And welcome to reality.

Mythic cut back on the release features for WAR today. Specifically they reduced the classes and capital cities.

The announcement and corresponding interviews were peppered with the usual cheery 'it's for quality' spin.

I'm not denouncing Mythic, while I don't think there was any bravery in the announcement, it was to be expected. It was either something like this, or a delay. At this point, with collector's editions pre-ordered, they cannot delay. EA would balk. They may even be contractually obligated to the retail chains for a Q4 release.

Mythic is trying to provide as much entertainment as they can within a sane timeframe and budget, two things which they've pushed pretty damn far.

It's too easy for fans to ask for something to be 'done when it's done'. The first time I heard that phrase it came from John Carmack, while leading a team of 8 talented developers at ID Software. It's a phrase for great games with limited scope. MMORPGs are on an entirely different scale of complexity, they can be great, but so much is involved in the process of getting them there. And it's far from an exact science yet.

Just a little while ago, MMORPG players were finally getting games that could be released without servers bouncing up and down for days, weeks and months. To ask for complete polish with full-and-lasting content on top of stability for launch-day, well we haven't seen it yet. It comes later, with patches.

I think we all have to swallow the pill sooner or later.

I hope to be proven wrong, eventually I will be, but not by the current crop of MMORPGs approaching release. There's an insane amount of pressure, the market has gone up and up and each game has investors that are hoping to catch onto that rocket and fly into the stratosphere.

When we do see it, I think it may be from a privately held company and not a big public corporation with shareholders to answer in quarterly reports and expectations of earnings on each dollar.

I hate patch day. Some folks love it, I probably would too if WoW patches were all about new content, but they aren't. And my dislike of patch day isn't just because of the inherent bugs or the server downtime, it's something more to the core of the game.

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet: Blizzard has created a Metagame out of "balancing" within WoW, by changing how the system works each major patch.

Yes, I'm very jaded and cynical.

I used to think it was just ordinary mundane balancing, the sort that comes along with nearly every MMO and gets tedious after a bit, but settles down over time. I strongly (that would put it mildly) disagree that any game needs "constant perpetual balancing", that's akin to game designer wanking. But I don't even think that's what they do with WoW. I think the whole point is to keep players occupied and busy with a new system every month or two. I'm certain that the peeps at Blizzard also feel like they're improving the game with each of the systematic changes, but much like The Vision wasn't really about the "epic" aspects of EQ, Blizzard's systematic changes aren't completely about improving the game.

I think most players are perfectly fine with that.

Here's how I became aware of WoW's Systematic Metagame:

A friend's comments about "skill" in WoW threw it right into my face. WoW does not have strong strategic or tactical elements and it certainly doesn't involve any physical or twitch abilities, but it is a systematic game. If you do not learn the system, you're labelled a noob and won't be able to play to the best of your abilities. Learning the ins-and-outs of the system is in fact a large portion of the game. This is true for most MMORPGs, especially ones that use the Tank + Healer + DPS paradigm.

So Blizzard perpetually changing the system, does keep a lot of players from getting bored. Except, for me at least, it has worn me down. Oddly, I'm more bored with having to re-learn the system each patch. For once, I'd like to jump into some new content WITHOUT having significant base elements of the game changed.

I'd like to feel a bit more comfortable, after playing for 3 years, there's a point where I do not wish to be on the edge of my seat. =P