Having received this email and read through it, all I kept thinking was 'promises promises promises'.
Im going to start by saying, this is all going to seem rather harsh, thats because Im rather disappointed.
I dont hold you and your staff accountable for the numerous issues the guides had at launch, although, I have to wonder how the other guide has had (on both the MoP AND WoD launches), significantly fewer issues...
Blizzard loves to change things and Ive seen it time and time again with launches and addon creators scrambling to fix their addons.
My bigger problem is your pricing structure. I have continued to say that your product is simply too expensive, your pricing structure and purchase options make no sense in todays current market, the way the guides are bundled makes no sense, and you continue to charge far too much for upgrades for expansion content (your already existing customers).
If we work backwards, in Mists, you charged $110 to upgrade everything, then in Draenor, mysteriously, you figured out a way to charge 30% more than that by charging twice, once for the questing / loremaster update ($30 as I recall), then ANOTHER large bundle of money for everything else ($115?), totaling $145.
You already know how I feel about how the guides are bundled, I believe they need to be restructured (Dailies and Reputation should be together in the same product, Titles and Achievements should be together as Titles are obtained by doing Achievements, etc.).
If you were to buy everything offered, your product far exceeds the price of World of Warcraft, which is absurd. Its like buying an accessory for your computer that costs more than the computer itself, buying an accessory for your car and said accessory costing more than the price of the car, etc. Im not saying that such things are impossible in the two examples I give, but they would have to be damn good accessories to make this sort of proposition make sense and Im sorry, your product is priced far too high.
A shopping cart is the least of my worries, although, its about damn time really.
You offer no ability to pay a small monthly recurring fee for upgrades (which should be cheaper than what I pay to Blizzard).
Your competition asks for a monthly $7 and for that, you dont have to think about another huge payment again and after having paid a total of $275, you get upgrades / updates for life. Ive even continued to pay monthly to him for at least a year beyond what I needed to for reasons that should be obvious (looking now, he's gotten $340 total from me and I couldve stopped paying long ago and still rec'd updates / upgrades).
And talk about sticker shock, Ive sent your demo to people for them to use and when they discover they like it but find out the pricing structure, how the guides are bundled, and what they will have to ultimately spend to get what they want, you dont even want to know what the responses have been.
Lastly, my biggest disappointment as of late, how you handle your updates.
Given the current state of your guides, it is absolutely inexcusable to have had no updates between December 18 and January 5th and absolutely no activity on the weekends since WoD launched.
It is obvious to me that your staff was busy updating over the Christmas holiday (there is no way all those changes listed for Jan 5th happened on Jan 5th) but whoever handles publishing the updates couldnt be bothered to check in a few times during the 2 week period and push out at least one or two updates, something your competition did at least 3 times during said 2 week period.
Im not expecting miracles, but actions speak louder than words.
You act like you have a premium product both in attitude and in your high pricing but cant be bothered to do anything over the weekend or holidays, even tho you have a product that as it sits 2 months after release, still has far too many problems to count.
Case and point, from the Jan 5th changelog:
"* Added two new Alliance taxi connections."
"* Complete system overhaul. Item weights tweaked."
The flight points are easily pulled from WoWhead and should have been in place within 2 days of WoD's launch.
http://www.wowhead.com/zones=13
Click the show on map, start with a faction, & pull each npc up one at a time (unfortunately, the coordinates given when hovering the mouse arent correct, but it took me 30 minutes to make a list of alliance flight points several weeks ago).
Item Weights should have also been tweaked a long time ago, its very easy to pull the correct figures, www.askmrrobot.com, load a generic character and edit stat weights will give you the values you need. Unfortunately, because you guys re-invented the wheel, you have to convert the numbers to a base 20 system rather than just using the figures provided by AMR but a simple excel spreadsheet would make this super easy to do.
I understand all this stuff takes time but there are ways to resolve this, crowd sourcing is one such method.
And I sill dont understand why allowing users to create their own guides by putting out the internal tools you guys use to create your guides (I know for a fact you dont do them all by hand, Im sure you have some sort of guide recorder and then go in by hand to tweak and make changes for the things it cant detect automatically) and then allowing users to upload said guides as 'unofficial' guides where each uploader would be responsible for supporting their guide(s) would be a bad thing... Addons in WoW have, in my opinion, extended the life of WoW far beyond what it should have been and user created guides could increase the popularity of your addon, especially since there is currently nothing out there that is decent (I know, your thinking WoW-Pro...there are so many issues with it starting with where to find the most recent version as the links for the recorder portion show a 2 year old version, it requires poking around on Git-Hub to find it).
There are so many ventures that you could take that would make this a far better product than it already is if you could just think outside the box.
You have the infrastructure already setup, its time to start thinking like its 2015 and not 2007.
Stop making promises and start making changes. I dont need yet another email about what you plan on doing, just start doing it.
Im going to start by saying, this is all going to seem rather harsh, thats because Im rather disappointed.
I dont hold you and your staff accountable for the numerous issues the guides had at launch, although, I have to wonder how the other guide has had (on both the MoP AND WoD launches), significantly fewer issues...
Blizzard loves to change things and Ive seen it time and time again with launches and addon creators scrambling to fix their addons.
My bigger problem is your pricing structure. I have continued to say that your product is simply too expensive, your pricing structure and purchase options make no sense in todays current market, the way the guides are bundled makes no sense, and you continue to charge far too much for upgrades for expansion content (your already existing customers).
If we work backwards, in Mists, you charged $110 to upgrade everything, then in Draenor, mysteriously, you figured out a way to charge 30% more than that by charging twice, once for the questing / loremaster update ($30 as I recall), then ANOTHER large bundle of money for everything else ($115?), totaling $145.
You already know how I feel about how the guides are bundled, I believe they need to be restructured (Dailies and Reputation should be together in the same product, Titles and Achievements should be together as Titles are obtained by doing Achievements, etc.).
If you were to buy everything offered, your product far exceeds the price of World of Warcraft, which is absurd. Its like buying an accessory for your computer that costs more than the computer itself, buying an accessory for your car and said accessory costing more than the price of the car, etc. Im not saying that such things are impossible in the two examples I give, but they would have to be damn good accessories to make this sort of proposition make sense and Im sorry, your product is priced far too high.
A shopping cart is the least of my worries, although, its about damn time really.
You offer no ability to pay a small monthly recurring fee for upgrades (which should be cheaper than what I pay to Blizzard).
Your competition asks for a monthly $7 and for that, you dont have to think about another huge payment again and after having paid a total of $275, you get upgrades / updates for life. Ive even continued to pay monthly to him for at least a year beyond what I needed to for reasons that should be obvious (looking now, he's gotten $340 total from me and I couldve stopped paying long ago and still rec'd updates / upgrades).
And talk about sticker shock, Ive sent your demo to people for them to use and when they discover they like it but find out the pricing structure, how the guides are bundled, and what they will have to ultimately spend to get what they want, you dont even want to know what the responses have been.
Lastly, my biggest disappointment as of late, how you handle your updates.
Given the current state of your guides, it is absolutely inexcusable to have had no updates between December 18 and January 5th and absolutely no activity on the weekends since WoD launched.
It is obvious to me that your staff was busy updating over the Christmas holiday (there is no way all those changes listed for Jan 5th happened on Jan 5th) but whoever handles publishing the updates couldnt be bothered to check in a few times during the 2 week period and push out at least one or two updates, something your competition did at least 3 times during said 2 week period.
Im not expecting miracles, but actions speak louder than words.
You act like you have a premium product both in attitude and in your high pricing but cant be bothered to do anything over the weekend or holidays, even tho you have a product that as it sits 2 months after release, still has far too many problems to count.
Case and point, from the Jan 5th changelog:
"* Added two new Alliance taxi connections."
"* Complete system overhaul. Item weights tweaked."
The flight points are easily pulled from WoWhead and should have been in place within 2 days of WoD's launch.
http://www.wowhead.com/zones=13
Click the show on map, start with a faction, & pull each npc up one at a time (unfortunately, the coordinates given when hovering the mouse arent correct, but it took me 30 minutes to make a list of alliance flight points several weeks ago).
Item Weights should have also been tweaked a long time ago, its very easy to pull the correct figures, www.askmrrobot.com, load a generic character and edit stat weights will give you the values you need. Unfortunately, because you guys re-invented the wheel, you have to convert the numbers to a base 20 system rather than just using the figures provided by AMR but a simple excel spreadsheet would make this super easy to do.
I understand all this stuff takes time but there are ways to resolve this, crowd sourcing is one such method.
And I sill dont understand why allowing users to create their own guides by putting out the internal tools you guys use to create your guides (I know for a fact you dont do them all by hand, Im sure you have some sort of guide recorder and then go in by hand to tweak and make changes for the things it cant detect automatically) and then allowing users to upload said guides as 'unofficial' guides where each uploader would be responsible for supporting their guide(s) would be a bad thing... Addons in WoW have, in my opinion, extended the life of WoW far beyond what it should have been and user created guides could increase the popularity of your addon, especially since there is currently nothing out there that is decent (I know, your thinking WoW-Pro...there are so many issues with it starting with where to find the most recent version as the links for the recorder portion show a 2 year old version, it requires poking around on Git-Hub to find it).
There are so many ventures that you could take that would make this a far better product than it already is if you could just think outside the box.
You have the infrastructure already setup, its time to start thinking like its 2015 and not 2007.
Stop making promises and start making changes. I dont need yet another email about what you plan on doing, just start doing it.
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