Did Blizz ever gave an explanation why WoD also had a 1 year+ content drought?

[Pantelija]

I remember how Tom Chilton explained why we had SoO in Pandaria so long. He said the 50% increase in staff members made things go slower than expected and that SoO was running 5 months too long and he was sorry. I don't recall any explanation why Hellfire Citadel is running for 12+ months and no other content. Did I miss it? If there was any, please link it, I'm really curious.

Dont worry if you were naive enough to believe in that shitty excuse about SoO you will believe in the excuse they will use for Hellfire Citadel aswell.

[meroes]

Retarded amount of focus on things that most player's don't care about/get sick of after a few months + destroying professions and taking a full year to release a reason to run dungeons.

Also tons of time wasted on changing/pruning classes for no good reason other than to make the different. I don't think it was lack of time or people, I think they just focused on unimportant things.

[kary]

Droughts are not inevitable. They didn't start occurring until late Cataclysm. Content updates were managed in a much better fashion pre-Cataclysm.

ICC was also a year +
Droughts been a thing.

[Alydael]

They gave the excuse with the info that passed NDA on June 10. "Legion took longer than anticipated." Of course! How foolish of us not to realize this!

[Thetruth1400]

I'm curious as well but it would probably just be a general statement saying "Oh we were working on legion, to make it an amazing expansion and that's why WoD turned out to be less than half the game we planned."

Honestly, don't think they could do it that way because then people would respond back with, "Well if you feel that's the case, maybe you should be offering Legion free or at a severely discounted price due to your failings."

Most likely though, they'll use their tired, canned excuse of, "We don't release games until they're ready and meet our always almost overcritical standards."

ICC was also a year +
Droughts been a thing.

That's kind of a half truth at best. ICC released Dec, 2009. Ruby Sanctum released June, 2010. Cataclysm launched October 2010. That's 11 months from ICC until Cata launch and even then they added something in the interim for people to do, even if it was one boss with three sub bosses.

Yes, drought has been a thing, but when the first one happened, aka ICC - Cata launch, they went out of their way to apologize and even tried to add a little something, aka Ruby Sanctum, in as an apology along with a "That wasn't acceptable and we're going to learn from that mistake" comment afterwards. From there though, they've just been drought after drought, and frankly, it's getting worse each expansion. If they really wanted the droughts to go away, they'd be doing better about their content release pacing, and even more so on the ass of their leads making sure they start motivating their teams to actually get their work done on time. I'm no expert, but I really don't see there being that many issues for a super established company like this that basically has to make the same exact expansion over and over with different mobs and zones. It's not like they're game breakingly rewriting everything from scratch every time here.

[TS26]

Isn't it obvious? They were focusing on other games.

this 1000 times.

[Deleted]

There's a reason for why Legion seems to have way more contents than Wod.

The 5.4 isn't the right patch to compare. It's closer to what happened at the end of Cataclysm, but instead of making a joke-raid (#dragonsoul), they didn't make any raid at all. That's why Mop had actual contents, and Legion will have too.

[Glorious Leader]

Honestly, don't think they could do it that way because then people would respond back with, "Well if you feel that's the case, maybe you should be offering Legion free or at a severely discounted price due to your failings."

Most likely though, they'll use their tired, canned excuse of, "We don't release games until they're ready and meet our always almost overcritical standards."



That's kind of a half truth at best. ICC released Dec, 2009. Ruby Sanctum released June, 2010. Cataclysm launched October 2010. That's 11 months from ICC until Cata launch and even then they added something in the interim for people to do, even if it was one boss with three sub bosses.

Yes, drought has been a thing, but when the first one happened, aka ICC - Cata launch, they went out of their way to apologize and even tried to add a little something, aka Ruby Sanctum, in as an apology along with a "That wasn't acceptable and we're going to learn from that mistake" comment afterwards. From there though, they've just been drought after drought, and frankly, it's getting worse each expansion. If they really wanted the droughts to go away, they'd be doing better about their content release pacing, and even more so on the ass of their leads making sure they start motivating their teams to actually get their work done on time. I'm no expert, but I really don't see there being that many issues for a super established company like this that basically has to make the same exact expansion over and over with different mobs and zones. It's not like they're game breakingly rewriting everything from scratch every time here.

The game was more varied too at that point as well. You could run the old weekly raid quest for badges, yiu could run dungeons for badges (frost), farm Hodir rep etc etc. It wasn't just raid highmaul in 4 different difficulties...

[TheWindWalker]

The 5.4 isn't the right patch to compare. It's closer to what happened at the end of Cataclysm, but instead of making a joke-raid (#dragonsoul), they didn't make any raid at all. That's why Mop had actual contents, and Legion will have too.

Dragonsoul was the raid wherein you fought the Big Bad of the entire expansion who was on the box and login screen. We aren't talking Ruby Sanctum here. Also 5.4 lasted longer than 4.3.

[Deleted]

Dragonsoul was the raid wherein you fought the Big Bad of the entire expansion who was on the box and login screen. We aren't talking Ruby Sanctum here. Also 5.4 lasted longer than 4.3.

It changes nothing to the fact that they rushed DS in order to make Mop better. You can say it's stupid to rush the raid with the big bad in the box in it, which surely is, but they did it anyway. Also expansion development starts way before the last tier yearly gap (and they lost a lot of time on the garrisons in Wod's development).

[Smauldy]

They feed the same BS every content drought. "We know we messed up, but it won't happen again, trust us!"

[Soeroah]

While I don't work there and thus have no more knowledge of their inner workings than they've publicly shared, I'd assume it's a combination of training up those new staff members slowing down the early stages of Legion, the fact that they pretty much wrote WoD off before it was launched and scaled it back content-wise so they could focus on Legion, and the fact that they've apparently got plans to have more than the normal number of patches in Legion, meaning a fair chunk of the developers are probably working on Patch 7.1-7.3 content already, rather than trying to polish Legion launch content off first.

Faster and greater numbers of patches, as these recent interviews show is the plan, don't come by finishing off 7.0 first. They are working on the next few patches in parallel. Could well mean that the more experienced developers are spread across the different content releases than them all working on the main expansion and leaving the new people to work exclusively on the patches.

[Deleted]

Are you kidding, trying to troll or just very uninformed? Have you seen how much content there is in Legion compared to WoD?

Not sure how to answer, this is just flat out wrong.

Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, months before WoD released. We know how that turned out.

And its still months to cut out even more 'not promised' content to push it in half a year later as the first and last 'new content' patch until 2018.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

The latest dev interview gave a rather weak "legion took longer than expected". The solution they're going for is spacing out the content more in Legion apparently.

[Walrock]

"You think we do, but we dont"

[Thundering]

Why is it only the expansions that should release new content now storys and new class devolpment? They should fix things as this as a expension is udnerway.

[Tuesdays]

WoD was filler, while they worked on legion, pretty sure that give the explanation you're looking for.

5.2 leaked the warlock class hall, said to be part of the green fire quest hub? Which imo doesn't fit with how GF quest works, so maybe, just maybe, it really was early legion pre-wod. If it was green-fire quest hub for MoP, why would they keep so much of the rudimentary ideas intact for the class hall?

I remember at the tail end of vanilla there was an old broken bridge in the files, but we didn't see it used until wrath. I think when Blizzard started coming up with ideas for Legion, they were gushing, and when they thought about WoD they were...Like us, just ugh...

[Einsz]

Because they rather work on Hearthstone and Overwatch than on WoW.

[Jahaga]

ICC was also a year +
Droughts been a thing.

The. Ruby. Sanctum.

[kary]

The. Ruby. Sanctum.

so single boss 1 room encounters are all yall want?
Cool.

They shouldve waited 6 months to release kazzak.