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!

TOR Gets A Release Date

Quietest train I ever heard.

Only thing I can say is that this has EA written all over it. Stephen Reid losing his mind in the release date speculation thread less than a week before the grand announcement? Not likely.

BW wanted to move back into 2012, EA said “hell no” and this was the compromise. A compromise that presents its own set of challenges.

One is logistics. UPS, FedEX, USPS…all logjammed with presents a few days before Christmas – and now we are going to add 500k+ (1m+? 2m+?) units of TOR to the load? Yeah, good luck with getting your box on time.

Two is support. You want those first couple of weeks to be spotless. You need a full team on hand to handle all the crap that crops up. But you are not going to have that.

And that is where BioWare’s lack of experience in this process will come back to bite them in the hindquarters. Because of their refusal to work with their customer base, listen to appropriate feedback, and at times combatative (even belligerent) attitude about “their” game (and they are quite insistent about that, despite years of industry evidence otherwise…I’m lookin’ at you Brad McQuaid) – all of that combines to give the customer base little trust of BioWare as a developer. Blizzard, Trion, and other successful companies have earned themselves some breathing room because of their track record and their ability to stay on top of things. As I saw someone noting this week, Blizzard can wreck and entire character class and people will yell, but they won’t leave (or they will leave and come back). Trion can wreck something and have a solution in place 48 hours later, and people have come to know and trust that.

Does anyone trust BioWare at this point?

I get that we were shooting for the “holiday season” but we are so deep up in the nose of the holiday season that not even a Neti Pot of the Ancients +5 is gonna dislodge us.

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.