For those that argue that it’s not a big part of the game or they don’t care because they weren’t planning to do Precursor crafting or that it was done for the good of the game and therefore it’s ok, they should look at long term financial impact of this decision for ANet if ANet doesn’t put it in before the next expansion.
There’s no way that this won’t be an issue from now on. It brings up issues of trust, promises, money taken but services not provided, expansions begun but not completed. These are all red button issues and it’s going to be brought up over and over. Just think how it’s going to look when ANet publicly announces its next expansion, takes questions from the audience and gets a series of very public questions from the audience about how they stole money, how they broke promises, how the last expansion was never finished, and why should anyone trust them to not lie or steal again. There will be questions there and there will be questions on the forum about this while ANet is trying to build hype. This is the sort of this that will impact the sales of the next expansion and even if if you don’t care about precursor crafting, if you care about the game you should care about the Devs having a reputation for promising, taking money and not delivering and the impact of a bad reputation on sales and the population of players.
I haven’t read past your post, and I agree with with it wholeheartedly, btw, but I can almost feel the incoming onslaught of “Mo didn’t know!! Mo didn’t know!!” Cool mantra, rhymes and all, but this “inability” to deliver didn’t happen overnight, and can’t all be laid at Colin’s feet and no matter how it’s spun, as mrstealth.6701 pointed out here, either the team assigned was, to use his words, which I agree with, abysmally incompetent, or they were working at a pretty impressive rate, and simply needed a slight delay to get the ball on track.
Half-Pac Mo (as some have coined him- coined, SAB coming back, lol) “had” Colin’s back throughout the whole PR/hype train of the the entire pre-launch of the expansion. You can’t Google stuff without coming back with results where both of them aren’t talking about what is included and the “framework/groundwork” that is being laid with it. One of the most favorite phrases on these forums has been, or currently is either “Colin says..” or, “as Mike says..” when anyone from ANet responds to someone about something. The latter mainly being used for communication in terms of [not] telling the customers what is coming our way. That is a policy that isn’t new. That’s how stuff is done around here, and it’s done that way because Mo does know, and has known what has been going on. To think otherwise is just.. just.. kidding yourself.
From the link in my sig, “Mo” was standing right next to Colin, not seemingly hypnotized by his hype inducing smile, while this was all stated to the people interested in the expansion:
Colin says things like: “’respecting the players time” and “not invalidating their hard work” and most importantly: “everything together builds one cohesive unit that makes this expansion succeed and any one piece not being here doesn’t bring it all together”.
“Mo” then took over:
Mr. O’Brien says things like: “’I have a feeling, the first day of revealing all these features, people are going to interpret these as separate features and say, ’oh I like this feature and I like this feature” and " I hope, that as people start thinking about this, they start thinking about how our purpose of building this expansion pack was really about laying the groundwork."
They know what they sold us, what they told us and what they hyped. Anyone with any common sense can see it by reading/watching the interviews, let alone the actual HoT Page that is STILL up advertising content we’re not getting. If they think their next product has a chance in Hades if they don’t make this right, they best rethink their strategy, because someone is going to be surprised.
I know I worked pretty hard at that last line of mastery needed for the new legendary weapons, but hadn’t started on any because there wasn’t anything that caught my eye yet. A whole line.. for what now?
- edit- I’d also like to add that even if “Mo” didn’t know, the company as a whole (that he was running at the time, and still is, btw) sold us a product and just because “management” of the game changed, that doesn’t mean our expectations did.
(edited by Siobhan.5273)
— but we wanted to offer the opportunity for people to share their thoughts and this was not intended to be a dialogue about communication.
I loved it!
