It doesn’t matter. It would have sold anyway, and that’s what I think Blizzard and Vivendi are not grasping, if they released it early and/or unfinished. I’m saying they had all the time in the world to polish it.

People may not wait for Smallish, Generic Fantasy MMO to deliver an expansion and may go elsewhere. People will wait a lot more for BC, though.

As to the comments prebiously regarding ‘no on ready to kill Cthun’ thats just bullshit. My guild was ready, as were 4 others on my server. There were hundreds of guilds worldwide stuck on C’thun during the unbeatable phase.

If Blizzard had bucked the trend and tuned C’thun to current status, people would have been farming it less than a months after the gates opened, and that leads to very unhappy hard guilds.

Trust me when I tell you that we prefer an unbeatable encounter that we strive to perfect, then walking in and one-shotting a God without having to think about it or theory-craft. If you think I’m lying, you are just wrong. This isn’t about “Epix fer Everyone” when we raid. We do it to do the impossible, and if it is intrinsically possible at the start then we get bored and call foul for shoddy design that made a noob raid instance.

When they promise ‘cutting edge’ content, we expect nothing short of impossible. When Death and Taxes beat Four Horsemen, pre-nerf, that was beyond epic… Do you think they are more pleased with their kill, or would they have ratehred kill a nerfed version a month earlier?

Go ask them.

Blizzard should change nothing about their expansion behaviors and release timer, unless they can release an equally polished expansion sooner than the last. The risk is of course promising one every X years like EQ did, and delivering a steaming pile of crap just to meet a deadline.

Julian just stop. You may feel that an expansion wasn’t warranted, but with 2.4 million boxes sold on day one we are approaching a nearly 1 for 1 conversion rate to The Burning Crusade in North America and Europe. That more than deflates your idea that WoW doesn’t need to “expand”.

I don’t know what Blizzard you are looking at, but the one I pay attention to is KNOWN for taking their time. Polish is Blizzard’s middle name. Blizzard is a box seller and not a company that tries to survive on monthly subscriptions. Blizzard’s business plan has always been built around selling millions of boxes. Monthly subscriptions just pay the server bills.

Blizzard produces quality. Nothing about TBC was rushed. No one gave Blizzard a date with a “Get it done or else.” statement. Blizzard took the time they needed to make a kick ass expansion. They have succeeded. No one and I mean NO ONE tells Blizzard to launch early. They get it right or they go back to square one and start over. From all accounts, TBC was in better shape during it’s beta than ALMOST EVERY major MMORPG expansion to date has been after it’s launch.

Vivendi has their part in this too. Four million boxes on shelves on day one is nothing short of awesome. I don’t personally like Vivendi, but I can’t deny them props for a calm and collected push to have product on the shelves. I am even more amazed that they have now allowed Blizzard to offer TBC via download.

Vivendi and Blizzard realize what the “cash cow” potential is in WoW. That “cash cow” potential is selling boxes in stores. So expect high quality expansions from this point forward.

Vivendi are the ones that set “the date” beforehand, and take care of all the business paraphernalia of shelf space, marketing, etc. This is thought up months in advance. What the team does with their project managers is to see what new content and how much of it to cram into the dev cycle to it (theoretically) reaches that date fine.

If BC indeed has unfinished/broken/cockblocked content, then, according to what I’m saying either:

a) Vivendi didn’t allow for “the date” to be pushed back.
b) Blizzard tried to cram more than they could manage or finish since BC was greenlighted and work began on it.

Both are bad. What I’m saying is that WoW is such a popular game, such an addictive cash cow for Blizzard and Vivendi that they don’t seem to realize it. Pushing back a date, or scaling down content until it can be produced to perfection won’t hurt WoW at all. It’s not any other game that has one shot and has to be micromanaged like this. They have a lot of room and a lot of leeway to be able to present a finished product. If there’s unfinished content, they’re just not doing it, or not being aware they have all that room.

They had the option of either a) providing target date that probably would be too early, or b) do a LaForge and pad estimates to hell and back. The former shafts just the folk who’d get to the broken content, which usually isn’t many people (and tends to be the hardcore bastages who never quit anyway). The latter pisses off everyone, including the people who are now complaining that they can’t get through encounter X, all of whom wouldn’t be able to get to encounter X, world sector Z, and powers group V.

( less than .01% of the playerbase at the time, I imagine), that would have said “Well, I quit because I killed C’thun and there’s nothing else. Bye”.

No, no one would have said that. Everyone has invested so much in time and energy on the characters that are at the bleeding edge of content that no one dares to quit. C’thun should not have been cockblocked. There was no need for it. If Naxx wasn’t ready, people were not going to quit about it. They would take it, do something else, then come back when it was done. It sells itself. Did people quit after they finished MC or BWL and there was no ZG or AQ to try? No. Or at least not enough to make it statistically significant.

Same with the expansion. I don’t have BC yet, so I can’t verify the missing/unfinished content for myself. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not as bad as the internet alarmists like to spout. But without even having BC, I can’t tell you that there was no need to rush BC to meet an arbitrary launch date.

Would people have left if they had taken their time to complete things? Would we have seen mass quitting of the game had it launched in February? No, we wouldn’t have. Everyone would have waited one more month. In March? In April or May? No one would have quit. Not enough to make it statistically signficant. The shit sells itself, and hooks players by itself.

The day Blizzard and Vivendi realize this they’ll slap their foreheads and will stop treating it like any other game around. A game that need to be launched ‘right now’, because otherwise it would miss its window and won’t sell as much. Won’t sell as much? What window? It’s WoW and BC, ffs. Competing against who? They’ll also realize that they can take as much time as they want to make new content and deliver it in pristine condition, because people will wait. They’ll wait as long as they have to. And those who can’t wait and quit? Well, they’ll be back once it’s done.

WoW is so irritating because it sells iself. Blizzard and Vivendi just need to come to terms with it, knowing that they have all the time in the world to do things right.

No, really. Sometimes I don’t think Blizzard is aware of what they have with WoW. I think they still feel the need to run it and micromanage it with PR and usual industry moves(tm) so they can squeez the last customer. One day it’ll dawn on them and they’ll realize they don’t have to. It’s WoW. It sells itself.

Examples? C’thun was a cockblock for however many months. Industry SOP indicates that you put in a cockblock to stop players advancing past what you have to offer and quit because they don’t have anything to do. They needed time to finish Naxx. Was it necessary? I don’t think so. Think back. Do you know anyone, any player that was of the appropiate level to kill C’thun (

So if McDonald’s asked me if it’s ok to give me the pickle later, I’d say “ok!” but my friend might be upset.