How can Blizzard possibly reduce the content drought?

**Dekkers** · 2016-04-12, 04:23 PM

If you haven't figured out by now that Blizzard has no plans to increase content distribution going forward I don't know what to tell you.
Things won't change in Legion, they will probably get worse.

Blizzard is milking you guys for all you're worth.
It is most obvious a few years ago they had a meeting with the execs and decided not to invest much time or resources into WoW anymore. Legion is going to be a failure of epic proportions.

**Cæli** · 2016-04-12, 04:26 PM

Steps :

1) Create more incentive to complete all the existing content and collections

Understand that it's useless to throw more and more content if 80% of the playerbase consider the content done when they do 20% of said content because they're not interested on the rest

**Flurryfang** · 2016-04-12, 04:27 PM

Hmm, they could come out with small content patches, like the ZA patch in TBC. Or they could just make more content

They have increased their team, they have not done anything extreme with the code lately, so making more stuff should not really be that hard. They made more content pr.month in TBC and Cata, so why not now?

The amount of content produced pr. dev is also very low, so something is wrong here

So, yeah, i think that just asking/demanding more content, is a thing that can reduce content drought. Other then that, make more small patches. It does not have to increase the content by much... Like 1-2 events, which have some quests and some lore, some more achievments and maybe a small extra area opened for people to farm something in

It will proberly keep people happy for a month or 2, atleast up to a major patch every 4-6 month

**Tuesdays** · 2016-04-12, 04:28 PM

Blizzard really needs to focus on replay value, life after raids.

**Raelbo** · 2016-04-12, 04:30 PM

Originally Posted by advanta

There are certain things where they are just being lazy or intransigent and you don't need to be a software engineer to work that out.

Saying a company is lazy is itself a lazy argument. How exactly would "Blizzard" be lazy? It's a company. It has employees who are paid. If said employees are lazy they get fired and replaced. The company has zero incentive to allow laziness within its employees.

Intransigent? Sure, I can accept that they have their way of doing things, a way that takes time and produces results unacceptable to some players. That doesn't mean they would have more success by changing the way they do things. Sure, they could change their whole approach and maybe it would result in faster content - or maybe it would result in complete disaster. Maybe they actually have been trying to change their way of doing things, and that is part of why everything is taking longer.

Originally Posted by advanta

Case in point. Pvp. No new bg's in wod or legion. Here's what a bg is. It is a chunk of the existing world content chopped up and instanced. That isn't difficult to do. All the content is already there. It should take a day or something at most. How is this difficult? I'd really like you to answer that but I don't believe there is a plausible explantion.

Maybe this is the problem with not being a software engineer....you can't understand why the task is difficult because you have never had to do it. You've simply abstracted the problem into oversimplified chunks and then assumed that it is easy to do. FYI - it is hard enough for experienced engineers to avoid abstracting in this way - we look at problems and we solve the critical issues conceptually in our minds. And then we build the system and discover the other 90% of the work that actually needs to be done.

Originally Posted by advanta

Some things do need more time, but it is increasingly difficult to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt when they repeatedly get caught bullshitting.

They got caught bullshitting?

I get that they fail to meet expectations, even those they themselves have created, that doesn't mean they were bullshitting. I genuinely think that they had hoped and expected to produce content faster for both WoD and Legion. And what I am trying to get across is that they didn't fail to meet their goals because they were bullshitting. They failed because that is the nature of this kind of project - it always takes longer to build than what was planned.

But I guess if you want to assume that it is always because they are bullshitting, then you are going to attribute every failure to more bullshitting. It's a circular argument. All I will say is this: Why would they bullshit? What do they hope to achieve?

In the end I choose to believe that they are doing their best to produce the content as fast as possible, and I recognise that they probably won't be able to deliver on their own expectations. You choose to believe that they're dishonest and deceitful. In the end maybe I am wrong, maybe you are wrong, but I would ask you this: Whose choice leaves them happier? Sure doesn't seem like yours does

**Manabomb** · 2016-04-12, 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by styil

We know that. The question is "How?" How can Blizzard create a lot more content in a lot less time given what happened in WoD and given all the additional systems that need maintaining.

Oh that's easy. They need department managers that actually give a fuck. It's really that simple. If they had better management both in the content creation and the overall project development departments, they would be able to push deadlines faster. As it stands? Their work ethic is skewed, sloppy and above all other concerns, slow.

There wasn't an air of quality with WoD after it was rushed, so the idea that Blizzard takes its time because of quality is pure nonsense. At the end of the day though? There are probably a ton of reasons why they are slow with content creation (even though they really, REALLY should not be considering their team, resources and offhand cash.), but the biggest reason I can see from a quasi-outside-looking-in state is management and accountability.

**Echocho** · 2016-04-12, 04:32 PM

Quite easy. They need to create more content patches per expansion since content patches generally take a lot less time than an expansion to develop. This would give them more time to develop an expansion parallell.

They could stop doing major overhauls of the classes every expansion since it's more often than not not something anyone has asked for. Minor adjustments and refinements can go a long way.

To avoid having to do number squishes every other expansion they could fix the problem permanently instead of temporarily. Anyone with a decent mathematical mind could sit down and figure out a good solution in a couple of nights with tweaks to past and future content.

I'm amazed how out of touch with reality they are that they can't see this themselves.

Deleted · 2016-04-12, 04:32 PM

Originally Posted by bryroo

I'm not interested in a pedantic argument about wording.

Because that allows you to completely ignore what people are actually saying. Well done.

Originally Posted by bryroo

There's more complaining about the drought because it's on the heels of a 14 month drought from 5.4. It is a consistent trend now.

No. The problem is the length of the drought itself. 14 months are unacceptable. 12 months are unacceptable.
Even if it was made worse because of the MoP drought, that is not a point in Blizzard's favour.

Originally Posted by bryroo

Please offer suggestions as to what content you plan on designing that is fun to play for 14 months at a time though.

Is that a serious question? What content? I don't even know how to answer that question.

The same content as usual? Raids, dungeons, quests.

What else?

Are you trying to say that no type of content could be fun to play for 14 months at a time? Yeah. Right on. See that's the whole point. That's why there shouldn't be a content gap of 14 months. The problem is the length of the content gap. Bring new content every 6-8 months.

**Jibjub** · 2016-04-12, 04:33 PM

Create a game with more open world content -- especially player-driven.

ArchAge was a TERRIBLY managed game but as long as people are playing it, it has content. That's the only way. Sandbox. Emergent gameplay. Living world.

**dd614** · 2016-04-12, 04:33 PM

Only by having millions more unsubscribe in protest will they get the clue.

**Pieterman** · 2016-04-12, 04:33 PM

Make content last longer. They make wonderful stuff, but not counting organized group activities(real raiding, rated BGs, rated arena) you burn through it significantly faster than pre-wotlk content. That's where the timegates come from. To give us a sense of pacing, which isn't actually there. The entire garrison campaign took me a few hours at most, but was timegated to last weeks.

It's OK to make questing take a few weeks, make some dungeons take a few hours, make professions something that requires effort. Having objectives take time isn't a bad thing. Having bosses not drop all their items at once isn't necessary. Not everything has to be accessible to someone that plays 2 hour/saturday.

It's just insulting to the WoW fanbase that you can be done with so much content so quickly, and then have to stay subscribed for timegates to reset.

**Raelbo** · 2016-04-12, 04:35 PM

Originally Posted by bryroo

Because it's cheaper to make content like a hearthstone expansion or a HotS skin than to sink a huge amount of work into a content patch that only brings fickle players back for a month or two.

While that makes for a nice little conspiracy theory, the fact is that they are spending more money on WoW development than they ever have.

**Valerossi** · 2016-04-12, 04:43 PM