An MMO company is not a person. People say all sorts of things all the time and mean them when they say them. Time passes and what was once true is no longer true. Colin was the game director and under his watch, that never came back….but MO never said it, and may have never even thought it.
People say Anet said something but it’s never true, because Anet has no mouth. It has 300 mouths. What someone says is only good as long as management doesn’t change, and even then circumstances can change.
I remember when Anet said an expansion wasn’t in the works and the Living Story was going to be the way forward. I always remember telling us that eye color wasn’t important enough to include in character generation and that walking would never been in the game, only running. All those things changed.
Town clothes changed too. They felt something didn’t work and they changed it.
At the end of the day, Anet doesn’t say anything ever. Individual developers say something and very likely mean it when they say it. Nothing is law or set in stone, because circumstances change. Hell in real life even laws change.
Sometimes it sucks when it happens, but this is one instance where I’m in favor of the change.
This attitude would be the quickest way to the closest conyon for the largest majority of companies. It would be like:
“Well, the developer said so to sell stuff and because he meant it because we promised him so. But screw him, we do what we want as a company.”
Not only is this massively cynical, it would make all involved people look like dorks. so either gag the developers or put out only serious information about the product.
If said developer makes such a statement on reddit or another inofficial forum, it is nearly excusable and makes just the company look like fools because the left hand has no idea what the right hand does. But if this happens on Gamescon or anything resembling a PR event, it is a sign of a trigerhappy management who either bit more that they could stomach or just made a false advertisement.
Actually this isn’t true, because MMOs aren’t like most products. MMOs are services. You’re not paying for a program, you’re paying for access to a world. That’s how it works.
I have had favorite rides at Disneyworld that have closed. It happens. Things change over time.
Most games dont’ have an over time, or at least didn’t. When I buy a driving game two years later, it’s pretty much the same game. Maybe some new tracks or new cars, but the game doesn’t fundamentally change. This isn’t true of MMOs and anyone that’s played a lot of MMOs would know this.
I can think of tons of reasons why something would change from what someone said. If I ran a health spa and I said I was going to put in a new machine and you were interested in it, but no one else used it, I’d take it out, even if it kittened you off. Because there’s limited room in the spa, and the machine wasn’t getting use. That’s probably why the Twilight Arbor forward/up path was replaced. Not enough people running it.
At the end of the day, an MMO is an ongoing thing, a world that changes. Have you looked at the difference between WoW when it launched and WoW now? Or Rift? Or SWTOR, or Age of Conan, or TSW, or Lotro or DDO, or Star Trek Online? They’re all vastly different games. And stuff any company says can change over a period of years.
That statement made by Colin was made five years ago. But this is true in the business world too. Once you see under new management sign anywhere, changes can happen. A new CEO takes over a corporation and that company can move in a new direction. It happens all the time.
Not sure how wise it is to put your faith in two paragraphs from a forum post from a single person in an ever changing world.
