Reason for persistence of content droughts in WoW?

[caervek]

Of course it existed. Content that one will never realistically reach is content that might as well not exist at all.

For most players, PvE in BC was one big content drought from almost the start.

Lulwat? unless you were in a really high end guild the was always PVE content in TBC, it even had catch up mechanics via justice items and highly itemized PVP gear (you could get T6 quality gear from the vendor/AH, and S3 weapons were better than T6 ones).

[jbombard]

Never understood the "Greed" reason. If they are greedy they want more money for less work. But nobody can tell me that is working whyn subs went down from 12 to 5 or less million. AND it could be clearly nailed to content draught. There would be SOMETHING easy somewhere to toss out as content.

Essentially, the people who stick around during the drought are funding the development of the expack. Then when they are done, they sell that xpack that was paid for by the drought subs to the drought subs and everyone else, essentially 100% margin on the expack. Subs come back for the new content that was paid for by the people who stayed subbed, and more essentially free money at least till people get bored of the new xpack. Content patches aren't sold to the player(yet), so the cost of their development is paid for by subs which means a lower % margin. Plain and simple as long as enough people stay subbed to fund the development of the xpack, and as long as people keep coming back, there isn't really any incentive to release content faster.

[Osmeric]

Sunwell was added because WotLK was behind schedule (according to Ghostcrawler).

He never said that.

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Lulwat? unless you were in a really high end guild the was always PVE content in TBC, it even had catch up mechanics via justice items and highly itemized PVP gear (you could get T6 quality gear from the vendor/AH, and S3 weapons were better than T6 ones).

No, most players got to maybe Kara, if that, and then stalled out. They had no realistic path forward compatible with how they were willing to play.

This is why Wrath was so different from tBC. tBC failed to engage most of its audience.

[jbombard]

He never said that.

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No, most players got to maybe Kara, if that, and then stalled out. They had no realistic path forward compatible with how they were willing to play.

This is why Wrath was so different from tBC. tBC failed to engage most of its audience.

Yet BC still managed to continuously gain more subs than they lost(growth) vs wrath which ended with pretty much the same number of subs(essentially flat compared to other xpacks)

[Osmeric]

Yet BC still managed to continuously gain more subs than they lost(growth) vs wrath which ended with pretty much the same number of subs(essentially flat compared to other xpacks)

This bad argument has been debunked many times. It only makes sense if all other factors are equal. But Wrath was releasing into a more mature market than tBC.

What's more, Wrath, which started with more players, had to attract more just to counter churn (which averages 5% or more per month in an MMO). With that churn rate, Wrath was attracting as many (or more) new players per month as tBC, and many more than Vanilla, even though net sub gain was minimal.

[Relapses]

This bad argument has been debunked many times. It only makes sense if all other factors are equal. But Wrath was releasing into a more mature market than tBC.

What's more, Wrath, which started with more players, had to attract more just to counter churn (which averages 5% or more per month in an MMO). With that churn rate, Wrath was attracting as many (or more) new players per month as tBC, and many more than Vanilla, even though net sub gain was minimal.

Whoa dude, don't drop fancy buzzwords like "churn rate" into this discussion. We're circlejerking about how much Blizzard hates its customers, logic has no place in this argument.

[melodramocracy]

Quicker content consumption naturally leads to an equally accelerated content drought. Blizzard can't create at a pace equivalent to what their target "I'm a busy gamer!" audience apparently expects from an MMO.

As far as the now typical end-of-expansion droughts, who knows? Part of it seems to be Blizzard simply being fine with reduced player activity. Perhaps they feel that it builds hype that much more when new content finally ships. Perhaps it stems from most expansions being a bit front-loaded, which leads us back to my first point.

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Most players never started BT at all.

Yet players stuck around anyhow. I guess the era of the player who quits if they don't get a shiny during every play session hadn't migrated here yet.

[caervek]

He never said that.

Ahem:

it was added when LK ended up taking longer

No, most players got to maybe Kara, if that, and then stalled out. They had no realistic path forward compatible with how they were willing to play.

Every player got to Kara because it was the first raid, and most did it because the early bosses were tuned for quest/Naxx gear. As for a path forward you cleared Kara (the quality of badge/crafted/pvp gear ramped up each tier allowing even complete noobs to beat Kara) you could either do TK/SWP, or if you outgeared them skip to BT/Hyjal, or if you didn't have 25 the was Zul Aman (which also dropped BT/Hyjal-ish level loot).

The only advantage with Wrath was every raid had a 10m mode not just the starting one and the penultimate one (but the gear was lower level), but the catchup system with gear was the same.

[Relapses]

Every player got to Kara because it was the first raid and the early bosses were tuned for quest/Naxx gear. As for a path forward you cleared Kara (the quality of badge/crafted/pvp gear ramped up each tier allowing even noobs to beat Kara) you could either do TK/SWP, or if you outgeared them skip to BT/Hyjal, or if you didn't have 25 the was Zul Aman (which also dropped BT/Hyjal-ish level loot).

Did you actually play in TBC? Because due to attunements you most certainly couldn't skip anything by simply outgearing it. Hell at BC's launch, you couldn't even do TK/SSC unless you killed Gruul/Mag, which was a pretty tall order if your guild was just doing Kara.

[Osmeric]

Yet players stuck around anyhow. I guess the era of the player who quits if they don't get a shiny during every play session hadn't migrated here yet.

It takes time for a player to get enough clue to realize it ain't going to happen. But once that happens, the player will be willing to bail out. Blizzard no longer has the cushion of players who are so clueless about the game not being designed for them.

This clue extends to other MMOs as well, which I believe is part of why they haven't done well since WoW. The audience is more discerning now.

A lot of the hardcore whining is basically "why aren't you all still willing to cluelessly play a game that's designed for MEEEEE?"

[DeadmanWalking]

Biased poll is biased poll. /endthread

[Wikko]

While I am certain there was some mismanagement involved (no company is perfect) I genuinely believe it is nigh impossible to provide consistent 4-6 month content patches while at the same time creating a new expansion. They need the drought at the end to do the bulk of the work and fine-tuning, they cant be focused on two sides at once.

That's not to say they're not doing ANYTHING related to the future expansions while rolling out patches (hell, they're probably gonna start working on the following expansion the moment Legion hits) it's just that it's probably a much slower and more inefficient way of doing things.

Have the normal team handling the current content and another team to handle the next expansion, sure it costs more to double the work force but in the same time they make millions by selling the expansion. It seems like they just split their workers now and that's why we get so little content. It's greed and mismanagement.

[Deleted]

I think that Blizzard need to stop telling people there wont be droughts, that cycles will be shorter. People wont accept that shorter cycles mean less content, so they might as well go whole hog (like they are with legion) with large periods of drought. Obviously we dont have Legion yet, so everything I say is based on perception, but it seems that it will have a shit tonne of content, whether people like that content or not, and that takes a long time to do.

Im not excusing them for Warlords here either, but I know some people have completely unreasonable expectations with regards to content. If Legion has as much as it looks like it will, people will argue it should have come out 4 months earlier, despite it having a large amount of content that is reasonable for the timeframe that the expac has been built in.

It is still kinda last chance saloon for me. I didn't hate Warlords, I'm still subbed and still get a decent amount of enjoyment out of it, but it was still a difficult pill to swallow.

[caervek]

Did you actually play in TBC?

Yup.

Because due to attunements you most certainly couldn't skip anything by simply outgearing it.

The BT/Hyjal attunements were removed when Sunwell opened allowing players to skip SSC/TK, which made sense as the gear from badges/crafting/pvp/etc had become so good at that point most SSC/TK stuff was redundant ant it was better to just work on BT/MH instead.

Hell at BC's launch, you couldn't even do TK/SSC unless you killed Gruul/Mag, which was a pretty tall order if your guild was just doing Kara.

Gruul was on the same tier as Kara hence most guilds with enough players killing him before clearing Kara, Mag was quite hard, but also fun.

[Deleted]

We can only guess but sometimes I have the idea they change their minds too much between expansions, which means they lose on development time.

I don't think it's the greed part at least.

[Pieterman]

Never understood the "Greed" reason. If they are greedy they want more money for less work. But nobody can tell me that is working whyn subs went down from 12 to 5 or less million. AND it could be clearly nailed to content draught. There would be SOMETHING easy somewhere to toss out as content.

Few are opposed to Blizzard trying to make money. It gets called greed when they sacrifice their product to try and make more.

Quicker content consumption naturally leads to an equally accelerated content drought. Blizzard can't create at a pace equivalent to what their target "I'm a busy gamer!" audience apparently expects from an MMO.

This. If you make content to satisfy someone for 5 hours a week anyone that plays more will run out of stuff to do. They threw in tons of filler and timegates to try and keep people busy, but didn't really work out.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Of course it existed. Content that one will never realistically reach is content that might as well not exist at all.

For most players, PvE in BC was one big content drought from almost the start.

what is this post

[jbombard]

This bad argument has been debunked many times. It only makes sense if all other factors are equal. But Wrath was releasing into a more mature market than tBC.

What's more, Wrath, which started with more players, had to attract more just to counter churn (which averages 5% or more per month in an MMO). With that churn rate, Wrath was attracting as many (or more) new players per month as tBC, and many more than Vanilla, even though net sub gain was minimal.

Yet your argument is BC failed to engage yet had growth, but wrath engaged players more yet didn't grow. The argument hasn't been debunked or proven because we don't have the information. That said BC failing to engage players, yet having consistent growth seems much harder to prove. Unless of course you are going to go with the whole BC was new and Wrath was old crap argument. More likely IMHO is that decisions in BC led to the flattening of subs in wrath, and decisions in wrath led to the crash in cataclysm as changes to game design generally don't have an immediate effect on the community.

[Osmeric]

what is this post

You seem to have serious difficulty understanding things that disagree with your unthinking prejudices.

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Yet your argument is BC failed to engage yet had growth, but wrath engaged players more yet didn't grow. The argument hasn't been debunked or proven because we don't have the information.

But I can observe that your argument is logically flawed. The alternative possibility, that BC grew because it was in a market environment where growth was easier to achieve, seems more consistent with the evidence.

The argument you are making is akin to arguing that 1960s US cars are better than current US cars, because car ownership was growing then and isn't growing now.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Yet your argument is BC failed to engage yet had growth, but wrath engaged players more yet didn't grow. The argument hasn't been debunked or proven because we don't have the information. That said BC failing to engage players, yet having consistent growth seems much harder to prove. Unless of course you are going to go with the whole BC was new and Wrath was old crap argument. More likely IMHO is that decisions in BC led to the flattening of subs in wrath, and decisions in wrath led to the crash in cataclysm as changes to game design generally don't have an immediate effect on the community.

BC was the last good expansion, even though flying mounts and cross servers(BGs only at the time) were the two worst things to be added to WOW, at least it had a proper progression path and difficulty.

Not sure how people think WOTLK is better than TBC, WOTLK is when the game got dumbed down and everything got worse and was truly the beginning of the end of WOW.