piatok 17. júna 2016

New content releases and high expectations

This won't end well.

I'm sure all of you have seen the italian interview that has brought a pretty big info on Living Story - ANET plans to release one LS episode each 2-3 months. In comparison to previous biweekly plan, it seems like a huge change.

First of all, the mentioned biweekly schedule was impossible to keep because Anet had to take breaks to develop the content. Obviously, they're not machines and although the day has 24 hours, man can do only so much.

What am I talking about then? I'm talking about the trend I warned about long time before, when Anet has announced quarterly content updates and LS 3 coming in summer. People want new pve content. People have certain expectations. If we were to continue with the "biweekly" releases, we would know what to expect. But now, with apparently big content updates coming 4 times a year, people expect much more and rightly so. In my opinion, people expect even more because we wait so long for a new content (about 8 months if we'll get it in July).

I warned Anet that they will need to provide a HUGE chunk of content because of this. As if those expectations weren't big enough, Anet has (let's be frank) cancelled the legendary weapon development in order to use those people for LS3. They gave community another reason to expect even more.

And now an italian interview claims that we'll get a single episode each 2 or 3 months. If I am to be honest, I can't see the real possibility that Anet shall release a big enough content in the Summer patch that will make the community admit - Yes, it was worth the wait.

Why aren't you more optimistic? They did well with the Spring patch! - You may say.

For the Spring patch development, Anet has taken also all devs that were working on the second expansion to help the rest. That's 60-70 more people. These people weren't working on LS  and it's quite certain that they don't work on it currently.

But they've been working on the LS3 for a long time!

Have they really? As I see it, after the HoT release they spent the rest of 2015 fixing the expansion bugs. That's also the reason why the Winter update hasn't brought much. So it seems pretty realistic estimate to say that they've been working on LS3 only in 2016. But that's not all. Oh no, they've admitted that they fully focused on the Spring patch in order to bring the most desired fixes and to bring HoT into more casual level.

Let's be optimistic and say that at least half of the current-content-team (more than 100 people) has been working on LS3 since the start of 2016 and then everybody or the majority besides the expansion devs were working on LS3. That gives us 3 full months + 4 months when only half of them worked on it, so let's divide them by half and we'll get 5 full months.

It seems like a lot maybe. Yeah for the good start of LS2 like LS3 start. I don't know about you but for a content update that would satisfy the community after such big content drought and with such high expectations, it seems like only a half of the needed time.

I'm sorry Anet but with your promises of LS after HoT, big content patches, cancelling feature in favor of LS development and now (probably) releasing one episode in 3 months, you've got into the position that doesn't seem very good to be in or easy to get out of.

After all this, I still have hope and believe in you that you deliver. Hope dies last. But realistically, I can already predict a very probable backlash and anger of the community when the released content won't be enough.

When.

And if.

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