Folks,
Okay, it's been a long day so I'm going to post some quick responses, comments, etc.
1) We are not cutting out 2/3 of the content, 1/3 of the content and frankly, what we are cutting out in terms of content is, in most cases, stuff that people have never even seen yet. While the capital cities were parts of the end game, a city capture is only supposed to happen once a month and even when you take out 4 classes out of 24, somehow this doesn't add up to a huge content change. All the starting areas, PQs, quests, zones, etc. that were not city-based are still in the game. And since the cities, prior to our decision to double-down on 2, didn't have all the PQs/Quests/etc. that they have now, we aren't losing a lot of content.
2) We announced this now, rather than in two months, precisely so people would not be surprised when they buy the box. If you feel that you don't want to play WAR now because we've cut classes/cities that you've never seen, you are certainly free to do so. Just like when we announced the last delay I said that people should not pre-order (or should cancel) and just wait till either we lift the NDA (coming soon) or until the game launches. Now, if we don't lift the NDA and if we hadn't made this announcement and then you bought the box, you'd have a heck of a right to get angry. As I've always said here and elsewhere (multiple times), that while we're in beta, things are set in mud and I've also said that we weren't afraid to cut things that weren't great.
3) The two capital cities are just the first two capital cities. Other cities will absolutely be done and put into the game post-launch once we see how all things shake out when we launch. Oh, by the way, the people who have said here and elsewhere that you're really paying for beta when we launch because I said that we will change things post-launch, LOL, nice try. One of the really unique things about MMOs is that we can make changes to the game after launch in order to make them better. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. No MMO is any different, we all change after launch. How much we change and how much we change for the better is really the key.
4) Regarding Punkbuster, it will either work really, really well or we won't keep it in. We'll know as we progress through beta.
5) Regarding another pushback. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who are saying that we should have delayed again were some of the same people that said last time that if we delayed again, they would lose interest, cancel their pre-order, epic fail, etc. I've addressed in great detail, why we have made the moves we did but we didn't make these moves to avoid delaying the game again. Frankly, I think another delay announcement would have had a dramatically worse effect on the community than this announcement.
6) As to whether this game is going to be unfinished at launch, well, depends on how you look at things. I've said over the years that MMOs are never finished until they shut down, that's the beauty of MMOs. However, if you mean by unfinished that "we're not going to have everything in the game that we hoped to when we started out" well, you'd be right. OTOH, no MMO that I can think of (WoW included) had everything that they hoped when they started out on the project. That's how these things go. Now, my definition of unfinished are treasure lists that are blank, spells that don't work properly, typos, graphical glitches and unbalanced classes. In terms of that, we will certainly not be an unfinished game when we launch. So, if you are not going to buy a game because it doesn't have absolutely everything that you'd hoped (or even that we hoped it had) it would have, then don't buy WAR, it's as simple as that. Of course, you would never buy any MMO ever and probably most games as well (unless the dev either doesn't talk about stuff that they would like to put in the game or they lie to ya). Stuff changes all the time during development and especially during beta.
7) Regarding the cities, the cities in WAR were not there to be the places people go to right away, this was not WoW or other MMOs. All the Tiered content is still there for each of the races.
Regarding "Keeping our promises" and stuff like that. We are keeping our promise and that is to make a great RvR-centric MMO with Warhammer. We never promised that we would have in 24 careers but just that is what we were working on and hoping to put in. Frankly, one of the few promises I have ever made is that some of our decisions would piss people off and well, I've kept my promise.
9) I'll re-emphasize again that another delay would not have meant that the 4 careers would be still in and for certain, we wouldn't have launched with 6 cities, I don't care how much time we had. Six cities sounded really good on paper but we believe it wouldn't have worked out that way at launch.
10) As to how it's all going to work going forward, more details coming. Once things settle down we'll go into great detail about how it's going to work. Same game, some slightly different mechanics to make sure that people who do not have a CC yet are not put at a disadvantage but it's the same game.
11) On the whole smoke and mirrors thing, well, like I said in my response, we had a lot of information coming. If we wanted to engage in smoke and mirrors kind of behavior, we wouldn't have made this announcement, talked about it, etc. till the last minute.
So, that's it for now. It's been a very long day and I've been posting a lot so I'm taking a break.
In the end, I'm truly sorry that we had to announce any bad news but as I've said here before, I'd rather have you all pissed at us now than when we launch.
Mark