Despite the passage of two years, no-one seems to know or, at least, no-one seems to have told, the complete story.

Here are questions that do not seem to have been answered conclusively yet;

1/. What was the nature of the SOE relationship with its licensing partner, LA?

2/. Who within that relationship originated the the idea of the NGE? Sold the idea? Rode herd on the idea until it launched?

3/. Who – if anyone – opposed the idea? Or changed the idea while it was in gestation?

4/. What was the calendar of the NGE? When was it originated? What resources were allocated to it? Which areas were neglected because capital and manpower were denied them?

5/. What was the fallout within SOE and LA? Who was promoted and who, faint hope, punished for NGE in action when its implications became clear?

I ask these questions not because I have any stake in SOE or in MMOGs or in the wider industry – I don’t – but simply because I once played the game, enjoyed it and am interested in what happened to it?

I think the (one of the?) elephants in the room is this bar that MMOGs either meet or don’t. And it’s my personal opinion that the bar is set at different heights for different companies and because of the reasons I listed above, the bar for Blizzard is set pretty low. Not because people give Blizzard a free pass, necessarily, but because Blizzard has proven that they will fix games. Even if people aren’t paying monthly fees for it. Not that they didn’t take a lot of criticism for the downtimes (which may be completely negligible compared to other MMOGs, but like I say, I really don’t know what the experience is for other MMOGs).

That’s just my experience as one person who played WoW long after launch.

I appreciate the valuable insight everyone is bringing and I’m starting to see just how complex this all is and I’m starting to have a huge amount of sympathy for the folks at Sony Online Entertainment and the Star Wars Galaxies issues because of it. Anyone who is building or supporting a MMOG. It just seems unfathomable to me the amount of hard work that must go on on even in the most poorly nurtured games.

I don’t particularly disagree with what anyone is saying. It just builds up a bigger picture of all the different ways things can go horribly wrong.

I hope that makes sense.

Love,

Hanna

You’re talking about class balance, while everyone else is talking about client & server stability and show-stopping bugs when they think of launch readiness. Class balance is highly subjective and depends on your frame of reference (what roles you *think* classes fill, what your focus of play is (solo, small group, raid, pvp, pve), and itemization). This has evolved a lot in WoW — some classes are hardly recognizable from their beta origins — and I’d argue that evolution of classes and gear can be a very positive thing, as it somewhat keeps things “fresh”. There were severe server problems when WoW launched due to demand, and Blizzard didn’t have a queue system (or had set the queue trigger far too high), but the client was stable for the large majority of systems, show-stopping bugs were few, and there was plenty to do. Joe Public could (once there were enough servers) log on and play 2 hours without a system crash or dieing constantly to invisible creatures (happened sometimes, but not often), have fun with his friends, gain some exp points and log off without fear of a rollback wiping out a day or two of his investment. You’d think this would be a pretty low bar to meet to win the “ready for launch” green light, but every single major mmo since (and including) UO failed in this regard, and WoW was the first to meet it.

ALL classes were very shallow at launch. Warriors only became truly useful post-40 when the itemization skills equation ramped up to reasonable stuff. Most classes were very lucky to be good at one thing, let alone have flexibility.

Months ticked by, things changed. Some fast. Some slower. While some folks can (and will) argue, Blizzard has done 100x the job of any other MMO I’ve played to find a balance that works with “big picture” of the game as well as the desires of the players.

My pool of Karazhan raiders contains shadow and holy priests, protection and holy paladins, feral (tank and DPS), boomkin and resto druids, marksman and beastmaster hunters, assassination and combat rogues, fire and ice mages and destro and affliction locks. All have a place in raids and properly managed (that would be my job) I can put together min/max’d groups for various fights that give us the best possible chances for success without telling ANY player that they need to respec before they can go. That’s pretty damned great.

@Kylrathin: Crafting WAS great. Use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP, use XP. Once that was gone it was a grindy, fucked up mess. Point A -> Point B was all that mattered because nothing short of skill mastery was all that really mattered because no one wanted your gimpy Novice Architect garbage. Ultimately that’s why I left the game. Trades were 5x more complex than any other game but still demanded grinding so I just gave up as I didn’t WANT to grind. That pushed me into doing nothing but combat, which was about as deep as those plastic kiddie pools. SWG was the first game I actually uninstalled with more than a month left on my sub I was that sick of it…

@Bloodcat – Opinions are like assholes. The only thing I’d agree with you on is your statement about lack of content. Otherwise, it was the interdependencies that that ‘niche’ you speak of loved so much. (They’ve been awfully loud for a ‘niche’, don’t you think? Here we are coming up on 2 years after the change, and we’re still talking about it. That’s a large ‘niche’.) The game had the best crafting system ever designed, in my own humble opinion, and all the NGE did to wreck that was make crafting mostly irrelevant. Everything else is personal taste – you like apples, I like oranges.

Most people are talking about content, and WoW did do an exceptional job with that. The low-level quests were complete and bug-free for the most part. I didn’t run into obviously unfinished content, such as places that simply weren’t itemized, until I got into the much higher levels. WoW had an impressive array of content at the beginning, and that is where it always shined over other games. Especially at launch. This was WoW’s tremendous advantage.

But, what Hanna mentioned above was class content. As someone who played a Druid at launch, some classes at launch were hardly exceptional for the most part. Druids in particular had very little to define them as special compared to other classes, and while the developers said that Druids would be flexible, they became second-rate healers for the most part when I was playing in PUGs. It wasn’t until about 2 years later with some major revisions that Druids became much more flexible rather than simply being a mana battery for priests at the high end. Of course, the saga continues as people report that now Druids can be better tanks than Warriors and better healers compared to the many Priests who are shadow-specced. The wheel of fortune keeps turning as the eternal quest for something resembling “balance” is sought. However, I think I would agree that this is a lesser consideration in the overall quality of the game.

I also think Hanna brings up a good point, too, that a lot of Blizzard’s success came from what they did before WoW launched, too. Part of this was knowing how to polish game content exceptionally well, and that they had a lot of very rabid fans. Keep in mind that Diablo 2 had presales over 1 million units, which is mind-boggling for a PC title (and pretty exceptional for console titles, even). You can’t tell me that some of those D2 pre-orders weren’t people that simply love Blizzard games. (Hell, I bought the collector’s edition of D2 on launch day because I knew I’d probably enjoy the game tremendously even without playing a beta.) I don’t think this can be underestimated.

My thoughts.