade's Eve was created with the assumption that the contents of Drop 3 would already be out and is reliant on some things within that patch. Cobbling together something in order to get it on live realms before that patch is a very dicey prospect indeed and would likely have a number of technical difficulties that could end up crippling it.
 
Add that to the notion that we got a new bit of tech specifically for the content that requires a ton of solid testing with a number of different variables (for both Shade's Eve and Winterfest) and releasing it without its proper run through QA is simply not a wise move. QA is currently testing the changes that will be on the servers year-round in Drop 3, and that's what they're doing. If we're going to hit our targets for minimizing bugs, this is absolutely the right call.
 
Q. Why can't you do something smaller for Halloween if you can't do the big stuff?
 
We had a lot of meetings about this, actually, trying to determine what we could do. This is definitely something that we considered.
 
Ultimately, though, it'd be the same, though lesser, situation -- QA really needs to focus on testing Drop 3 and this would take time away. Shade's Eve is a large package, and stripping individual parts out isn't as clean as you might think. Even adding a vendor would require QA time -- is it selling the right things? Is it calling on the right currency? Does it appear and disappear with the Shade's Eve scheduled event? Does everything the vendor's selling work as intended? These are all questions that would have to be answered through testing, and that's time away from testing Drop 3.
 
Q. Maybe Halloween's out, but why Christmas? You've got two months and change!
 
The thing is, we don't.
 
I know it looks that way, but development works on a different schedule. The Winterfest content we've got is in a rough state -- anything we did (and I mean anything; nothing is currently in a complete state design-side for Winterfest) would need additional design time in order to bring it to a point where it would be good to go. Then it needs to run through editing, localization, and audio -- and then get its thorough battery of tests. None of these departments are currently idle. We're all working on stuff -- important stuff! -- that are aimed at making the game better for folks year-round. These things we're working on are higher priority than making Winterfest happen.
 
Q. Well, why not have the holidays later? Do they have to correspond to real-world holidays?
 
We talked about that a lot, too, trying to determine if we could have Shade's Eve in November and just shift it up the next year. Same with Winterfest. A lot of other things would still have to be sacrificed if we did, however, so we leaned away from it.
 
Shade's Eve and Winterfest don't have to correspond to real-world holidays, and as a designer, I leaned away from a lot of the traditional imagery as I could. No big white beards and baubled trees in Winterfest; it's about pure consumerism, all Protostar'd up. Shade's Eve is about the remembrance of a plague that struck Cassians ages go, not so much the warding off of the supernatural. But there's still real value in holding them at those times: you want to capture the meta-spirit of people being saturated by the holiday spirit in the real world. That's why many of our holidays line up with real-world ones, and have similar surface themes. This is not the main reason why we leaned away from offsetting the holidays -- that had everything to do with prioritizing resources -- but it's a reason why we plan to have them when we do, since I've seen that come up in conversation.
 
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I get it, folks. I understand you're disappointed, and I sympathize. I love holiday content and I've worked on this kind of thing for many years. The team and I are really proud of what we designed and we can't wait to share it with you. We're just going to have to wait a little longer. It's not an ideal situation, but releasing the holidays this year isn't practical. Thank you for hanging in there with us.
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Caydiem,
Thank you much for taking the time to post.
I wont lie, I am disappointed. I liked the little bit I saw about Shade's Eve, and truthfully, Halloween is one of my absolute favorite holidays. I was wondering if by chance you guys would release holiday home décor or something along those lines, so that we could decorate for own amusement.
 
That being said, I also understand why things are they way they are. I'll wait. I'll be patient, and see how things shape up for Drop 3.
I have faith.
 
Keep working. Ill be here when you get done.
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There already is a selection of Halloween-esque decor. Some of it is actually very cool too, love my creepy cave
 
but caydiem has straight up said on several occasions there will be no content at all, even adding a vendor with nothing more than a couple costume pieces is too much to ask for
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What's in drop 3 that will bring people back?
 
The rube changes. It may work, it may not. 
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The whole "people are waiting for drop 3" or "drop 3 will bring people back" sometimes looks more like irrational wishful thinking than rational expectation. The itemization in drop 3, in terms of RNG, still looks bad and dishonest against players.
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It's the way you perceived it, that much is certain. Also, I'm not 'reading into it', I'm interpreting the events you describe differently. 
 
As I said, and you apparently ignored, whether or not people were saying "it's the bugs" back then, they don't seem to be saying it now. While it is entirely possible that I've missed a load of people complaining about bugs, what I have managed to find on other forums that talk about Wildstar is... content, content, content. In the rare event I find a post talking about bugs, I find 5, 10 more posts talking about content and negative reactions to "Hardcore!"
 
Just look at the phrasing of the Wildstar Report that was referenced;
 
Solo content? 15-30 minute content? That sound
<a data-ipb="nomediaparse" data-cke-saved-href="http://wildstaronline.wikia.com/wiki/Shade" href="http://wildstaronline.wikia.com/wiki/Shade" s_eve"="">If the Devs are listening, they seem to be experiencing synesthesia: the only thing that seems at all to be what most would consider "solo content" is Omnicore, and we're already heard from PTR users that it's... well, lacking.
 
 
I was going to reply to this to point out the nuances that you've missed, but this article from Massively already did, so enjoy!
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You seem to be missing the point entirely. You don't design something that is reliant on something else that doesn't exist yet
If it was as simple as parts of the event took place in the defile, that's acceptable
 
but to stick with car references.
You don't start designs on time traveling dolorians when no mr. fusions exist yet on the assumption old doc brown will have it ready to go at the same time
 
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The whole "people are waiting for drop 3" or "drop 3 will bring people back" sometimes looks more like irrational wishful thinking than rational expectation. The itemization in drop 3, in terms of RNG, still looks bad and dishonest against players.
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Folks,
 
I don't think there is much factual information I can add to this thread at this point, but I do need to put in a firm "Let's calm things down a bit".
 
Obviously, everybody posting here is very passionate about WildStar. We all are. From those who feel we are making the right call, to those who feel we are making the worst one. Everybody is posting here because they *care* about the game, positive or negative, so *please* try and keep that in mind and don't get too heated about it. We don't want this thread, with it's valid opinions, to come off track and get locked for turning into a personal argument.
 
For those who are unhappy with this change and the lack of the holidays events; all I can say is, we're sorry. I understand the disappointment, I understand the frustration, but this is the call that has been made. Of course all of your feedback has been passed on, and we've made it clear that many people are upset about this, but the people that made that call weighed all the arguments, considered all the options and this is what they felt was best. It's Caydiem's area, but I am sure that she'll be putting out all the stops to make our seasonals extra special next time.
 
Will it bring ex-players back to WildStar? Will it be exciting enough for new players? We won't know for sure until megaservers and the next drop happen.
 
This drop is there to help stabilize things. It's focused on QOL improvements, bug fixes and feature updates. It has some new content, of course, but the focus here was to get stuff fixed and make sure our teams had enough time to thoroughly test those fixes.
 
That doesn't mean every drop after this will require the same focus on bug fixing. Content is, and always will be, important to us and we want to make sure these quarterly drops are jam-packed with stuff to do.
 
So don't give up on us just yet. ;)	
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Folks,
 
I don't think there is much factual information I can add to this thread at this point, but I do need to put in a firm "Let's calm things down a bit".
 
Obviously, everybody posting here is very passionate about WildStar. We all are. From those who feel we are making the right call, to those who feel we are making the worst one. Everybody is posting here because they *care* about the game, positive or negative, so *please* try and keep that in mind and don't get too heated about it. We don't want this thread, with it's valid opinions, to come off track and get locked for turning into a personal argument.
 
For those who are unhappy with this change and the lack of the holidays events; all I can say is, we're sorry. I understand the disappointment, I understand the frustration, but this is the call that has been made. Of course all of your feedback has been passed on, and we've made it clear that many people are upset about this, but the people that made that call weighed all the arguments, considered all the options and this is what they felt was best. It's Caydiem's area, but I am sure that she'll be putting out all the stops to make our seasonals extra special next time.
 
Will it bring ex-players back to WildStar? Will it be exciting enough for new players? We won't know for sure until megaservers and the next drop happen.
 
This drop is there to help stabilize things. It's focused on QOL improvements, bug fixes and feature updates. It has some new content, of course, but the focus here was to get stuff fixed and make sure our teams had enough time to thoroughly test those fixes.
 
That doesn't mean every drop after this will require the same focus on bug fixing. Content is, and always will be, important to us and we want to make sure these quarterly drops are jam-packed with stuff to do.
 
All I ask is that you don't give up on us just yet.
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Lol give up on you? There isnt a SINGLE mmo out there that can match Wildstars difficulty, so I am here to stay. Too many hand holding free candy MMOs in the past 10 years...
 
BUT I have to say.. no holiday event truly bums me out hahaha.. I was really hoping to see Wildstars FIRST holiday event. There were so many hints from random Carbine staff posts lol.. 
 
Is there any chance you guys will at least mail out to all players an item or two just to celebrate the holiday?
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No holiday events bums me out too man, but hopefully we can knock it out of the park with the first one next year instead!
 
I don't believe this is planned, I will see if it is possible but I do not expect so. :(
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			Wow so glad i came back to this game  to see nothing of any significance to content has been done. And to top it all off the reason i came back was to check out holiday events because they were looking great and I was actually starting to get excited about the game again and get back in the swing of things but of course things couldn't be worse. This game has just been one huge let down after the next such a terrible waste.	
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			If you wouldn't mind, folks, let's keep things both civil and on-topic.	
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Wow so glad i came back to this game  to see nothing of any significance to content has been done. And to top it all off the reason i came back was to check out holiday events because they were looking great and I was actually starting to get excited about the game again and get back in the swing of things but of course things couldn't be worse. This game has just been one huge let down after the next such a terrible waste.
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I don't think there is much factual information I can add to this thread at this point, but I do need to put in a firm "Let's calm things down a bit".
 
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This is my first post here, i think.
 
 pay the sub very month, but i don't play every day, actually i am thinking about to cancel my sub. why? lack of content, and the crazy attunements that made lots of people from my guild to leave the game, I am keeping the account just because I have been playing from beta so i have all those nice items there.
 
Now regarding the Forum topic .
 
Holidays events are a big deal. speacily for a game that you pay a sub, you are paying for it, you paying so the devs can provide you content, the problem is that between the current stat of the game and the bugs, I don't think you will see holiday content ever, simply because i don't believe the game will last until next year if it keeps the monthly sub. 
 
The best example of that is the layoff that Carbine had. Did you see that happen on ArenaNet?
 
Do you pay a sub to play their Game(gw2)? 
 
Now you will say - yeah but people complain about lack of content on that game. - Yes they can complain but you always have content and on a regular basis - we have Halloween there, is almost the same content as last year but at least you have it..
 
and just to give an example on how a game without sub can be profitable - this month i spent almost, if not over £200 in that game. and there are people that most likely spends more.
 
​So in summary - Yes Holiday events are a big deal specially for a game that is going down the hill.	
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