However, if you look at the selected quotes from above it seems pretty obvious they are nowhere near the "polishing" stage.
Um... all the quotes you include are, in fact, talking about polish.
Let's take 'em one at a time.
First, the noobland missions. We have some. We haven't been happy with them. The content team finished the entire set of missions for the game, and then went back to those noobland missions to revise them to be more fun and interesting. They actually finished this some time ago, and have been bottlenecked behind our QA department's schedule. Rusty's basically saying 'that polished noobland content is finally ready to go in.' Which it is.
Avatar combat has been in for a long, long time now. 'Going in,' in this case, means 'avatar combat missions are now polished enough to be turned on in the beta.' Beta players have had access to the system, in a demo/test environment, for quite some time.
Boarding has been done for a while. I'm personally doing the boarding polish pass, so I know its status intimately. Lemme share a couple of the issues on today's polish pass: "my crew should emote /cheer when I win'"; "defender crew should spawn belowdecks". We're not talking about 'OMG I CAN'T FIGHT' issues. We're talking about little things that will make the experience more fun and ... well, polished.
Usability testing has been ongoing for a couple of months now, but now we're switching our usability testing lead to full time, and setting up a dedicated usability lab for her. I'm guessing you don't know how usability testing works, but -- you can't do it until you're basically almost done, because you're looking for subtle problems that only show up when the egregious issues are already dealt with.
We're expanding the beta because we're pretty close to where we want to be for the kinds of systems you can test with small numbers of players. A couple hundred people can tell you if your missions are working, or your combat mechanics are broken. Now we need testing for the big, large-scale systems -- and the response to that testing is tuning. And tuning is polish. It's polish, in fact, that's ongoing after launch. Or do you think the skill tuning changes WoW's putting in their 2.1.0 patch are indicative of a game that's not finished, and not ready for release?
Honestly, I don't care if you troll. I don't really even care if you troll with inaccurate information, because I need to get my daily roofles from somewhere. But other folks might take your shenanigans for gospel.
Comments
Let's take 'em one at a time.
First, the noobland missions. We have some. We haven't been happy with them. The content team finished the entire set of missions for the game, and then went back to those noobland missions to revise them to be more fun and interesting. They actually finished this some time ago, and have been bottlenecked behind our QA department's schedule. Rusty's basically saying 'that polished noobland content is finally ready to go in.' Which it is.
Avatar combat has been in for a long, long time now. 'Going in,' in this case, means 'avatar combat missions are now polished enough to be turned on in the beta.' Beta players have had access to the system, in a demo/test environment, for quite some time.
Boarding has been done for a while. I'm personally doing the boarding polish pass, so I know its status intimately. Lemme share a couple of the issues on today's polish pass: "my crew should emote /cheer when I win'"; "defender crew should spawn belowdecks". We're not talking about 'OMG I CAN'T FIGHT' issues. We're talking about little things that will make the experience more fun and ... well, polished.
Usability testing has been ongoing for a couple of months now, but now we're switching our usability testing lead to full time, and setting up a dedicated usability lab for her. I'm guessing you don't know how usability testing works, but -- you can't do it until you're basically almost done, because you're looking for subtle problems that only show up when the egregious issues are already dealt with.
We're expanding the beta because we're pretty close to where we want to be for the kinds of systems you can test with small numbers of players. A couple hundred people can tell you if your missions are working, or your combat mechanics are broken. Now we need testing for the big, large-scale systems -- and the response to that testing is tuning. And tuning is polish. It's polish, in fact, that's ongoing after launch. Or do you think the skill tuning changes WoW's putting in their 2.1.0 patch are indicative of a game that's not finished, and not ready for release?
Honestly, I don't care if you troll. I don't really even care if you troll with inaccurate information, because I need to get my daily roofles from somewhere. But other folks might take your shenanigans for gospel.