New Feature: Log In Via Social Networks

Brynd:
Right, it's not rocket science. Here's a window into what's behind this though: every time a "new thing" deemed interesting enough to highlight in a website article, the people who write our web articles are charged with the task of highlighting that "new thing" in the best way they can. From experience of writing articles myself in the past, it can seem counter-intuitive to play down the features of "new thing" and make it sound dull, so usually the idea is to make something sound either great or at least list all it's features or benefits in a relatively perfunctory way with at least some kind of positivity. Now I'm reading over that article right now and I can't really see that we've gone overboard in expounding the virtues of this system: apart from a few perhaps unnecessary exclaimation marks, the article seems pretty neutral and explanatory to me and doesn't seem to make the feature sound spectacular.   So why make an article at all?  One reason might be that if we release a very obvious feature like this (I mean, you can't help but see it as soon as you go into the game) if we didn't supply some kind of article on the website to announce and explain it in some at least brief detail (as we did) it might generate some confusion and thus might lead to more tickets to Customer Support: tickets that could have been avoided with a simple, brief article. Just a thought. There could be other reasons too that just aren't coming to mind fast enough to write up. 

 

Brynd:   I don't want you to stop playing a game you're enjoying  I did say that!    I'm merely suggesting that you can enjoy the game without all your long-standing issues and requests being resolved and maybe that's enough. It's just that there are certain features or changes people constantly ask for, even in unrelated threads like this, and we can choose to either reply to them (as I did... possibly mistakenly) or ignore them because we've already passed this feedback onto developers lots of times and we now have faith that either the developers will see that the benefit to doing these changes is great enough to do them, or they simply disagree the game should be changed in that way, or they do intend to make the change sometime but just not yet.  

As somewhat a related aside note, regarding performance versus graphical quality: from my own experience this can sometimes be a terrible choice for a player to have to make, because we have an urge to see the game with as high a quality as possible yet this can play against our desire to have smooth performance, something that can be sacrificed with higher quality visuals and effects. At the end of the day, even the lowest graphical quality is often better than it would have been say 10 years ago or more, so the equilibrium between performance and visual quality that most of us end up accepting as "good enough" does gradually improve over time for those of us (like me) who can't have the most powerful computers.
 

Brynd:   If you have access, I urge you to! Testing the game is really important for us to ensure it's a good release.    But I feel a huge amount of empathy for all the players who don't have CBT access so I don't really want to focus on mentioning WoWs if I can avoid it.

Anyhow, thanks for a decent chat without vitriol.