Even though i agree with you, i'd like to think it doesn't work that way given the fact that blizzard is under a corporate tag and handles millions of dollars a month, one would like to think they have a much more coordinated production structure.

But then again, as you said, you see all these asymmetries from them when it comes to information, patching, feedback, etc.. i wouldn't be surprised if it does operate like that.

If I held the purse strings in my company, I would offer to do it for free because of all the publicity we could get. Having said that, product-based IT development is a whole different kettle of fish than the kind of lifecycle-based IT development the traditional management consulting companies excel at. Would be hella fun though.

Indeed Gurg, it has been a pretty important transition for Blizzard , and Ã*t's safe to say they haven't fully attained a complete coordination when it comes to all the branches that they have separated in the management and maintenance of the game.

As for the original questions:

1) content for particular groups is slow, overall, its acceptable, not fantastic, but acceptable, but if looked upon by a particular group (raiders, pvp, casuals) , its slow

2) i believe gurgthock just answered that a post or 2 back ;)

3) yes it is, when you ask yourself, assuming you raid 5 nights a week (average raider, not casual raider nor super hardcore raider), look at all your options and you'll have your answer, casuals and pvpers have it 10x worse.

4) this has to do with competition, right now, they excel at boxsales, and they keep a good subscription base, they dont overprioritize content development because they simply don't need to because for people that have to be playing an MMO there simply isn't a better option these days.

the real question is.. when will this change? when will blizzard try and please an already dedicated and loyal (to some extent) playerbase which they have been building since release?

My personal opinion is it is 10x harder to please everyone than it is to stick with 1 player group, and sadly for casuals and pvpers, raiders are simply the more dedicated. This won't be an issue until WoW has some serious competition which makes them even worry about this, which makes the release of some upcoming games something to look forward to when it comes to the future of WoW, it's funny.. to see some drastic changes in WoW, one has to expect some future promising MMOs to be released.

Our guild alliance downed Ragnaros for the first time last week, and did it again yesterday (only this time without giving every single person in the raid a flask). I'm lagging behind the hardcore elite raiders, but frankly I'm really enjoying it -- by the time we get to C'Thun there'll be an expansion pack out already.

We already have more stuff than we could do in a week. I still have stuff to get from ZG rep, we've only done the first couple of bosses in AQ20, we're gonna wait for a couple more Rags kills before starting BWL, and we have a bunch of PVP nuts with whom it's fun to jump into a battleground.

As someone who plays around 30 hours a week but has only relatively recently started serious raiding (and 2 nights a week isn't that serious really, is it?) I'd say there's plenty of content in the game.

If I hadn't found a decent group of 40 people to go raid with, though, I'd be pretty annoyed about the lack of content for solo and 5-man groups. I don't consider a rep grind to be anything but a lazy way to add content to a game, frankly. Those new Tier 0.5 armor quests actually ought to look somewhat interesting to an newish MC raider like me, but they're harder, more time consuming, more expensive, and less fun than hanging out in MC with my friends.

I'm waffling, but overall I'd say WoW has lots of content for everyone but the cutting edge guilds, who will naturally finish that content quicker than anyone else. Not sure there's a whole lot Blizz could do about it, other than moving to EQ-style evil grinding and spawn camping (never played EQ but from what I hear it's got evil addiction crap built into every second of it).

Balancing PvE and PvP is probably possible, but insanely hard and perhaps not worth it. It might not be the most elegant solution, but I wonder why you couldn't come out with special item modifiers that only affect PvP. Have BG and PvP Honor Rank weapons have a % increase to damage done to other players, and PvP armor have % reduction to damage received from other players. Now you could have some sort of parity between raiders and PvPers on the battlefield, while still allowing for robust PvE progression, and not letting a High Warlord or Grand Marshall jump right into the high-end raiding game without any other PvE buildup.

The problem is that there really is no way to please the people who want to do high-end PvE so that they can dominate in PvP, without angering those who have no interest or ability to raid.

Agreed. Some of the stuff they break is bizarre, and really makes me wonder whether they have adequate QA (sounds like they don't) and automated testing (you mean I can *test* this combat code by seeding the RNG the same each time and checking for expected outcomes?!?).

Given the number of servers they've got you'd think their code/build/test/deploy cycle would be highly automated and bullet proof, but in reality it's probably something that kinda worked day 1 and has been hacked and patched ever since.

Look at the datacentre thing - I heard they originally signed some deal with a hosting/networking provider and couldn't get out of it, and only now are they migrating to a new datacentre. I often jokingly blame my crappy ping times on the fact that I'm in Canada, but the traceroute shows clearly that their AT&T network is borked bigtime.

From a recently new player's perspective, the game does have variety, and if the current content the game has now would've been available at release i'd say WoW's content options are amazing, but it isn't, game has been out for a year and some months and it has the same amount of content i'd say EQ2 had at release, and EQ2 has since release a lot more, which is imo their way of trying to complete with blizzard.

As for the PvE > PvP balance issues, there are ways to do it , blizzard just didn't seem to focus so much on it. As gurgthock said, you can adjust combat mechanics to work differently in PvP, one example of this is EQ2, their newly introduced pvp system has every single PvE ability (even stuff like taunt and -threat abilities) work in PvP in a different way.

In EQ2 for example, when you taunt someone in pvp, you force them to target you for a brief second, rogue's -threat abilities make you lose target for a brief second also, and DPS abilities which are focused for PvE and would do insane amount of dmg in PvP are scaled down to create balance. And i wouldn't be surprised if in the long future Blizzard would copy some of these concepts from EQ2. Of course then there's actual , the honor system problem, PvP gear vs PvE problem , BGs, and overall i'd say PvP in WoW as a whole needs a lot of rework.

Totally off topic and maybe not deserving of its own thread...

Gurgthock, how many hours to you bill while posting on these boards? About now I'm wishing I bothered with the LSAT.

Not enough. :( I probably spend 20-25% of any given hour at my desk on some forum or another (not billed, obviously). Pretty much everything can be done from home these days, so I fit in extra hours on weekends. And I don't sleep.

Truly the key to raiding success. :laugh:

No love for the Alexandria crowd? :-(

Old Town actually is semi-nice this time of year.