Maybe it’s just the standard whining but I believe it’s one of the rare situations where the message sent isn’t that wrong. Currently the official World of Warcraft boards host a good numbers of complaints about the lack of updates to the game (the last, somewhat consistent, patch was on the 18 December). Blizzard always did a decent work at mantaining and supporting their games based on Battle.net, now that standard is opposed to a new model. While for Diablo and the Warcraft serie the players had just to buy the box and wait for fixes released after the months and years, now they are asked to pay a monthly fee.

It’s not a case that now those old and affectionate customers are also expecting something more. Instead Blizzard is still adopting its classic approach. The work on the game slows down, the team is reorganized and new possible projects get considered. The approach is the classic “fire and forget”. The game is done, you just need to apply a fix or a patch so that you can keep milking money from it while the focus of the team moves on the next big title.

I already stated my opinion. I wouldn’t be surpised to know that a good chunk of the programming team is now already working on a new expansion or other projects. Obviously all this is legitimate and there’s not much to criticize if they choosed this way.

The point is obviously that they wipe off the real potential of the genre, as I explained in the other comment I linked. The nature of a mmorpg should be the possibility of growth, evolution. The age as an added value, not as a ballast. It’s after a game’s launch that the most intensive development should start and the money should re-enter the process to strengthen the dev team, expand it, add new minds, new processes, start those plans that weren’t possible till that point.

Instead the mmorpg, as a genre, is just seen as a FAT, multiplayer game that, once and if you are gone through the tragedy of a release, becomes a money-cow to milk in the long term. A faucet, if you put it in a good place it will spill money on the long term. Wow, it’s a dream. Now the problem is that, as a paying customer, I’d like to see my money be used in what I pay for. And not to fund “World of Diablo” or “Starcraft, the FPS”.

So the point is, why I’m the only one in the world who believe that, even from the marketing perspective, is more important to use ALL the resources you have to give a strength and evolution to the current project. without the need to wipe everything and restart from zero, without taking money from a place to transfer it to another. If I’m playing and paying for THIS game, it’s because I find a value here and I’d like to see it develop. I’m not paying for DAoC so that Mythic can release Imperator.

Another good point for Eve-Online:

(compiled from the full versions that can be read here and here)
CCP has 40 other staff members, where of 7 work for me in the Content department, the rest is split between Programming, Art, Testing, Marketing and Financials.

We have the whole development team working on EVE the whole year.

I hope this helps a bit understanding how we work. All of this is included in your subscription (as you might have noticed) and we will continue to provide free Expansions to EVE Online. We consider this being part of what you pay for with your subscription. Why? We’re gamers and we hate it as much as the next guy having to buy a box in a store to get new stuff from someone you have been paying for 2 years.

The fact that Eve-Online is showing a constant increase of subscriptions even with the launch of new, bigger titles, maybe, is the demonstration that passion and dedication sometime offer paybacks. Even money paybacks.

While World of Warcraft, aside unstoppable records, will probably also set one of the highest churn rate ever. Or at least this is my point of view and expectation.

P.S.
Rants aside, I’d love to see Blizzard revealing honestly and openly informations as CCP did with Eve-Online. I’d be curious to know how many devs are currently on the live team, how many on an expansion and how many have been redirected to new projects. If my assumptions on this message are wrong I’d be glad to be disproven. As always.