The New World of Warcraft Patch Looks Good

Yesterday, I talked about setting expectations and how fulfilling them is key to winning and keeping your audience (because they are the buyers who make your business work). The folks at Blizzard Entertainment did one of their livestreams from Gamescom today, and the World of Warcraft did a reveal on the 7.3 Patch (which goes live next week). Whatever else they do, they're getting good at matching the setting and fulfillment of expectations. Observe.

That's the start of the hype train, the setting of expectations, and in this respect the WOW team at Blizzard are no different from their colleagues at EA or DICE. The difference is that they're far better at matching the set-up to the payoff, and here's one of the big tools used: videos to summarize and display what you actually get. This is the tempering of expectations.

This is before the patch goes live. Players can be told, here and how, what they're getting when the thing goes live. They don't have to follow livestreams. They don't have to watch endless videos. They don't have to suffering through WOWhead's shit coding to find information. They can just watch one short video and have their expectations properly set so when they start playing next week what they see and what they get will be in line with what they expect.

That this has to be pointed out, time and again, to people creating entertainment in all media says that there is a fundamental crisis of basic business competency throughout the world. This is despite the fact that "Underpromise and overdeliver." is so old as to be Ancient Wisdom. How do you fuck this up so badly or so often?

Yes, there's a bit more at work here--the dev team have finally gotten a content release pace that actually works, so now all we dread is another year of Final Patch Syndrome--as the final raid instance won't be open until closer to Halloween. Pacing release of content also matters, but that's for another post; for now, what matters is that know what to expect and when to expect it also plays into the proper setting and fulfillment of audience expectation that anyone with two brain cells to rub together has to figure out if they want to retain (nevermind expand) a loyal base of paying customers.

And if you think this only applies to videogames, you have not been paying attention to film, television, comics, SF/F, or any other business or political environment. This is fundamental to success in any such endeavor, and you can tell the fuckups by how routinely they get this wrong.