Sorry for the necro-post, especially one so off topic. Just felt that I had a proper reply to something stated earlier in the thread
CHIMPNOODLE wrote:
What did you find was done well with the expansion?
Simply put, the Burning Crusade was complete. Where EoF was not.
Echoes of Faydwer failed to deliver on a number of promises. SoE was forced to promise that Unrest, and other parts of the game such as the progression chain will be added at a later date through patches. Not to mention a severly buggy change to combat mechanics that was released with some rather alarming holes, such as the whole avoidance issue and SOE not revamping kos instances to new combat system. Basically SOE released an incomplete product and spends the next 2-3 patches fine tuning it.
WoW: The Burning Crusade however released with everything that was promised. It released without a single bug, other than lag due to everyone logging on at once their was not one problem on launch day. No further efforts will need to be made in order to fine tune the release. Instead further patches will be aimed at adding even more new content to the game.
I think that key paradigm shift in development is why in the end I am back with World of Warcraft and blizzard. Before Blizzard I expected buggy releases and patches that would eventually come to fix them. However blizzard came along and changed that. They have released content that is flawless for all intents and purposes on release and spent their patch development either tweaking class balance in a meaningful way or else added huge new dungeons and new content to keep players happy. I think in a post blizzard world you can't get away with the shoddy product anymore. Not when your competition is doing it better.
Edited, Feb 6th 2007 5:54pm by bodhisattva