The Quest to 700 Gets a Reprieve

Wargaming announced today that World of Warplanes would be taking a delay to their launch date. For my eyes, its probably not a bad move. There was a hitch in the last update, which means that the British planes are not in yet, and you are going to want more than just a weekend to test those buggers before launch I would think.

The feedback has been…almost 100% positive. The forums are alive with congratulations and kudos and agreements from the playerbase (Someone even marveled that this must surely be the first time that a company announced a delay and had such a positive and supportive response!) The fact that they announced that this gives you more time to get to 700 battles and continue to earn tokens didn’t hurt either. Someone pointed out that if you already had more than 780 tokens to your name right now, if you continue to earn the 240 a day, by the time launch rolls around, you will be able to lock on to 6 months of free premium time. That is a whale of a catch!

For me though, I’m not sure. I’ve had to play 33 games a day to keep pace for the original launch date, and I’ve needed just about all those to get all the daily token allotments. I’m not sure I can keep that pace up for another 7 weeks after already having been running it for the last three.

I have 133 battles left, not counting my Closed Beta tally. And I have to admit, I will be resting easier when I see my battle count at over 700 without those CB battles added in…just in case. So I have 53 days to get 133 battles. I’m thinking maybe I will play enough each day to get 3 kills, 3 victories and all 10 of the easy to grab ground targets destroyed. This leads up to 140 tokens a day and probably won’t take more than 6 matches. That’s enough to earn another 3 months of premium, buy the one premium they are letting you keep post release (a prototype of the Brewster Buffalo), and have more than enough battles to earn my reward plane.

Kudos again to Wargaming for smart and savvy moves. They are just grooving through the mess this month. Good for them!

Stephen Reid Confirms SWTOR Delay?

 Just a few minutes ago on the TOR forums, the old thread proclaiming a Spring 2011 release date disappeared, and a new (locked) thread appeared with this:

‪Star Wars: The Old Republic is expected to launch this year after the close of EA’s fiscal 2011 (which ends March 31st, 2011). Information on the release date and pre-order programs will be released as it becomes available.

I don’t think I have to tell you what that means.

So after a wimpy Friday update that really should have been part of last week’s “big reveal,” we now know what the REAL Friday update for today was….

Nice ninja move Bioware. Some would say gutless. But I’ll leave that for someone better qualified to decide.