115015-holiday-event-removal-not-a-big-deal-page-3

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Who says they are falling flat? What does that even mean?
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			You wasted far too much time writing that just to ignore most of the content of the discussion in the other 10 pages of the thread.It boils down to this:Do you think it's more important to address problems in their core processes and get their house in order than it would be to continue with a bad setup and release another inadequately tested and probably buggy piece of content? Your post seems to be saying yes putting out content under a disorganized QA process is what they should do, and to me that kind of assertion is ludicrous.Not to mention your premise is seriously skewed. You overplay the done-ness of the content and downplay the importance of adequate QA just to reinforce your desired conclusion that they dropped the ball on this. A preliminary press showing under extremely limited conditions is NOTHING like having content ready to go Live, and trying to say it is is silly.If any Holiday content had been even remotely ready to be shown off, it would have been seen during Closed Beta when they had hundreds of us under NDA and itching for things to test. 	
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You wasted far too much time writing that just to ignore most of the content of the discussion in the other 10 pages of the thread.
 
It boils down to this:
 
Do you think it's more important to address problems in their core processes and get their house in order than it would be to continue with a bad setup and release another inadequately tested and probably buggy piece of content? Your post seems to be saying yes putting out content under a disorganized QA process is what they should do, and to me that kind of assertion is ludicrous.
 
Not to mention your premise is seriously skewed. You overplay the done-ness of the content and downplay the importance of adequate QA just to reinforce your desired conclusion that they dropped the ball on this. A preliminary press showing under extremely limited conditions is NOTHING like having content ready to go Live, and trying to say it is is silly.
 
If any Holiday content had been even remotely ready to be shown off, it would have been seen during Closed Beta when they had hundreds of us under NDA and itching for things to test. 
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A fair amount of the fixes to drop 3 is not really new content.. but addressing some of the issues this game has had since beta that has been ignored.
Poor itemization, the horrible rune system, PvP queing mistakes where fresh people are up against half a team of 1800 geared people.
Hopefully this drop will tase the game back into what i hoped it could be... but what they've done is remove content (the holiday stuff) to focus on fixing issues that shouldn't have been present at launch.
 
Think the bug fixes are more important mind.. but got to see it as what it is... delaying content plans for game fixes	
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(snip)...... Carbine killed the joy of holidays
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I understand the focus on Drop 3 has been huge. I understand Shade’s Eve being dropped as things got too close. I do not understand why it was felt that is was acceptable to skip Christmas. Drop 3 will have come and gone, the festive period will hit after people have finished the limited content it offers (again yes massive system overhauls and bug fixes galore, but not much actual content). If there is nothing to do people will still leave how many bugs your drop fixes. Holiday festivals add so much to retention, even if they are small scale.
 
I can perfectly understand the ambition to deliver something fun and high quality, these are goals that should not be compromised. However, there needs to be a middle ground when it comes to the goal of everything being full-featured.  Of course people would of course be happier with a full-featured event compared to small scale additions, but they sure are going to be more disappointed getting nothing.
 
Can you give us an idea on when we will see Holiday content? By that I mean are they any Holidays early next year, are we looking at Late March for a Spring Fling or will it be even later than that?
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I understand the focus on Drop 3 has been huge. I understand Shade’s Eve being dropped as things got too close. I do not understand why it was felt that is was acceptable to skip Christmas. Drop 3 will have come and gone, the festive period will hit after people have finished the limited content it offers (again yes massive system overhauls and bug fixes galore, but not much actual content). If there is nothing to do people will still leave how many bugs your drop fixes. Holiday festivals add so much to retention, even if they are small scale.
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They know there's a certain expansion pack hitting come November 11, that's why this November 3 Drop 3 is being so attentively looked at, it's their last salvo to keep players before a chunk of them venture somewhere else.
 
They will have 1 week to show off Drop 3 and hope that it lands bug free *fingers crossed* and provides everything they want.
 
It's a gamble and i am excitedly looking forward to how its going to play out.	
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You wasted far too much time writing that just to ignore most of the content of the discussion in the other 10 pages of the thread.
 
It boils down to this:
 
Do you think it's more important to address problems in their core processes and get their house in order than it would be to continue with a bad setup and release another inadequately tested and probably buggy piece of content? Your post seems to be saying yes putting out content under a disorganized QA process is what they should do, and to me that kind of assertion is ludicrous.
 
Not to mention your premise is seriously skewed. You overplay the done-ness of the content and downplay the importance of adequate QA just to reinforce your desired conclusion that they dropped the ball on this. A preliminary press showing under extremely limited conditions is NOTHING like having content ready to go Live, and trying to say it is is silly.
 
If any Holiday content had been even remotely ready to be shown off, it would have been seen during Closed Beta when they had hundreds of us under NDA and itching for things to test.
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I fear that that you don't seem to understand the points you yourself are making: your point about the importance of QA and how Carbine is in disarray is simply restating my point about competency. Your notion that I would have them push buggy content relies on facts not in evidence.
 
Moreover, it seems clear you don't understand the importance of the claim you are making that no Holiday content was "even remotely ready to be shown off". Do you understand that you are indicting Carbine? After all, if the Holiday content is really nowhere near prime time, why? It's not like Halloween snuck up on them; as I pointed out this event is two years in the making. It's not making things up, but Caydiem making the claim that "Shade’s Eve was more or less done, but it still needed a lot of proper, rigorous testing." 
 
If you want to interpret what Caydiem stated as equivalent to "still needing months of work" then you still end up in the same situation: why?
 
No matter how you want to phrase this series of events, it all ends up in the same place: Halloween is October 31st this year, it's not like the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur that just ended (which moves around on the Western calender). Halloween is a stationary target and Carbine could not hit the target. They started on some level two years ago and they still couldn't get their content in on time. 
 
All of these arguments that phrase the issue as a matter of polar opposite choices (you either want buggy crap or a complete halt to new content) are dodging the real question: what is going on that the one event that had a specific date (Halloween) had to be cut?
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"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." 
I totally agree with this statement. When I first started Wildstar I declared that I would NEVER play World of Warcraft again. But in light of the live game, I've gone and resubbed. Thanks Wildstar for allowing me to rediscover what makes WoW great.	
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Wrong wrong and wrong again.
 
Messing up, admitting it, then making a conscious choice to change your processes and use your remaining time to focus on the highest priority issues points to competence, not incompetence.
 
They realized they were doing the one thing they never wanted to do, put out badly done content. So they stopped and have made changes to try and avoid that. It took time. If they'd gone one and put out the holiday events badly done, it would have hurt them more than skipping them will. Not being able to see that is on you. There are more important things to fix and work on than holiday events. They've admitted their errors, told us what they're doing to fix them, and are moving on. Problem is, your personal hobby horse means you can't let them do that. It also means you're trying to twist events and motivations to suit your conclusions, but it doesn't work for those of us paying attention.
 
You fundamentally don't understand the software process. Just because problems in steps 7-10 mean they don't have time to continue the work people did in steps 1-6, doesn't mean Carbine is bad or the people who did steps 1-6 are bad at their jobs. It doesn't even mean the people responsible for steps 7-10 are bad at their jobs. It only means a new company came up with a system for their new product, and found out it didn't work. Your contention seems to be that upon discovering that, they should have let the calendar rule their decision making, instead of their desire to put out a good product. My contention is that them getting back to their roots and not putting out things until they're as ready as they can make them is a good thing, no matter what the date on the calendar is.
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-snip-
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I'm not entirely sure that article means what you think it does....
 
It was pretty clear that the author was talking not about any actual failure of W*, but of the virulent and toxic people who WANT it to fail....
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My point was not that so much Wildstar is dead (or dying), but that the optics of their decision were terrible. To quote the paragraph immediately above the one you quoted;
 
 
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Just about all of the Dev loss was for better oppurtunities / personal reasons.... 
 
Losing devs isn't a 'bad' thing per-see; it's bad when devs are CUT because of financial failure; but Gaff got cancer, Frost got a much better offer elsewhere, and that was the case with most major departures. 
 
Carbine honestly should have started with Megaservers, but C'est la vie, et la vie est drole! Carbine's making things work, and while I'm not going to suggest they can do no wrong, most of the major issues with W* are a result of a tumultuous MMO market and a characteristically turbulent playerbase. Reality is that you simply can't anticipate everything, and honestly, we as MMO players are .... a bunch of dilettantes.
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Hehe, as they say: if you build a sty, don't be surprised when the pigs play in the mud.
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Not gonna lie...having played AO, AoC, and TSW, Carbine is starting to sound more and more like Funcom.
 
This ...is not a good thing.  Not even vaguely.	
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But what we are given are vast and unimaginably complex virtual worlds to enjoy AND share in the case of MMO's...
 
I mean, a social, shared narrative experience where we can not only read words on a page; but interact with a whole new virtual universe?
 
Hardly a 'sty' eh?
 
 
 
 
I mean, sure if you wan't to consider MMO's as stys, go for it... but I think if one steps back and thinks about what video games and MMO's really are... they are astounding creations, even the least of which would far exceed a 'sty' IMO. 
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I know we all have respect for what Carbine and its developers are trying to accomplish and a lot of us love this game and want it to succeed (not to mention retain continuity).  But I think a lot of us need to stop making excuses for their early shortcomings.  Yes it is more important to fix critical game systems that are not working, bugs that are preventing progression and the ability to experience content than to release a holiday event.  But to some people (especially with the large gap we now have between Sabotage and Defile) it was more important to get Shade's Eve with some buggy content than it was to fix other things.
 
And for people saying Shade's Eve wasn't ready and it needed more testing, everyone knows that to be the case.  But we all know Shade's Eve was scheduled to be released, until the community made Carbine realize content that doesn't break things is more important.  So we can't get mad at players who are upset they will not get to experience two events that were more or less scheduled for release this year (hell, I wasn't happy when they announced the cancellations).  And megaservers shouldn't really count as a reason against the release because that was planned all along apparently.
 
Also, what does everyone think is going to happen when Drop 3 hits.  I guarantee 50 pages of Donatelli's bug fixes are going to be things none of us really care about or do not affect end game content/progression.  Aside from the big changes (runes, itemization, optimization, megaservers, and the new daily zone) are a lot of players going to think that fixing 50 low level quests, random mobs, and maybe another visual associated with riding a taxi (obviously I am exaggerating) was worth the cancellation of Shade's Eve?  I think not.
 
I for one love the game and will be here until the end, and I would rather the core of the game get fixed than to see holidays.  But I think we all can agree that everyone would have loved to see Shade's Eve this year.	
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I personally hate when video games that are of obviously not earthly origins, have Earthly events of modern cultures.
 
It's hugely immersion breaking and takes me personally so far out of the game that I avoid playing during said events in ANY mmorpg.
I came to see nexus, not see earthly stupidity all over my damn screen.
I get sick of christmas all around me, I definately don't want to see that crap in my relaxation spaces as well.	
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If you're really certain that things are on the right track, just engage in this thought experiment: if cutting content no longer constitutes failure, what does? Because let's be real here, there are going to be bugs, it's just a question of how many in a system this complicated. How bug free do the new drops have to be to justify cutting out Christmas? Halloween? monthly content drops?
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Failure would be a refusal to acknowledge problems and continue as they had. Failure would be to release more crap that didn't work just to satisfy a date on a calendar or picky people like you. In order not to be a failure, new drops have to step forward and add something, and at the same time not feel like two (or more) steps backward in terms of basic functionality that players have in the current build. During drops 1 and 2, basic things that were working fine for people stopped working, even in areas totally unrelated to new content. That's what was unacceptable before, and that's why there needed to be serious changes.
 
Holiday events are dross in comparison to that. Most of my MMO life has been in games that didn't even have them. They're not critical to a game's health, and missing them isn't a sign of doom and gloom if the things they're working on instead are more important. There was a time when players made their own events, not relying on devs to spoon feed them content and ideas. If I really feel the need to celebrate Christmas in Wildstar, I'll decorate my house and have the best party I can, and it will be great.
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I personally hate when video games that are of obviously not earthly origins, have Earthly events of modern cultures.
 
It's hugely immersion breaking and takes me personally so far out of the game that I avoid playing during said events in ANY mmorpg.
I came to see nexus, not see earthly stupidity all over my damn screen.
I get sick of christmas all around me, I definately don't want to see that crap in my relaxation spaces as well.
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I personally hate when video games that are of obviously not earthly origins, have Earthly events of modern cultures.
 
It's hugely immersion breaking and takes me personally so far out of the game that I avoid playing during said events in ANY mmorpg.
I came to see nexus, not see earthly stupidity all over my damn screen.
I get sick of christmas all around me, I definately don't want to see that crap in my relaxation spaces as well.
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I wouldn't mind it if they celebrated just a few human holidays but then also threw in some other Alien holidays ontop of that.
That itself could be an excuse to throw in something to get people to log in during slow periods.
 
Though in regards to Xmas, I do like what I'm hearing about Protostar being alllll over the consumerism of it... And I'd laugh if they made a poke at the holiday pretty much stealing aspects from other historical holidays... Sounds very Dominionesque.
 
But frig, they could throw in a Maurauder's holiday, something to do with looting and pillaging, and I'd make that my new real favourite holiday.
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Chua warriors....make this all go away...
jus sayin'....jus sayin'	
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The thing about content like seasonal events is that they provide content that makes people that otherwise wouldn't be interested in logging-in log-in. That is, they would provide something for the person that wants to, for example, play maybe 30 minutes to an hour in an evening, or who wants to play many alts, or just likes cosmetic and time limited content.
 
The problem is that once you get beyond the bugs and things that just don't work right, there are still a lot of structural problems for... rather then say casual, let's say easygoing, player: for people that like having a lot of alts, there is a single leveling pipeline after level 12-15. In games like WoW, many people will play for long periods of time and never hit the endgame level: in Wildstar, so much stuff is gated to the endgame that this is a much, much less attractive prospect.
 
I totally get that Carbine needs to fix the stuff that it currently has that doesn't work. The problem is that if all they do is fix things, they don't remedy the problem of only appealing to a fairly small segment of the population that they could.
 
One thing I have noticed again and again on other forums and article comments is that people who have quit aren't slagging the game for being "bad". The vast majority of the people I see talk about how they really liked the game, the combat and the look, they just ran out of fun things to do.
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First of all, I agree that game needs to be polished and stable. This isn't the case at the moment, but I'm sure they're trying the best they can.
Now, about events.
I completely support the idea of their existence in MMO's, they provide new stuff to do, they provide new stuff to get and enforce more player interaction. Also, they allow to get some of the holiday feel even during gaming.
The fact that they had to pull off those events is... sad. Something was terribly wrong with the Carbine business plan if this had to happen. And, considering that the game went out... raw at best, that was a thing to be expected.
I really hope this sacrifice will be enough to get the game going, because Drop 3 (with all the sacrifices that had to be made in its name) is their last chance to make things right.	
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Except that it didn't. This is the thing that I don't understand about the current memes running rampant throughout these forums.
 
Go take a look at the reviews of this game on metacritic. Both critics and players alike were strongly supportive of the game. We all thought it was a lot of fun. Where people mentioned "bugs" at ALL--and most didn't--they were pretty forgiving about them because we all understand perfectly well that every MMO launch has them.
 
It must be said that some of the bugs currently in the game were introduced by drops 1 and 2, but the reality is that none of the bugs that currently exist in the game are game-breakers and we all understand perfectly well that every major addition to MMO content will have some bugs that need to be stamped out. "Patch day" is usually an ironic statement among the crowd I play MMOs with, because it's a given that there will be lots of excitement just before the patch followed by howls of outrage as something breaks and needs hotfixing.
 
But either way, all of the core systems of the game are working and you can log in right now and PvP, PvE, raid, dungeon, adventure, build housing, work the market, tweak costumes, or just stand around and chat to your heart's content.
 
There are still a number of design flaws in the game that are sources of trouble, like the overuse of RNGs in itemization, the absurdly limiting attunement requirements, the overly exploitable rating system in PvP, and the lack of variety in endgame content for the majority of the MMORPG playerbase, which doesn't raid and doesn't PvP. Those aren't bugs, they were intentional design decisions that were simply wrong.
 
But given that "lack of things for most MMORPG players to do at endgame" is on that list, the idea that the devs would cancel new content in favor of 100+ pages of bug fixes--the overwhelming bulk of which can't possibly be things that we'll even notice--blows my mind.
 
Devs, I know you're listening. But I can't help but wonder who you're listening TO.	
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Except that it didn't. This is the thing that I don't understand about the current memes running rampant throughout these forums.
 
Go take a look at the reviews of this game on metacritic. Both critics and players alike were strongly supportive of the game. We all thought it was a lot of fun. Where people mentioned "bugs" at ALL--and most didn't--they were pretty forgiving about them because we all understand perfectly well that every MMO launch has them.
 
It must be said that some of the bugs currently in the game were introduced by drops 1 and 2, but the reality is that none of the bugs that currently exist in the game are game-breakers and we all understand perfectly well that every major addition to MMO content will have some bugs that need to be stamped out. "Patch day" is usually an ironic statement among the crowd I play MMOs with, because it's a given that there will be lots of excitement just before the patch followed by howls of outrage as something breaks and needs hotfixing.
 
But either way, all of the core systems of the game are working and you can log in right now and PvP, PvE, raid, dungeon, adventure, build housing, work the market, tweak costumes, or just stand around and chat to your heart's content.
 
There are still a number of design flaws in the game that are sources of trouble, like the overuse of RNGs in itemization, the absurdly limiting attunement requirements, the overly exploitable rating system in PvP, and the lack of variety in endgame content for the majority of the MMORPG playerbase, which doesn't raid and doesn't PvP. Those aren't bugs, they were intentional design decisions that were simply wrong.
 
But given that "lack of things for most MMORPG players to do at endgame" is on that list, the idea that the devs would cancel new content in favor of 100+ pages of bug fixes--the overwhelming bulk of which can't possibly be things that we'll even notice--blows my mind.
 
Devs, I know you're listening. But I can't help but wonder who you're listening TO.
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Just a thought...
 
but what if Shade's eve was actually our "christmas" in Wildstar? Like how in Futurama Christmas is a time of terror and fright because santa clause is going to try and kill you.
 
Shade's Eve make me think "eve of what?" anyway... so theres that. I dunno I feel like having it put off for an entire year is a bit much for something that is close enough to just need testing.	
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I quoted a bunch of posts already, but the community in August was not making the case that content was important.  They were telling Carbine, point blank, that they didn't "want another leveling zone", they wanted all those things, both broken and not broken, to be fixed.  Don't release any more content until you fix the damn game, etc.
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Put another way: if the idea is that the forums in August were filled with complaints about bugs, how many of the people making those complaints are still going to be here in November? It doesn't seem entirely unlikely that people (that found bugs to be so gamebreaking they would be willing to sacrifice all new content) making those complaints months ago are... probably not here anymore. If the plan is that they will be coming back after Drop 3... oi.
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QFT. I'm trying to imagine what the response on the forums would have been back in early August if the response to "No new content until you fix the damn game" had been "OK, we're fixing bugs but it'll take us so long to do it that we're cancelling seasonal content for the rest of the calendar year and we'll have a more precise date for when the next drop will be...oh... probably around October. Maybe. Don't quote us on that."
 
I can only imagine that it would have been pretty epic.
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I quoted a bunch of posts already, but the community in August was not making the case that content was important.  They were telling Carbine, point blank, that they didn't "want another leveling zone", they wanted all those things, both broken and not broken, to be fixed.  Don't release any more content until you fix the damn game, etc.
 
I mean, on a level, I agree with you.  It wasn't like the game was horribly broken.  For all the talk of bugs that were making the game nigh unplayable, I don't think a bug ever stopped me from playing.  I think I noted five that even altered my play to any degree that required some kind of workaround.  I didn't think hitting the brakes on all content until everything was fixed was necessary.
 
However, on the forums at the time, that was a minority opinion.  And, all told, I'm not really that bothered since it's not like we're getting less content out of the developers (they're all still working the same hours, just releasing quarterly).  I'm not going to say a massive sweep of bug fixes are a bad thing either, since so many people brought them up and harped on them.  I don't have any reason to think people ran into no bugs and quit while citing them as a reason, so I believe they exist.
 
I think I'll be satisfied as long as we never have a bug-fix cycle this big again.  This is supposed to be the big one that fixes the issues people were bringing up the most, so that's fine.  I just hope we get back onto a content cycle after this.  Donatelli said this one was going to be the most painful and should never be so dense with fixes ever again.  If he's right, I've got no issues.  I was perfectly willing to play WoW for a year without content.  And Megaservers + Drop 3-4 is a healthy chunk of work.  If all goes well, it'll be worth it.
 
I really don't want to have another content cycle again so heavily devoted to fixes, though.  The whole point was that this one would be painful, but we'd be happier on the other side and we'd never have to do this again.
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			I will not denie it isn't the end of the world but look at from my point of view, I am having my favorite and I mean FAVORITE time of the year in any MMO taken away from me.  I'm probably gonna end up crying in the corner of my haunted mansion all month now just to keep that spirit alive.	
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The problem, as I went through before, is that this argument is more an indictment of Carbine's ability to make good decisions then anything else. 
 
Put another way: if the idea is that the forums in August were filled with complaints about bugs, how many of the people making those complaints are still going to be here in November? It doesn't seem entirely unlikely that people (that found bugs to be so gamebreaking they would be willing to sacrifice all new content) making those complaints months ago are... probably not here anymore. If the plan is that they will be coming back after Drop 3... oi.
 
The people that remain are likely not the people complaining most vociferously months ago. Among the people remaining, however, are possibly some people that value things like seasonal content more then fixing bugs. Those people are not going to receive a bug fix update that they don't particularly care about, and lose out on content that they do care about.
 
Carbine's strategy seems almost like one you would enact to maximize player frustration.
 
Here the problem is... that's just not true. Not to be cutesy but the whole point of this thread is... Carbine Cut Content.
 
Not just tinsle and bat decorations either: remember, Caydiem explicitly pointed out that Shade's Eve was innovative content that took months to develop and test. So yeah, we kinda got the short end of that stick.
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I think you're missing the whole point behind the post I made.  Yes, there are a lot of people saying that bug fixes aren't as important as content and that halting content isn't acceptable.
 
Now....
 
But Carbine had a choice to make in August.  The most vocal people, all the feedback they were getting, said to put the brakes on content and fix the game.  I mean, it wasn't even close.  It wasn't a decision to be made between two equally vociferous and opposing viewpoints, it was "do we do what they're saying, or do we just go about our business."  And, obviously, they proved their slogan.  The devs ARE listening, but they can't hear you if you're not talking.  I'm not sure that's an indictment of Carbine that they did what their community was screaming, loudly, to do.  I'm not sure why I'm supposed to blame them, I was DEFINITELY here, and even I thought the "okay, bugs aren't that bad, people" view was a very small minority opinion.  I think it was Lethality, Olivar, and me.  And obviously, it was us fanboys that just didn't get it.  I'm not joking, the volume was incredible, and I was 100% convinced it was just a handful of us that bugs weren't making the game all but unplayable for.
 
So I'm absolutely not going to blame Carbine for listening to the people that were talking.  I don't know how many times I've said it, but the axiom is true:  Carbine is listening, but are you talking?  It wasn't just a handful of people that said bugs were an issue, it was forum thread after forum thread saying that bugs were gamebreaking, optimization was a joke, the gear system was a money-making scam.  Whether or not it was true, or whether that was a majority opinion or not, there were not an awful lot of people on the forums, Reddit, really anywhere saying that content was more important than the fixes.  And once the move was in motion in late August to do as the community asked, it's not like they could just hit the brakes again whenever the mood of the community shifted.  These things take time, and they're committed to the new content fixes for this patch.  There's no way to back out now that people want Defile out now and everyone else is lapsed to wait for the new drop.
 
I'm not sure how it's Carbine's fault that they said they were listening and they actually were.  We can say all we want that those people weren't representative of the playerbase as a whole, but if you're not part of the conversation, how exactly is Carbine supposed to know that?  They need feedback to know what we want.  If you weren't giving your feedback then, when they made the decision, it's hard to blame Carbine for not having psychics on staff.  They only have game metrics and these feedback channels to know what we're thinking.  Their subs were falling, everyone was saying things needed fixed before we got a new leveling zone.  There weren't many people around telling people to chill and give Carbine a year to fix the small stuff.
 
I'm not sure how it's fair to lambast Carbine's decision-making when they made the decision with the evidence at their disposal.
 
 
 
Well, June was the game release, July was Strain, August was Sabotage, September would have been Defile, but they said they would push it back.  I'm not sure how far back people thought fixing almost every single thing the players were talking about would take, but if people didn't think three months would be in the cards, they don't know much about project coordination.
 
I'm sure if Carbine would have said, "Yeah, it'll take until late October," maybe a few more people who were into content would have been around to join the discussion.  But they weren't.  Carbine didn't know how long it would take; they said so.  They said they'd have it out when it was done.  But don't kid yourself, there were people who were literally saying the game should be taken down for six months and brought back up FFXIV style, in long and articulate posts.
 
At least it would have maybe meant I could have had a little more backup.  I did warn people at the time that it wasn't going to be a matter of a few extra weeks.
 
 
 
Well, the only thing I'll say about vanilla WoW is that, bug for bug, it was a LOT worse than Wildstar was.  I mean, they were paying for our months to play to keep us around.  Wildstar's both added servers and prepped a megaserver merge, at this point Blizzard was still trying to stabilize their servers long enough that we could loot the things we killed.  If we were ready to eat a few bugs, I'm sure we'd have Shade's Eve.  People weren't here saying so.
 
That's part of the problem.  It's not like ZOGM BUGS was new.  August was the first time people en masse started telling Carbine to knock off the content releases for them, but it's not like this all came out of the blue.  There are rotating issues (In order, they were servers are full > bugs > bots > attunement > servers are empty > RNG > content is late) that become a sort of zeitgeist.  But Carbine can't ignore these people, they're the players (a lot of the players, so if Carbine actually doesn't get any of them back as some people have said, content won't matter).
 
Their hope is to hang onto enough of us who are really into the content drop (which, if you're paid into October, you're likely to be here for it) and hope people really meant what they said when they posted that they'd be coming back once the issues were fixed and having a big recruitment drive to pump up the numbers.  Let's face it, if not, Carbine could have kept up their release schedule and still failed.  There are almost certainly not enough of us to support the game as is.
 
At this point, the only thing we can do is talk about the future, which most of us aren't prone to do (or I suppose my posts wouldn't have been so lonely out there).  Once the bug fixes are done, what would be required out of a quarterly drop not focused on bugs to be worth it?  Should they try bi-monthly cycles?  It's no use looking back and wondering what Carbine picked this way for.  It's fairly obvious why they went this direction, and we're looking at both megaservers and Defile in less than a month according to their loose estimates, so they can't throw it in reverse now.  If you really don't like the quarterly development cycle and have a better idea, your next chance is to say what you'd like done with the drop now tentatively scheduled for January.  It's no use saying, "You shouldn't have listened to all the feedback you had then, you should have known what we that are giving you feedback now should have wanted."
 
I don't care as long as I get content for my money, whether it's three months or one months worth isn't a big issue for me.  I'd like to see it as fast as they can deliver it.  But if you're not like me and you want it a lot faster, it's no use  for someone to gnash their teeth because they weren't here to add the volume to their particular opinions at the time.  Carbine can only get the feedback they're given.  I can't see it being rational to expect that they should have known that they shouldn't take what the community was saying at face value.
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{| class="blockquote"
You just went right back to it like a security blanket of "WoW had bugs" immediately just as i said people do.
It's as though you didn't even read the post and just saw the "WoW" and went into automated response mode
In fact you must not have read the post because I was using the "WoW had bugs" comments as a reason to compare other things WoW had
 
vanilla WoW was the first of it's kind and it was 10 years ago and it gave away free time while the going was rocky.
Wildstar has done none of those things therefor has earned none of the slack WoW was given
 
it's like comparing a modern car to a model-T, what was amazing in the past is substandard now
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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.
 
---
 
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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{| class="blockquote"
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.
 
---
 
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.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
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.
 
---
 
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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{| class="blockquote"
isn't that the exact same thing you said earlier in this same thread just reworded a little bit?
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{| class="blockquote"
Again, Caydiem, thanks for dropping in.  Sorry your content got stiffed in favor of the new drop.
 
That's a new bit of information that makes a lot of sense, though.  If something relies on a bit of code put in drop 3, and drop 3 still needs testing, you can't test Shade's Eve at the same time.
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			Or perhaps they didn't cancel these events and plan to surprise us because surprising us hits everyone off guard!	
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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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{| class="blockquote"
I think you're missing the whole point behind the post I made.  Yes, there are a lot of people saying that bug fixes aren't as important as content and that halting content isn't acceptable.
 
Now....
 
But Carbine had a choice to make... I'm not sure how it's fair to lambast Carbine's decision-making when they made the decision with the evidence at their disposal.
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			From Caydiem's post though you can tell at least he fully understands why events are cool and important for MMOs.	
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{| class="blockquote"
From Caydiem's post though you can tell at least he fully understands why events are cool and important for MMOs.
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