Yet another day filled with "Soon"

#0 - March 28, 2007, 10:52 p.m.

Another day winds to a close, and still nothing addressed other than "Soon this, and soon that". /sigh

Soon engineering will be fixed. Soon the Mechanar elevator bug will be fixed. Soon the pally ret tree will gain PvE viability. Soon the Cut Citrine will be fixed. Soon the druid epic mount quest will be implemented. Soon the community will have more specific dates on the Arena season ending. Soon, profession problems such as lack of pally BS gear and the craptacular look of Shadowfrost (or whatever its called) tunic will be addressed.

Well done Blizz, I wish I could use that answer for all of my clients. "Yes sir, I will have an answer to you 'soon'." (2 months later) "Yes sir, I will have that answer to you soon. No, I won't provide any specifcs, even though I have been working on it for over 2 months, but yes, you should definitely trust me and not make any drastic changes. Oh yea, here's your quarterly bill."

wtb service quality

Nethaera

#34 - March 29, 2007, 3:57 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Here's how software development works. I sit down with the end-user, and work out a scope of work. Based on this scope, I provide an estimate, usually man-hours and calendar days. As scope changes, or risks turn into roadblocks, schedules are affected, sometimes moving up, sometimes moving down. In alpha and beta testing, serious issues can be uncovered that cause you to push the date a day, a week, a month. You try to avoid those things, and when they do occur, you try to accurately predict them so they don't come as a surprise to the development team, and especially the end-user.

Now let's apply that to WoW. If Blizzard says "The current estimate is the new content will be released on April 12th. Keep in mind, this is an estimate, and it may change based on development and testing."

On April 12th, at 12:01 am, if the new content wasn't released, the forums would explode in "LIIEEEESSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

This is why Blizzard says "soon"

Thank you for the nice post.

I would point out that I did use "Very soon" for something yesterday. I'm sure that threw people off for a bit.

We don't give dates unless we are going to meet that date. While there are many people who understand that schedules can and will change, we tend to get a lot of negative feedback from many others who then get very upset about the delays.

Nethaera

#52 - March 29, 2007, 4:15 p.m.

Just to follow-up, the "Very soon" I posted was in regard to the Mechanar door fix. That and the Eye of the Storm issue with people leaving the bubble prior to the match start are both addressed in the current PTR-

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=86856591&sid=1

The patch is for bug fixes, but some of those people have been waiting on awhile.