Yes, I understand your game may encounter a few unforeseen bugs at launch because of the massive influx of new players, but there’s no excuse for a lack of polish and balance…

It’s quite simple really – Don’t release your game until it is ready.

Don’t tell me WAR didn’t launch early so it could establish a market before WotLK would obviously draw many hundreds of thousands of cancelled subs back to the game. A couple more months spent solely on polish and balance would have made a much better game.

I don’t envy their launch situation. In retrospect, they probably made the right decision launching an incomplete product before WotLK. Launching a more complete product in the couple months following WotLK wouldn’t have yielded as many results.

It still doesn’t change the fact that they had a huge change of game direction 8 months before release and they couldn’t get everything right in that amount of time.

The problem with mmo’s is that most of them are made by these second tier developers that have usually never made a game before. With the exception of Origin, Square Enix, and now Bioware, none of these developers have a portfolio even close to Blizzards. In my opinion, until these studios start getting some more products under their belt, they are going to continue to release products that imitate and not innovate.

Its a software product that investors spend millions of dollars paying supposedly smart hardworking people good money to generate something other than a trivial return.

If I delivered work product in my job that some of these folks delivered to us, I would be and should be fired. I shouldn’t ever be trusted with their money again, thats for damn sure.

If you decide to release a product that is buggy and doesn’t work, it means you failed as a result of management choices made– you hired shitty people who weren’t up to the actual task, you failed to managed the scope of your project such that you diluted your resources ensuring a shitty product (which includes fundamentally understanding the task at hand or the nature of your competitive marketplace.

Guess what? Your product, if successful, will be required to host likely several thousand simultaneous users. They will want to communicate with each other, exchange things, and otherwise interact with the game environment. Design, build, test.

If a game company decides to launch with 2 zones that are 1/2 done versus 1 well done (apply the same logic to every aspect of the project– testing, QA, etc.), that’s a management decision and the companies have to live with the consequences. If they didn’t have the budget, then they are faced with tough choices and hard questions to answer, not the least of which is how did we get it (budget) so wrong?

Thousands of creative technology companies are undertaking greenfield development on limited resources everyday and have to live or die by the same decisions.

No one gives a startup chip company a pass because they are new or use of their product as designed and shipped resulted in sub par performance. If they aren’t better than industry leader X on some level (price, features, etc.) they lose.

MMO companies need to deal with it.