Ocho: What's Next?

So let's talk about how we release news and the reasoning behind it.This is going to be a long one, but hopefully informative as I'm gonna go into a lot of "how the sausage is made" or more accurately "how the sausage is talked about" kind of talk.Generally speaking, RIFT follows a fairly predictable release schedule, and messaging is based around that. While we can't of course commit to specifics if you look at the pattern over the last couple years there are certain similarities that can be observed. The exact timing of messaging is a little more flexible, but it's derived from a couple basic principles:

1. Telling people things too early means they get excited, then lose a lot of that excitement before the thing arrives
2. Telling people things too late makes people nervous and doesn't give them time to get excited. Also it doesn't give us enough time to properly communicate everything that's coming. RIFT Updates are pretty large, and usually have way more stuff than we have time to talk about already.
3. Telling people about things that are coming way off before the last set of things are delivered means that their focus will be on the far off things, not the things they can do soon.

So our general communication strategy over the last couple years is to announce something a bit ahead, talk over the various features, then give a release date, and finally recap what's been released. If a release has multiple pieces (like 3.6, with the Carnival, MoM IA, and CoA content all being released separately) then the pattern may repeat itself in smaller ways a couple of times.So, if we look at that information, where are we in the cycle now? Well everything we've announced for 3.6 has now been released, and it's been a couple weeks. That's a bit of time, but usually we go a bit longer than that before we announce the next thing. Thereare hints though. While BrandGuru, myself, our PR team, our devs, and a few others sit down and formulate a strategy about when to release news, invariably a little bit slips out. And that's probably good. Or even encouraged. ;)Now with Nightmare Tide, we probably let too much slip too early. People weren't as excited about the later 2.X releases as the content deserved because the focus was already on 3.0. People were paying attention to what was coming much later, and not paying attention to the cool stuff they were getting now. Totally understandable, but we did learn some good stuff from it too. So that goes in to our thinking.Finally let's talk about Producer's letters. The head of RIFT, Archonix, only writes a couple of letters a year. Those are focused on the big picture, longer term plans and the biggest possible items. Things like Multicore and our 5th Anniversary. Those were big deals, but he didn't go into every feature or aspect of say 3.6 Celebration of the Ascended. There's a ton of cool stuff he never got to mention because otherwise he'd have had to have written a book. And some of the cool stuff wasn't finalized when he wrote that letter, so he'd also have to invest in a time machine*.So click around some links you might find in this post, and try to read between the lines with the information on how we think I've shared here. Obviously it's a small slice of the picture, but it maybe gives you some insight. Either way we've got lots of stuff coming to talk to you about, just not quite yet.Thanks,Ocho*I keep requesting a time machine, but my requests are always marked as "Closed - Unresolved".

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Ocho: What's Next?