Quote justinplainview Quote: Originally Posted by Non sarcastic question: Your community team grew during this content cycle. A 3.0 announcement is, judging by your past history of announcing content for this game, going to be a ~500 word press release with an image tease, or it may be a 2 minute producer video with a breakdown that may be the equivalent of 1.5 pages in length. Either way, I don't understand how you could, on Friday, think you would be ready for the announcement, then change your mind on Monday. Were you more ahead of the curve and then suddenly regressed? As for information being correct, are you referring to the really nice thing for subscribers? Because you could literally omit that information to keep everything correct, or just mention at the tail end that subscribers or preorders will get a perk or perks to be named later. You make it sound like a 1 page cover letter announcement requires the entire dev staff to get the phrasing right. This expac is supposed to be out "this year." And it hasn't been announced yet.



If you delay the ANNOUNCEMENT by a few weeks, that implies you will have 2.5 months left in the calendar year for testing. But out of that 2.5 months, MOST of the testing will be in the first 2-3 weeks. After that, you're implementing changes. So It makes me wonder how you'd think this timeline seems wholly acceptable. It's going to seem rushed, regardless of actual polish, because you're delaying the announcement, which pushes up the time between said announcement and release. Is the pre-order window going to be the equivalent of a double XP week where you have 5-7 days total to pre-order? Because the window between this announcement and the release, if it follows the "this year" timeline, is going to be very small. This is a great question (or questions?), that I think are on a lot of folks minds. As you can imagine I can't go too deep into the rabbit hole in talking about our internal processes but I can give it a go.



In short, the process we go through internally to announce something as big as an expansion is actually quite complex and extensive. Although you are correct in that the end process may be a video, a landing page with some copy, etc. the process to get there requires a large amount of moving parts across multiple teams. Aside from just the assets and webpages there is arguably one of the most important aspects of these types of announcements, the game!



By the time we announce we have to have a concrete idea of what will be coming in the game with the expansion, what types of perks we might give our subscribers, etc. Unfortunately with so many moving parts, we can sometimes run into the scenario like we did today. If we are not 100% confident in what we are going to put out, for a multitude of possible reasons, it can lead to a delay of announcement.



I would caution not to read too deep into what I said above. It is somewhere in the cog of those moving parts that this delay happened, but ultimately our goal remains the same: to get you as many details about this expansion as soon as we can!



-eric

Eric Musco | Community Manager

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