Why is EHG doubling down on the silence?

General
12

And then the follow-up was ‘We’re not sure yet’.

As mentioned… if you change your terminology and people pick up on it then you better have a backup plan at hand rather then being cought with your pants down.

Given the monetary issues EHG has faced - as seen by the sale of the company - it was kinda a obvious connection to make. If they didn’t even think it that far through then they need direly someone competent in the marketing aspect.

If you promised to never have a paid one and people reasonably get worried you do it as late as possible before it happens. Like… a Cycle before it does.

Also usually a company has a finished product before announcing a expansion, rather then being more then a year away from any state which resembles ‘finished’ even remotely.

So that’s another aspect there even.

Yes, and almost any ‘major studio’ fails over a few years of time, with extremely few exceptions… which universally tend not to do those things which make the other ones fail.
Pure hubris of the whole gaming sector. The movie sector nearly collapsed because of it, the Anime sector is nearly collapsing currently because of it, and the gaming sector already has collapsed because of it and is solely in the last death throes for ‘major companies’.

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They didn’t change their terminology, though. They said they were going to release an expansion. That’s not new terminology.

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14

First of all they talked about a console release. Console release are commonly timed with Cycle releases, anything else would be ridiculously idiotic. And EHG isn’t that, hence why mention ‘expansion’ even?

So that means ‘Expansion’ has another meaning. Which also was confirmed after people voiced out their concern about the terminology.

So please… can we stop nitpicking about the specifics of the situation when it’s blatantly clear?
One must be blind after being pointed towards it… and the gesture towards it was quite clear quite quickly.

EHG provided a fairly clear-cut term which was unfitting outside of specific circumstances and people weren’t too idiotic to miss it. Simple as that.
So here we are.

Doesn’t change that the follow-up is absolute nonsense for now. Inept, incompetent communication, absolute trash-tier. There is absolutely no way around it.

If that is what ‘decent communication’ is then damn… mandkind is a lost case.
So let’s step away from nonsense-town and get back to common-sense, can we?

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I don’t understand what you mean. This isn’t the first time EHG talked about expansions. It’s not new terminology. They talked about expansions before.

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:man_facepalming:

In the context of it being something ‘extra’ to a ‘given situation’ like a release during a console port?

Also why would they pre-name a Cycle a year ahead of time?

I mean… are you really not seeing it? It’s kinda disappointing actually if that’s the case, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It just seems like a absolutely obvious thing in my eyes.

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That makes no sense to me. If they said they were going to release to consoles, do an expansion and add new supporter packs, would that also be “extra”?
They had 2 significant releases to announce, they announce them. Should they have to wait x days before announcing either? Can you not announce 2 things at once?

You know, like when GD announced a new major patch and that they would be releasing a new expansion in the future at the same time? Both announced at the same time and no one batting an eye to it?

They didn’t pre-name the season, they pre-named the expansion. They will likely release at the same time a season starts, but the season will likely have a name as well. You know, because not everyone will buy the expansion but they will still play the season.

No, I’m honestly not. Maybe that’s because I don’t have “conspiracy theory” brain and I don’t overanalyze things and take them for their face value. Especially when what they announced is pretty much the same as what hundreds of studios have announced before.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even suspect a paid expansion when they announced it if Judd hadn’t already opened the door to it with a comment on the Krafton aquisition thread.

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Yes? They would release more supporter packs related to the console port or the expansion and they would release an expansion along with the Cycle.

I mean… it’s kinda a given unless your PR team is a bunch of nitwits. Why am I saying that so clearly? Because the Cycle is a given… so you don’t provide it as a selling point. It would only cause misunderstandings and problems.

So… 2 things which are not ‘business as usual’ hence? Yep, checks out.

Much like ‘A console port’ and ‘a expansion’ is not ‘business as usual’ for LE.

Or will you now start to argue that they have to remind everyone that Cycle’s actually do exist? I mean… they did a bad job in upholding a timeline for em… but still… would be expected to not forget that new ones are supposed to come out :joy:

Exactly!
So what the actual fuck are you arguing about? If ‘Cycle’ and ‘Expansion’ in our situation are obviously different things then why the heck are you arguing about it?

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There is a difference between something not being “business as usual” and something being “new terminology”. They could have, just as easily, simply announced a new expansion and nothing else and it still wouldn’t be “new terminology” because they talked about expansions before!!

I’m not arguing that they’re different. I’m arguing that an expansion is a new terminology and somehow something unexpected when they’ve talked about it before and it was expected to happen at some point. Paid or not paid aside, this isn’t new information. An expansion was something players would be expecting from quite some time ago.

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First of all: When have they talked about a paid expansion ever before?
Secondly: When have they talked about an overall expansion outside of a ‘big Cycle’ ever before?
Thirdly: What does it have to do with the topic about ‘why is EHG doubling down on the silence?’
Fourthly: Which nonsensical reason could anyone come up with to reason a expansion coming out when the friggin base-game isn’t even finished yet?

I mean… people are in this topic to talk about the potential reasons for EHG’s silence, even if no chance to find out the real one being available is existent. But people at least want to have a half-way decent discussion of what the chance is.
Not a talk about ‘But akshually they mentioned ‘Expansion’ as a word before!’.

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Until Krafton’s announcement they didn’t. Nor did they do that in the announcement either.

Here, for example, back in 2020:

There are a few other similar examples through the years, even on discord, reddit or Mike’s stream.
So it’s not something that you should be surprised to see happen.

You said that Judd’s statement equated to “We’ll tell you when we think it’s right” (meaning they already know and are postponing) and I replied that’s not how I read it, rather being “We’ll tell you when we decide”. Everything followed from that, especially with the “new terminology” stuff which is what I opposed the most.

It’s llikely they plan to finish the campaign and the missing skills in the seasons before that. At which point it will be finished, if unpolished.

Yes, but this back and forth all started when Llama pointed out that they weren’t silent and you dismissed it. It all evolved from there.

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Fair, which is milder, same end-result though… lack of planning and instead of a quick resultion a waiting game at their terms rather then those of the customer.
Kinda a crap situation as a customer I gotta say, means the company screwed up.

2 Acts + missing skills + fixing the most broken stuff in… let’s say 1 year?

You really think EHG has the capacity for that? Would be a massive miracle with their record by now.

But could be their plan… we know how deadlines work for EHG :stuck_out_tongue: Release in 2020 after all! :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is where I disagree with you. It’s not lack of planning. When a game announces a new game will come out 2 years from now, they have no idea how much they will charge for it. Is that bad planning? Is every single studio in existence a bad planner?

You know you’re going to release a game, or an expansion, sometime in the future. You have some idea of what you’ll put in said game or expansion, even if plans sometimes change, even if you end up placing more stuff, or different stuff or have to drop some stuff.
You have no idea how much you’ll charge for it yet because you have no idea how much it will cost and what will happen to the studios finances until then.

This is standard practice in every game/expansion release.
The only thing that makes this situation different is EHG saying in the past that expansions would be free. If they had never said that, no one would be the least bothered if they said they didn’t know yet how much they would charge, if at all.

So no, it’s not lack of planning. It’s standard practice.

There isn’t any broken stuff that prevents the game from being complete, only from being polished. So they only need to add the 2 acts (which I believe are being worked on) and the missing skills, which they’ve been working on since launch with a new one every single season.

MG/CoF don’t need to be fixed for the game to be complete. Nor does item progression. Nor does game balance. The game will be complete as long as it has the full campaign and all missing skills. It will have balance issues and other issues (which could be planned to be fixed with the expansion) but it will be complete.

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Wrong premise there though?

First of all, there is no ‘new game’ coming out. The PR time is already over, their whole PR focus is related to console and not to PC anymore. The time of ‘fresh blood’ has simply passed… at best a revival can happen… and that does through results not through promises in this sector.

Also they announced a new game for console, sure! But the expansion is a different matter still, a majorly different one.
Don’t announce that crap when your record is as shit as the one from EHG while the base game is in such a bad unfinished state as it is. Simple as that.
Short-term reveal only… or a surprise reveal. Anything else is nonsensical from a PR standpoint, and EHG needs any dollar they can get their hands on to have the chance to avoid being forced into a paid expansion.
They fucked that up, majorly.

Still baffling I gotta repeat that.

And the MG part… if that is not a atrocious quality segment which pushes people away then sorry… I got nothing more to say to that topic, you’re a lost case then.
50% in the initial survey wanted that… and now we have a 5-10% usage rate at best. Think all the other 40% still play in CoF? The majority just pissed off, and good for them actually! It’s atrocious.

Think EHG can sustain the same happening on console once more? That would be utterly delusional.

‘The game will be complete if…’ yes, another low quality slob game… just what any market needs! ‘But it’s complete!’
Please… fuck off with that argumentation line. It’s plainly spoken disgusting.
EHG should do their job properly for once instead of those half-assed results. Fix the base game up, then move forward. Otherwise history repeats itself, simple as that.

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It’s not, though. We’ve been talking about new games/sequels/expansions in the same terms. When GD announced a new expansion, they didn’t announce how much it will cost. We still don’t know how much it will cost. No one has an issue with that. Nor is anyone saying it’s bad planning on Crate’s part.

If it wasn’t for the whole thing about an expansion maybe being paid when they previously said it wouldn’t, no one would care either. If it was a free expansion, especially one that fixed stuff in the game, no one would have cared if the game was complete or not.

We’re not talking about quality here. Just completeness. And you do have trade in the game. It has issues, but it’s there.
Which means that finishing the campaign+missing skills will, in effect, make LE a complete game, even if it’s unpolished.

That was the terminology you used, that was the terminology I replied to.

Either way, that won’t be the only things they’ll be adding. We’re still expecting skill sigils, plus whatever other endgame systems they will add in the meantime, along with fixes.
Much like the game is quite different now from launch, I expect the game to be quite different when the expansion is released from now.

In the meantime, to get back to the OP, they didn’t double down on the silence. They made a pretty standard announcement for this industry, players had concerns, they addressed it with the info they had.

And with plenty of honesty, I might add. It won’t save them from going back on their word, since that will annoy players regardless, but they could have just as easily said it would be free only to announce a year from now that no, wait, we can’t make it free after all.

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Well… does this game have a live-service construct and a seasonal system?
Hence wrong premise… it’s nonsensical to compare a SP game with a live-service game. Different model.
There is no game on the market which has major seasonal content and microtransactions based around that while also selling expansions.

Base game unfinished? → People care.
So nah.

And still people would’ve complained.
Basically the notion would’ve been ‘too incompetent to fix the base game while releasing crap on top, wrong focus!’
Seen that, been there, no thanks.

Yes… that’s the bar for ‘low quality slob’.
Not even going further into it. Be better.

The game overall is in a worse state then when it didn’t even have exalted items.
It’s been shittified sadly. Non-coherent mechanics, half-assed mid-quality implementations. Patchwork after patchwork to fix half-assed stuff before.

Yes, some mechanics are nice… but even those have severe issues in several areas which should’ve been avoided by simply researching how competition handled their content… they did so for a reason.

Which would get them into legal hot waters in the EU. We’re not in 2010 anymore, that stuff has been adjusted gladly by now.
Don’t make promises to customers which you don’t know you can hold.

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It would be, if EHG hadn’t said all along they’d also have expansions.

You mean other than D3/D4?

If it was free? No, no one would care. They’d treat the expansion simply as a “super season”, which is what it’s likely to be anyway.

I have more fun with the game in 1.3 than I did in 0.9.2, so that might be a you thing, since you tend to overanalyze and overinflate things that aren’t to your liking.
Yes, there are still plenty of issues, but it’s also more fun to play now than it was then.

According to you they already are, so it’s not like things would be different if they did that, except players wouldn’t be raging about for a year. Which means they totally could have done that just to get a year’s breeding room, rather than having this be a constant ongoing issue for a year.

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Their seasonal content is not kept.
Makes them a major outlier in general.

You would be surprised.

I’m talking about 7.9 and prior, pre exalted era.
When itemization worked.
When the campaign has a decent difficulty throughout which was coherrent and not half-assed ‘updated’ without ever being finished before something else was randomly tackled.
Before you did hundreds of hours of ‘find the single lucky drop’ play-around unfitting for the positioning of the game related to the target audience (nothing against long-term grinds… but the RNG factor was miniscule back then comparatively) and much more.

Ah yes… if you did a murder why not 20! :joy: Nah… that’s not how it goes. If you did crap and are potentially in trouble already you don’t pile on it. Because then even something which would be explained away suddenly becomes a surefire way to have a bad outcome for you.

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Considering all the stuff that’s been added to endgame since then, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even if I had played 0.7.9 and prior I still would have more fun right now than I did then.
In fact, I played a version of LE sometime in 0.5 or 0.6 or something and I hated the game. I definitely wouldn’t have bought it then. It was only when I tried it in 0.9.2 that I actually had fun with it.

They could always claim then what they’re claiming now, which is that when they said that they meant it and that the economic reality of the studio forced them to change their mind.
Except instead of saying that now, they could have said that a year from now and evade all this noise for a whole year.

30

No, it didn’t. If anything the campaign was even easier then before they reworked the divine era. Itemisation was also somewhat simpler back then I think, was 0.7.9 before the helm/chest/relic rework, so no class specific affixes, no +skills, possibly protections rather than resistances, no endurance/ward per sec/% health & the like. And crafting was majorly bad (fracturing items ftw!!!), it might have been pre-mono rework so no mono bosses & arena was much longer (they compacted the waves/difficulty at some point).

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Cos thou dost not follow the news.