I think they may be going with smaller, more frequent updates this year - it's looking like we'll get at least 4 Issues - I14, I15 in a month or so, I16 around the CO release date, and I17 by Christmas.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
I enjoyed talking to people in Pocket D on the test server, meeting people from the forums and having a bit of a laugh. Talking with War Witch was delightful, and she seemed to take great interest in learning about us as players, and I felt a bit better having talked to her. Same with Ghost Raptor and Avatea.
Positron answered questions, and that was good. He found it interesting my mention of size shifting from male to huge, but when we brought up that we'd mentioned that on the forums many times, he said something along the lines that he knew that already and went to the next question.
Yeah, getting a bit excited about the in game address from Positron was silly of me. But Positron? There was no -need- to do it. You told us nothing a fair number of us didn't know. And that's what makes it worse. The fact that I could break down your announcement into thirty two words of what we didn't know but could probably guess would happen in something that isn't even that big a deal anyway.
Ok I was really disappointed by two things today:
Positron's general demeanour in Pocket D. That's been dealt with elsewhere but suffice to say the guy lost a shedload of brownie points in my eyes. He came across to me as disinterested and anxious to be elsewhere. He was very selective in the questions he answered and one of his responses to me was pretty damned awful from a PR exercise.
Then the Big Announcement. That was very very weak. Everyone gets to go into closed Beta. So in fact it's open beta by definition. How the hell they'll manage the info gathering process I don't know but that's their problem. But there was nothing in the big announce to excite.
But... wait a moment. There is a glimmer of hope.
Think of it this way: If "closed beta" starts this week, we might expect I15 to go live by the first week in June. (Oddly enough)
But that would then mean we would have had Mission Architect, 2 TFs, a Booster (ok it's paid but it IS new content) costume parts, emotes, new IO sets and the odd other shiny I've forgotten.
Let's glue that together into one lump and for the sake of argument call it Issue 14.5. Ok so it's delivered in two slices but that ain't bad actually. If we then say that I14 to I15 is "extended testing under rigourous conditions" we then get a good issue in June
Trouble is that means we've not had a good issue update for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
I must admit I have enjoyed todays events (well as I write, yesterdays) but bottom line: "B- Must try harder"
I doubt I shall check out the "openclosed beta" and the MA has proven to be a curse rather than a boon and unless they clear up the issues with that it'll kill this game quicker than a quick thing on a day with "quick" written in large red letters on it.
Sadly it's a genie that can't easily be put back in the bottle and there's a rather plump lady in the corner warming up for her solo, for me at least.
Thelonious Monk