Gold Master, ship to duplicator, 2 weeks later you have 200.000 copies. Choose onen per territory and you're done. Add 3-5 days shipping to reatail so they need 3 weeks lead time max.

That puts the Master Version they need to ship to duplication mid november because after week 1 december no retailer will restock.

Thats barely 4-5 week sleft for testing the beta, not enough. This might change if bliz patches up the beta weekly and adds stuff.

Did you know that the final 2 continents are still closed? Not tested or not finished? Your guess ...
 

Believe it or not I wouldn't mind it being delayed. I still want the guild I'm in to down C'Thun and get through Naxxramas. I have a feeling if we don't have the time to do them while everyone is leveling up to 70 or leveling new characters we may never do them.

Well I guess we can go back and do them when they are way below our level and trivial...
 

Meh, we all have been waiting this long for an expansion so what is another month? I would like to get my warrior to level 60 by the time expansion hits anyway so this may just give me the time I need.
 

This has been a topic I've discussed heavily with some guild friends. Most of us are people who used to do EQ's internal testing, and are used to seeing the development process moving along. Apparently my time working with SOE has scarred me because I'm almost alone in my position that Blizzard will release it, bugs or no, to sell it for Xmas. It's not just the current subscribers to buy it, but grab the new ones who get it as a gift.

They, having also done testing with Blizz now, and many played in the Alpha as well, feel confident that it will release only when ready, and right now, it's not. Not even close.

I still hope they are right, but the pessimist that I am says money will win.
 

Hehe, no question about it, if WoW was made by SOE, BC would be out before christmas, ready or not. :)

Of course I will buy the expansion regardless of when it comes out, even if it is March 2007. But I'm 41, and spending $40 isn't a problem. Quite a number of WoW players are kids, which might not have the money saved up, and nagging the parents only gets them the expansion on their christmas or birthday wish list. So I'm not buying the argument that releasing BC in November would be financially identical to releasing it in March.
 

The next major content patch for beta servers is 2 or 3 weeks away. This one will bring some new inctances and level 70. Stuff like endgame content and pvp balancing is still weeks or even months away. Even if they would try to rush for a christmas release, they wouldn't make it.
 

As someone said up above... I really wouldn't mind then delaying it. Sure I want to jump in and get into the new stuff. But I would also like more chances at the old content before it becomes a deserted wasteland.

Not everyone belongs to Naxx guild, or even Bwl for that matter. I would hate to see places like zg or aq 20 go unused by the people who think they will just jump into the outlands and soak up all this good gear, when they barely have tier 0 completed.

If you played EQ and spent any time in walls of slaughter (i forget the exact expansion that was), the undergeared and inexperienced made leveling up annoying and painful. Of course many will clutter up the zones anyways.

But anyways. If they do delay it hopefully the content will be polished and ready. Instead of the patchfest games normally end up being when they are released to fast. And yes, eq comes to mind(I started just before pop came out).

If its towards the end of the year or some time next year...they will still have people bum rushing the stores to get it.

Sansai - ER
 

"I had the beta freeze on me once, but of course that could have been my computer."

The contract between operating system and application software is that the OS forbids certain things which might be faster, or in some vague way "better" and in exchange it can make certain guarantees, one of which is that the machine won't crash or freeze. In order to fulfill that contract the OS kernel requires nothing of the application software, since anything the app does which would interfere can be prevented. But it does require something from the device drivers, and thus from the hardware they control - these must themselves must be designed not to crash the machine.

For some reason that they're not very willing to explain, the big two graphics chipset vendors decided years ago that this was too much to ask. If they'd been selling keyboards, or network cards, or hard disks, they'd have been laughed out of the market. Who wants to buy something that's 50% faster but sometimes crashes and loses all your data? Customers would be demanding full refunds. But with graphics cards being used primarily by gamers, something odd happened. Instead of returning the defective hardware and demanding their money back, the gamers said "Well, I can mostly avoid this crash by turning down the fog settings and switching to 4xAA instead of 8xAA" or "I heard it will be fixed in the next version of the drivers" and they went back to playing their games. A few years passed, and you can't buy anything except the stuff gamers decided was "good enough". It's like hearing that a few people in the backstreets of your city are eating rat burgers because they're too poor for real food, and then the next time you go into a decent restaurant, you find that rat is the only thing on the menu.

When I say that they decided it was too much to ask, I don't just mean that their drivers have bugs. That would be understandable, even expected. No, the hardware is actually designed in such a way that it cannot safely be controlled by the OS. At any time a simple error in an application can cause the hardware to lock up solid. This is the stated policy of the vendors, as provided to the people writing Linux drivers (back when top tier graphics vendors were still actually talking to the people who make Linux drivers).

So the freeze is not really Blizzard's fault. If it was Blizzard's fault you could hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete when the game locks up, close the application and restart it. But instead most graphics related game lock-ups are fatal. Any time WoW or any other video game crashes and you can't break out of it back to Windows, the #1 thing to blame would be the graphics chipset vendor, nVidia or ATI as according to your preference.

It would be nice to imagine that if enough raiders wipe because of these crashes it would create a market pressure to fix the problem. But how? Switch from nVidia to ATI and get ATI crashes, switch from ATI to nVidia and get nVidia crashes, or switch to something else and struggle to even play the game at all. At best we might expect that eventually 3D graphics is a commodity feature and the high end vendors try to differentiate by being "lock up proof" just as CD writers eventually became "burn proof".
 

I think from the sounds of things that's exactly what they're going to do, and more power to them I say. Strictly tiered progression on the EQ model will not work for a game like WoW, the customer base has grown far beyond the subset of players who would enjoy or put up with that.

I think inclusion of Tiered progression gave many of us things to do before the expansion. If there were no places to raid, I doubt I'd just keep leveling up alts. People complain about dungeons being the same thing over again. What about the people who play the entire content from 1-60 over and over again.

I don't want to turn this into a casual vs raider argument, because I've been both - I guess I just want opportunities for both to keep playing.
 

I've been hunting for clarification on a comment you made before, and turned up this one about beta:

"Poster: Nethaera at 2006-10-11 07:54:01 - We've been saying we are shooting for Q4 2006 if that's what you mean. ;) We are still saying that but we are also not committing to any particular date and holding to the idea that if we feel we need more time, we will need more time. When we have a date we will give one. All things in good time my friends."

This was followed by:

"Poster: Nethaera at 2006-10-11 08:43:06 - Keep in mind we are not going to have an open beta. While we are testing a lot of content, we are not testing an entire game from scratch either. The timeframe for testing while important is not as long as what most may be thinking of. Of course, we will also test as long as we feel necessary as well"

Tobold...any chance you know where you read that banked completed quests will be non-exp giving in BC? You had mentioned that before...
 

What a massive Hammer that would be to the competition if Blizz decided to wait until Febuary to release BC. Nearly all of the games scheduled for release last quarter 06 were pushed back until at least first Quarter 07. Imagine how pissed off the developers of these games will be once they find out that BC would be directly competing with their games at roughly the same time. Course, imagine how pissed off many WOW players already are for the expansion taking 2 years and then compound that anger with the fact that their release date got pushed after 2 years.
 

Tobold...any chance you know where you read that banked completed quests will be non-exp giving in BC? You had mentioned that before...

I read that on WoWInsider.
 

I just saw this on Amazon:

Availability: This item will be released on November 22, 2006. Pre-order now. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. link

Maybe you've already seen this, but I thought you might wanna know.
 

Remember that WoW is an MMO. It does not need to be fully complete when it goes gold. The game will be patched whether or not new items/balance/whatever needs to be introduced to TBC, since every player will be getting all the models for the new races.

That will let them basically run the closed beta up to the the last minute, a day or two, before the release of the game. Yes, it'd be tight to turn around the last minute fixes and balances into the game, but it does give them an extra 2-3 weeks between the gold and release date. We don't have about 3-4 weeks left for the beta, we could have 6, possibly 7 more weeks of beta. They could also pull a SoE and get an extra couple weeks for content development for the really high end instances.

I'm an optimist. The fact that it's in beta is a huge plus. I suspect the zones kept closed are complete, just final balancing going on likely. Plus you don't want to spread out the testers too much. You'd rather focus on an area or two at once, rather than all 8 or however many are in outlined.

I believe that we'll see the expansion beginning of december, or if it is pushed back, it will likely be in january.
 

Talk about posting inane crap.
What your post is saying:

TBC might be delayed... or it might not.

Grats on making the most useless blog-post of the year?

Or maybe you just want to be able to say "See, I told you so" no matter what happens?
 

Probably good odds that it'll be out before Christmas... but really, everyone's making educated guesses, but no one will know until next month.
 

TBC might be delayed... or it might not.

Grats on making the most useless blog-post of the year?

On any other forum the same discussion would happen under a flashy heading like "Burning Crusade delayed to March 2007". Not my style. I'd rather admit that I don't know, and let people discuss the arguments speaking for or against a delay.

Yours to judge who is more useless, the guy who claims to know something which is impossible to know, or the guy who admits he doesn't know.
 

Oi, Tobold! Your blog allows re-use of aliases! That earlier Nick ain't me.

Not my fault. Blogspot allows you to use *either* your www.Blogger.com identity, which is unique, *or* type in a name and website which isn't unique. You can tell them apart by hovering your mouse over the name (the Blogger ones link to your Blogger profile). If you want people to have an easier time to tell you apart from the other nick, you could also put an image in your Blogger profile, which will be shown to the right of the comment on the comments page. That's what I do.
 

Well, bearing in mind that Blizzard have already said that TBC won't be complete when it ships, I'd say that the end-Nov/early-Dec will happen...come hell or high water.
 

Blizzard will make every attempt to get the game released to retasil during the holiday season. That's exactly what they did with retail release in 2004, and they knew then it would sell extremely well as well. Even though the game will sell out its initial ship regardless of when it is released, nothing can really replace the publicity factor of being all over the place during the holiday buying season, when everyone is out buying gifts and looking at Blizzard's displays (even if it is with open jaws at how the game is already sold out).

I think the indications are that closed beta will go until right before release, and release will happen sometime between the end of November and the middle of December, unless there is something very wrong with the thing, in which case they'll delay it. At this point I don't think they would have started their beta testing (which they've said won't feature an open beta) now if they were not planning a release before Christmas.
 

They just made an official announement...

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=38244050&postId=381406362&sid=1#0