Almost everyone now seems to be painfully aware that there will not be an update this week. I guess this really shouldn't have surprised anyone -- the fact that Sega chose to let the Halloween update run for three weeks (until Nov. 21) suggests to me that they would not have any content ready to go until then.
Which brings us to next Friday. The Halloween lobbies are scheduled to come down at that time -- but what then? Something's got to give soon. As I've mentioned numerous times on this blog, I think that the future of this game is riding on next week's maintenance.
Look at it this way: Thanksgiving is two weeks away. It's almost a sure bet that Sega of America will not want to do any maintenance on Friday of that week. Last year Sega compensated for the Thanksgiving holiday by doing maintenance on a Tuesday, but there were special circumstances surrounding that update (the release of Ambition of the Illuminus). I doubt that will happen again.
That brings us into December, and kicks off a month of holidays and short working weeks. Given Sega's track record over the last few months, how many times do you think they will want to do maintenance? I see only three Fridays where they could possibly do any updating at all, and I bet they won't take the servers down for more than one of them.
In other words, maintenance weeks from now until the end of the year will probably be few and far between -- despite the "every two weeks" plan Sega reps tried to push back in September. That's why next Friday's maintenance is so crucial. If no new content is pushed onto the servers at that time, I expect that a lot of people will just quit for awhile -- or maybe for good. Who's to say that new content won't arrive until January? There is nothing that would kill this game faster (you know, besides a server crash).
Of course, we wouldn't even be talking about this if Sega would just update the game on a regular basis. Unfortunately, that's apparently too much to ask for these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment