How can Blizzard possibly reduce the content drought?

[Deleted]

Maybe not invalidating previous patches within a expansion with the addition of each new patch? It's kind of interesting to see how insistent Blizzard is to funnel players into the newest raids, dungeons, zones etc. It's like they've become so afraid of Naxxramas 2.0 that they're willing to just throw whatever the fuck they worked on less than a month ago, just to make sure everyone experiences the newest new.

Why would a new player be anymore interested in Hellfire Citadel than Blackrock Foundry? Both are completely fresh and new content for said player, and Hellfire Citadel isn't even necessarily any better/more fun than Blackrock Foundry was. Generally this philosophy bugs me, but it's up to Blizzard.

[Tuesdays]

I agree with this 100%

There's no reason for Blizzard to reach up inside the game's asshole and rearrange everything every single expansion. Just make some fucking content.

I think the biggest problem Blizzard has is the amount of resources they waste on balance, even with prune after prune they can't do it. Time to face the facts, balance was an after thought, and popularity of the game has dwindled too much to take e-sports seriously. Caster in melee range? Get rekt! Melee at ranged? Get rekt!! Years of balancing issues solved.

[leyst]

Make legacy raids as TW and make them rewarding but than again this would probably take too much time which would take their time away from future patches etc.

[Deleted]

Knowing blizz at this point they will give us a airport with a mission table and call it a major content patch. You won't be able to fly the planes of course.

[Tart]

I believe the content droughts are deliberate and will continue moving forward

Been thinking this for a long time now. I believe the content is there but they are drip feeding us.

[Maltore]

they can reduce content droughts by doing one simple thing: quit fiddling with game systems and various "modes" and just create some good old fashioned content like a dungeon or a raid.

It appears that the current game is being run by system/mode designers rather than content creators. Just take a look at the upcoming mythic/mythic+ dungeon system that requires a table/figure to understand what the hell they are planning to do there. Things should not be this complicated. Core of good MMO game play has always been interactions with other players and "player-created" content, rather than a plethora of different convoluted game play modes.

Exactly. Nothing encourages people to log in more than a new raid, dungeon, zone, etc. Even if it's just a single dungeon, or a single-boss raid, people will want to see the next new thing. Their current mind set is to simply tweak the challenge/reward system.

I believe there's a definite correlation of quantity of content to expansion favorability. Having good quality is important, but even the most polished feature gets old no matter how you tweak the systems surrounding it.

Timewalking is a good example of this issue. It's a good system, but there's nothing 'new' about it. I think the resources spent creating the TW system could have been better spent toward creating a new dungeon or single-boss raid.

[Deleted]

By adding content that doesn't take a few hours to get through. The weekly events were a great idea. Continuous content like that is a start. Perhaps spreading them out over different zones in Azeroth (Kalimdor/EK)?

[twh]

They are creatively bankrupt. They no longer support WoW as their main cash-cow. They don't care anymore.

[Spotnick]

The biggest issue Blizzard has is pacing the content. If they had released Blackrock Foundry in June and Hellfire Citadel in January, probably nobody would have complained.

The first tier is never long enough, the amount of people who killed Blackhand mythic is very low, and many people never even cleared Highmaul mythic and jumped straight in BRF because the gear wasn't worth it.

As for non-raiding content, that's another thing. They should plan ahead and release new zones like Tanaan every 3-4 months. Why do we need to explore the whole continent in the first weeks anyways... The pacing of the Thunder Isle where it unlocked zones with time was an interesting concept, but it should be like that for the whole xpac duration, not just for a couple of weeks.

[Deleted]

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.

You sound like Blizzard now.

A battleground is instanced world pvp. Instance a world zone and tell people to go fight there you have a battleground. That's it. Stop stroking your beard and going "ahhh", then muttering vague generalities as if you were in possession of some kind of higher wisdom.

If you actually have some specific objections that would be different but you haven't produced any.

[Nightstalker]

Increase outdoor mob HP, kill count requirements and XP/effort needed for lvling. Remove lvl Boost/RaF. Sounds like Vanilla, TBC. Well it worked.

[Baconeggcheese]

Content pacing.

Their xpac release schedules haven't changed much at all over the years, they can very clearly produce content at a specific rate. What's changed is the pacing of that content, everything is insanely streamlined to the point where you can piss through the content in a month or two of casual play and then have nothing to do for the next X months.

Grind and tedium are necessary evils of mmorpg's as they'll never be able to pump out new content at the rate players consume it these days.

[Stormspark]

By *gasp* supporting their expansions and creating content, instead of spending 2 weeks making a shipyard and then swimming in their Scrooge Mcduck money bin instead of working on the game. (Yes, I know the art dept worked their asses off even in WOD, they still have my respect.)

[RickJamesLich]

At this point I'm starting to think that the conspiracy theories about blizzard purposely tanking wow, so that it's playerbase will go to it's more lucrative games (like Hearth Stone or HotS) may not be far from the truth. I just heard that all the negative shit from the garrisons will essentially be back once again. I'm really amazed, they must think their fans are dummies lol.

[Deleted]

Community driven content. Basically: events that are controlled, triggered or in other way influenced by us, allowing for grand plotlines and stories to develop for YOU, the player by other players.

It's either that or having and A, B and maybe even a C team constantly making content, á'la how CoD was made by like three companies to keep up with the yearly demand. Good luck with consistency then, though. :P

[Stormspark]

The MoP content drought could have easily been mitigated by spacing content better. They could have cut 5 months out of that 14 month drought by slightly delaying 5.1-4 (4-6 weeks each); people were still progressing in raid/completing other objectives when those patches went out.
The content drought in WoD could not be solved by anything other than more content though.

This. MOP actually had a lot of content, it was just poorly paced.

WOD...didn't have any content updates after 6.0 unless you were a raider. 6.2 was a halway decent raid patch but otherwise had nothing new except a zone that was pretty to look at but didn't really have any substance. So 1 small content patch. Compared to 1 large and 3 medium content patches for Mists.

[Stormspark]

At this point I'm starting to think that the conspiracy theories about blizzard purposely tanking wow, so that it's playerbase will go to it's more lucrative games (like Hearth Stone or HotS) may not be far from the truth. I just heard that all the negative shit from the garrisons will essentially be back once again. I'm really amazed, they must think their fans are dummies lol.

Believe it or not, there is precedent for that. That's EXACTLY what happened to the original Battlestar Galactica (the real one, not the crappy in-name-only "remake"). It was expensive to produce, but it was too popular to outright cancel. The network *deliberately* screwed the show (moving it into unwatchable time slots, etc - even VHS recorders were expensive and thus rare for most people in those days so it wasn't a simple case of just recording and watching it later like you can easily do now), hoping that the viewers would watch their cheap sitcoms instead. Note: it didn't work, the network lost a metric ton of money on that deal.

When BSG was moved to essentially unwatchable time slots and then cancelled, the fans DID NOT just go "oh, we'll watch these cheap sitcoms instead". They just stopped watching that channel entirely. Blizzard should take note.

[Deleted]

How can Blizzard reduce the content drought: create more content ?...

Tons of dungeons.

Rewards that last longer.

Make classes so they are never redundant in PVP.

Add higher difficulties to old dungeons.

Blizzard have tons and tons of great lore they could explore as well. They should explore Lovecraftian lore more as well because those creatures are more deceptive than most people realize.

I am particularly interested in how Sargeras would interact with the old gods as well; they wouldn't be on the friendliest of terms despite both living in the world of darkness.

So there you go. I still love this game and hope Blizzard turn it around even with the current model they are using.

Edit: corrected mistakes.