DiabloFans

Quote from Winged

Dolaiim no worries, good discussion is good discussion right?

NO. I WAS FIRST. Actually I freaked cause I thought my account was compromised for a second. I just recently got identity thefted, so I'm a bit paranoid.

Quote from Winged

An yes I'd agree earliest is July, though again.. Logic says Blizzard never reaches goals at the earliest possible date.. Again, when July 20th rolls around and the BETA isn't here yet I'll say I told ya so again

Definitely. That's why I made sure to say the earliest a beta could start is July 1. The latest a beta could start is Sept. 30th.

I'm not actually disappointed. I am, however, surprised and amazed that a 3-month margin of error was the best they could do for a BETA START DATE. I listened to the full conf call (I'm used to them since I work for a publicly traded company, and am a private investor), and it never ceases to amaze me that Blizzard can look Goldman and DB hedge fund managers in the face, who hold thousands of their shares, and basically admonish them for being curious about what YEAR this game will be released.

Once you go public, you have one boss: Your shareholders. There's a reason Act/Bliz stock has done nothing for a long time.

Quote from Jack00

Did they say if they were talking about FISCAL YEAR Q3 or 2011 Q3 ???

Calendar year 2011, not fiscal year.

Simple equation:

(July 1, 2011) <= (BETA START TIME) <= (Sept 30, 2011)

what the hell, i started this thread. why the fuck does skarin1993 have the first post.

can i get a moderator to PM me ASAP.

Edit: I just realized they re-named another thread and folded my post into this one. And I don't like that.

Anyway, to confirm, The soonest we'll see the external beta is July.

I'm assuming they mean the 3rd Quarter of the Calendar year, which would be July-Sept timeframe at the earliest.

Gotta admit, I'm disappointed that I'm disappointed.

Thoughts/comments?

Edit, changed time frame to July-Sept, which Bashiok has confirmed.

Just to be clear, this means the External Beta will START no sooner than SOMETIME in the 3 month window starting July to September.

Quote from Shatterer

Also, federal regulations require me to warn you that the firebats skill... is looking pretty good.

+1 for LMAO. That's one of the funniest bits in Portal 2.

Quote from asSmiLk_LemoN

am I the only one thinking that blizzard is slacking hard on these updates?

No, you are not. I find these updates for the most part tedious and condescending*. Like I said above, this particular piece of concept art is cool (even though it could have easily been drawn by a depressed goth kid sitting forlorn in the back of his high school home economics class). But the only value I typically find in these digital deer-droppings is the opportunity to talk shit.

*diablofans is doing an amazing job, I'm directing my snark purely at Blizzard.

Hm. Usually the concept art annoys me, but that fat dude drawing is pretty epic. For my money, he's a caster. Holding a staff, has tattered robes and a hood, and his left arm definitely appears to be casting something. Or, maybe he's reaching for another cheeseburger. Dude needs to work in a salad.

It seems to me that since full sets will be dropped as one single recipe while leveling, that will basically mean we'll just be going from set to set until we hit max level.. my instinct is to assume everyone will basically wear the same thing given their level range/class throughout progression. Not sure how I feel about that..

Quote from Magistrate

Quote from Dolaiim

Bugs should not and, in my opinion, will not determine how long the beta lasts.

After all, what are patches for?

No that's a fair rebuttal, I neglected to mention the main assumption of that comment. What I meant to say is, imho, most of the big showstopper bugs are going to be resolved before Blizzard releases the code for Beta test. I believe that Bliz has a very high defect standard which, if it isn't met, will gate the Beta release. So what I was really trying to say is, it's unlikely software defects will lengthen the Beta test cycle, because most of the defects will already be resolved. Along the same lines, it's unlikely that a lack of defects will shorten the Beta cycle. That's why they have a long, iterative Alpha test stage, and a friends and family Beta.. so they can have a predictable, specific public Beta, focused on gameplay, scalability, and compatibility.

Now it's definitely possible that scale and platform compatibility issues will emerge during Beta that could require some low-level re-writes, but Blizzard code is super-stable, so the likelihood of that actually happening is super low Again, just in my opinion.

Overall pretty exciting stuff, I can't wait to see what the trade system will be!

As for the home stretch, not to be a debbie downer, but if you watch the Blizzard 20th Anniversary retrospective video, Alan Adham says he told his development team for Starcraft every day that they were in the "home stretch" when, in his words "of course, we were nowhere near the home stretch." Apparently that "home stretch" lasted for 8 months. =/

Quote from Azriel

I really don't know how to take the prospect of 6 months. For all we know, it might not even take that long if the Beta isn't filled with game-hindering bugs. If there are just a handful, I could imagine them trimming down those "6 months" to about 5 or 4.

I think putting a time-frame on the beta, from our vantage, might be a dangerous thing to do. In my opinion, the beta will focus primarily on class balance, gameplay flow, bnet feel/scalability, and system performance/scale testing. I think the length of the beta be largely dependent on how much iteration is needed to properly treat beta feedback.. Bugs should not and, in my opinion, will not determine how long the beta lasts.

Quote from Don_guillotine

It still boggles me to no length as to why someone would be too upset about the conference call.

Before it we had no tangible clue of release date, they had only said: "when it's done!"

Now that we do know something tangible on the release date and start of the beta, it's a major catastrophe?


Sure, waiting is a bummer, but we're still looking at a Q4 2011 or Q1 2012 release. Now we just have for the first time something concrete and not just speculation.

News does not equal good news. I admire your optimism, I really do. But I do not share it and here's why: Blizzard does not seem to appreciate the importance of deadlines, and how they impact their customers. I do not see the conference call as anything resembling a deadline. I develop and test software for Cisco systems, and have worked for Sierra Games and a couple other startups you wouldn't have heard of. Across all these software companies, there was universal agreement that time-to-market is an essential part of developing software.

Quality is the most important. Yes, yes, always. But again, more time does not necessarily yield more quality. In fact, when developers know that large-scale re-writes are on the table, they are less inclined to commit themselves to ideas, and thus the ideas are weakened. So allowing re-writes can actually cause re-writes, and this is an important point.

Bottom line is, strict project management should dictate development. You should see our project slates. Hundreds of milestones, with mitigation plans, including adding/shifting resources (people), to account for schedule slippages. Aggressive milestones brings the best out of a group of people. We create some of the most brilliant products ever devised.

Now you may be saying, "how do you know Blizzard doesn't have milestones?" Look, they probably do (though I'm really not sure). Here's my point: No matter how you look at it, your customers drive your business! Take what time you need, yes, but communicate your major milestones to customers. If you don't, customers lose faith in your integrity to develop and deliver quality software. The fact that it takes Blizzard SO long to develop a quality product says what about their ability as developers?

In closing, Blizzard is not Vincent van Gogh in a shoddy Paris apartment crafting masterpieces on his brother's dime. They're a publicly traded company driven by demand for their products. They scoff at commitments, and they scoff at deadlines, because they don't feel accountable to their own reason for existing: Their customers.

Quote from Eso

The conference call should be taken in context of the fiscal year for 2011, which ends September 30, 2011 (oct-dec 2011 is the 2012 fiscal year).

Anything released after that date will technically be part of their 2012 "financial plans".

False, considering this conference call was entitled:

Activision Blizzard Fourth Quarter Calendar 2010, you may want to check your particulars there. This was the report for Fiscal Year 2010 Q4, which means, of course, that Q42011 doesn't end until Feb 2012.

Edit: I think I just replied to your same post on battle.net with the same post. sorry to be the double harbinger of bad news.

Quote from Jackzor

This is god-awful news, and I'm sure heads are rolling at Blizzard. If Bliz has no new releases in 2011, shareholders are gonna dump the stock like it's hot. After-hours trading the stock is down 7.2%.

You mean like the years and years they had with WoW as their only new game? I don't see any reason why they would do so much more poorly with a early 2012 release and WoW subscription fees from 12 million people.

Because the market, and shareholders, expected a D3 2011 release.

Quote from Jackzor

Blizzard's arrogant dismissal of the importance of time-to-market never ceases to astound me. They want to confuse us by saying : More time causes more quality. Not necessarily true. Better development and quality assurance models improve quality. Iteration is ONE way to achieve quality. Planning and coherent development vision is another.

I'm exceptionally disappointed, in any case.

Yes, and planning and coherent development vision and iteration is the best way. Blizzard has developed games like this for 20 years now. Why in the world would they start doing any differently?

Exactly my point. I don't see any evidence of coherent planning and vision. They seem only to use iteration. Just look at how many times resource systems and skills have been re-designed.

Quote from Jackzor

It is out of my mind how can people still be "okay" with these results. The game's being made for so many years now and nothing is still certain about it. Even Mike is uncertain about the whole D3 situation.

Of course hes uncertain about D3's release date. What hes not uncertain about is the beta release. They know when its coming out, they just don't know how much work the feedback is going to lead to. He seemed to say that if there were not huge problems after the beta it would be late 2011, while if there were more problems it would be early 2012. I don't see how that can be bad.

Very few if any software companies in the world don't know when their products are going to be released. They set a deadline and they meet that deadline. They tell their customers what that deadline is. They have internal "stretch" deadlines, and externally facing "committed" deadlines beyond which they do not pass. This is BASIC project management. Why does Blizzard feel so above this process? Obviously it's outrageous to their customer base.

Quote from nadenitza

Given the way blizzard handles release dates with "when it's done" catch phrase it could be just a ass-cover as you said.

Let's hope we see it in 2011 ;- )

Show me the last time Blizzard gave us a positive release surprise (positive being sooner than expected).

This is god-awful news, and I'm sure heads are rolling at Blizzard. If Bliz has no new releases in 2011, shareholders are gonna dump the stock like it's hot. After-hours trading the stock is down 7.2%.

To re-iterate what I said in the battle.net forums:

Blizzard's arrogant dismissal of the importance of time-to-market never ceases to astound me. They want to confuse us by saying : More time causes more quality. Not necessarily true. Better development and quality assurance models improve quality. Iteration is ONE way to achieve quality. Planning and coherent development vision is another.

I'm exceptionally disappointed, in any case.

This sounds like Bliz hedging because everyone's gonna look the damn same once we're level capped. Sounds like they definitely know there's a final "end came" set.

Bashiok: "..and so eventually there will be points where all the highest end players have the highest end set." That's just flat disappointing. This long in development and the talent of artists you'd think they could move past a gear "set" mentality. I really didn't like that about WoW, and I'm sure not looking forward to it here either. Colors really don't mean much to me, having a unique model is where it's at.

Again, I go back to what they did in Wall-E: create 1000's of robots from around 50-100 different modular elements, or "robot parts." Why can't they have modular 3d textures that are randomly spawned as the gear drops, much the same as stats?

Anyway, meh.

Edit: Nice article Scy, thanks!

I echo the sentiments of others, being that most (if not all) accomplished musicians, as he clearly is, can play and compose in any genre of music they wish. By experience I can say that the quality of a composition is directly related to the composer's passion for the subject matter represented.. Genre and subject matter being at least partially dependent. If you know how to represent a theme with notes, there are only two tasks: Intimately understanding (feeling) the theme, and working incessantly to find notes and timbres which represent that theme, to the best of your capacity.

I love what Phillip Glass said about composition.. Someone asked him "Where does your music come from?" He said "Music is like an underground river. You don't know where it comes from, or where it's going, but if you listen hard enough, it's always right there."

I have no doubt that Andy McKee has the musical talent to pull it off.. It's just, can he understand the themes, and can he work to the best of his abilities?

That takes me to another point in what is turning into an unreadable wall of text: I'm flipping worried about D3's music. I find the "Hey I liked the Gladiator soundtrack with that lady singing let's steal from Hans Zimmer" theme pretty atrocious, and worse still are the lazy post-modern ambient B-movie samples. I heard the New Tristram theme and I almost pooped.

By now you've ascertained with no possible doubt that I'm a music snob. But I can safely say that after 10 years, if we don't have D1 Tristram quality music, I'm gonna be pissed. And still play the game to ruin. But do so while pissed.

Maybe I'll start composing my own soundtrack to D3, and play it with the real D3 music on mute.