Wow characters needs a faceliftFollow

They did a good job with Goblins and Worgen, now if they can fix Human male and Troll female it would be grrrrrreat. Updating old characters would be a nice thing to do in the next expansion.

Human female got a big one

What I've gleamed from their discussion is "Well, you just cover them up with armor anyway." I guess they've failed to note that we also interact with ugly NPCs.

Imo, this should have happened for Cata. Then again, a lot of things should have happened that didn't. Like Cata getting released when it was actually ready.

It looks like they've added some new faces to human females at least. Last night I was bored so I made a human warrior to check out the new starter area quests. I ended up picking a face I'd never seen before: freckles and what appeared to be purple eyes. The freckles are very faint though unfortunately.

Blizzard redoing the old faces is as likely to happen as them allowing flying in the Old World.

...er...wait...

Why do you guys feel like it wasn't ready? Sure there were some balance issues that had to be tweaked, but that happens continuously throughout an expansion, not just at the beginning.

A lot of people did do the new old world. Just, you know, in the time before Cata was released but when they still gave us most of the content anyways.

Honestly, they're right. Cata just wasn't nearly as polished as the others were. By the end of a beta you should be at the point where not much remains to be changed. Things were changed right up until release in order to meet the date and the holiday season.

Heck, just look at the talent overhaul they did midway through the beta, and the clusterfreak that came with that.

Edited, Jul 28th 2011 9:47pm by IDrownFish

God was it a mess. Still WTB triage healing.

Balance is obviously going to be an issue, as it always is. But we didn't really see balance issues--that wasn't the actual problem. I mean, yeah, there were huge balance problems even after 2 months of live, but the real issue is that they were changing the entire way classes worked. It's not like they just realized that <insert ability> was 40% too high (which is something that would have been crazy anyway). It's like they realized that the entire systems in place for a ludicrous number of specs were based on bad premises.

Some of these they actually fixed, more spent a lot of time with ghetto fixes that ignored the actual problems (and have slowly been chipped away, though many still exist--healing be the really obvious place).

And it's not just endgame. Druids launched without having any AoE tanking abilities until they were way up there in levels. That was such an obvious problem in beta. And it wasn't fixed until 4.1. And they are way more of these where it came from.

It might be more obvious to me, since I saw what the beta was. I saw how issues, big and small, we were reporting weren't fixed until 2-4+ months after launch.

And all of this comes on top of a massive amount of cut content. Cata is big, but compare what they gave us with what they originally promised. It's pretty crazy what they never got to. Especially since the things you announce with an expansion are generally the things you are sure you'll finish--everything else gets announced along the way.

I forgot you were, lol. Old world stuff was largely fine. There were a lot of glitches of course, like with any launch, but that was in the realm of expected stuff. Almost all of them are normally fixed in a week (and I'm pretty sure they were for Cata).

It was really just endgame and class design. Both of those should have warranted a good increase in development time. Treating live like a PTR isn't okay, and it took like 5 months for someone to point that out to the Devs (in the words of a GM).

Rhode makes a very good point. People had been raiding ICC for a year when Cata was released, and I'm sure people would have been upset at having to wait longer for a more polished product. It's really a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I still wonder what influence the mess with CWOW might have had on things. Roughly 5 million players were blocked from the (then current) expansion; they were having to put a band aide on WotLK by changing the graphics but there was just too much content that dealt with Scourge.

If the subsequent expansion also ran into problems, we would have been hearing that they lost a lot more than 600,000 subscribers (I suspect that a chunk of that loss was because of a change in accounting between The9 and NetEase). That must have created some discussion in the back offices of Blizzard and Activision; if nothing else "more than 12 million" sounds more impressive than "more than 7 million."

Pushing Cataclysm to summer would have cost them a lot of subscribers, yes, but those subscribers would be bored with the game and would be won back with a polished expansion. Instead they launched the expansion while it was still in beta state and lost a lot of subscribers who got tired of the company. It's much harder to win those back.

Of course, actually listening to people during the beta and the tweaking in the following months of release probably would've sped it up some. Instead they chose to close their eyes and just bulldoze forward over and through everything else.

Also, healing is still a mess.

Here's hoping the next expansion will knock some sense into the new development team.

Edited, Jul 29th 2011 7:42pm by Mazra