Did they really say this about xpacs?

[IKT]

Noo. They've been trying to shorten the content gap at the end of expansions since way back when. Faster/yearly expansions was only a thing in WOD, a failed experiment.

Wrong.

And not to attack this sentiment (I know where you are coming from), but since TBC/WotLK, we've actively stated our goal was to get the length between expansions down to one-a-year as our way of combating a lack of content

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...6000?page=3#56

WoD was effected the worst because they grew the WoW team significantly and a large part of WoD was spent training and bringing developers up to speed with the product. You can't just plop a developer into one of the largest codebases in the world and expect them to instantly be at 100%, hence when they moved onto the next expac at the slowed rate WoD was left with nothing.

However all previous expansions were effected by this same goal, from TBC (Black Temple was supposed to be the last raid instance) to WOTLK (ICC was supposed to be the last raid) to we all know how the previous expansions have gone.

[Thage]

Blizzard just says whatever people want to hear.

- The team is never going to rush an expansion, they will be released when they are done.
- This time around there won't be a content drought - "Don't worry, we got you!"

Don't you see these 2 contradict each other?

That sounds more like a return to TBC/WotLK development where, if necessary, they'll push an extra content patch to lighten the drought rather than sit us with a year and a half of the final patch; if the Legion drought extends more than 5 months between 7.X launch and 8.0 prepatch, then ideally they'd drum up a small raid, dungeon, and quest chain to keep players entertained rather than just sit on it for the next seven months. The fact that 7.1 is going on PTR right after Legion launch also suggests a patch cadence similar to MoP's, where they alternated between big raid tiers and smaller story-focused patches, except with a focus on the updated Karazhan dungeon over a daily quest hub a la Shieldwall/Dominance Offensive.

Now, whether they'll put their money where their collective mouth is, we'll have to see if they can keep the output up from 7.2 onward.

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Legion beefy?
It feels almost smaller than WoD.

The size of the continent does feel small, but they pack a lot more into that continent than they did into Draenor. Or at least, they fixed the reward scheme enough that it feels like there's more to do in the Broken Isles than on Draenor, thanks to migrating the lion's share of non-raid endgame back to dungeons and world content and out of the mission table.

[Eon Drache]

Did they flat out say they fucked up? No, not once they consitently kinda said so in a round about way. Look at this quote and discussion from it they vaguely said they fucked up and weren't specific at all. If they just came out and said so most of the complaints would be over with but they don't

They said they tried something that didn't work. What they tried ended up making things worse. To me that is them saying they know they fucked up.

[SirBeef]

"There was a period where the team focused on faster expansions, sacrificing things that they shouldn't have. This made the experience worse."

Saw it on the front page of mmochamp and cannot believe they would say those words. When exactly were those faster xpacs? All of them have taken forever. If the past xpacs have been "fast" for them, when will the next one be? 2020?

The quote implied they stopped working on anything for the current expansion and put in all their efforts to getting the next one out. Had they had a dungeon, small raid, small story line quest hub added after the last raid patches the drought would not have been there. With this new approach, the expansions would still come in roughly 2 year cycles, but it won't be with a year or so of the last patch.

[Jewsco]

They said they tried something that didn't work. What they tried ended up making things worse. To me that is them saying they know they fucked up.

Without actually saying it yes. It is a lame way to admit it without actually admitting it. Blame it on not working and not on themselves releasing an expansion light on content and then adding next to nothing to it after release.

[Flurryfang]

"There was a period where the team focused on faster expansions, sacrificing things that they shouldn't have. This made the experience worse."

Saw it on the front page of mmochamp and cannot believe they would say those words. When exactly were those faster xpacs? All of them have taken forever. If the past xpacs have been "fast" for them, when will the next one be? 2020?

They tried to make faster expansions, but they never succeded with it. WoD is proberly the only expansion, which have signs of this expansion rush, but even WoD was delayed because they could not fufill their ambition of a fast expansion and the expansion got damaged because of that.

It does not really matter if Legion lasts for 4 years really, aslong as there is good enough content all the time. Having 9 tiers might be wierd, but if i was payed to find a solution for plus 5 tiers in a single expansion, i could proberly find a solution to that.

[xenogear3]

Remember MoP?
Blizzard confirmed the model is
1 Daily Quest Zone
2 Raid
3 Daily Quest Zone
4 Raid

Promise this will be the future.

One year later, $50 expansion
1 Nothing (Twitter, UI changes)
2 Raid
3 Took our $50 and enjoy themselves

You actually gonna believe them?

[mistahwilshire]

Not necessarily. If that tier is the top dog during its time it will have served to be new content that people deem worth doing. I don't care what expansion you played, even going back to TBC is you came in late the only thing worth doing was the "island and last raid". Even then heroics were useless for anything but farming valor/ badges.

Except that back then if you just came back you would have to legitimately progress through raids you missed, which were still being ran and progressed on while newer tiers were available. This was because there were literally zero catchup mechanics and raiding was balanced around gear requirements rather than skill and strategy. Nowadays you come back to the game in the last tier, get all kinds of fast free catch up loot and get carried through the current tier til your gear is caught up enough because carrying is so easily possible now.

Anyone that came back to TBC during Sunwell was NOT going straight in to Sunwell.

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Remember MoP?
Blizzard confirmed the model is
1 Daily Quest Zone
2 Raid
3 Daily Quest Zone
4 Raid

Promise this will be the future.

One year later, $50 expansion
1 Nothing (Twitter, UI changes)
2 Raid
3 Took our $50 and enjoy themselves

You actually gonna believe them?

Can't take this post seriously with all the blatant hyperbole. Try again.

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Without actually saying it yes. It is a lame way to admit it without actually admitting it. Blame it on not working and not on themselves releasing an expansion light on content and then adding next to nothing to it after release.

Holy shit get over yourself.

[Jewsco]

Except that back then if you just came back you would have to legitimately progress through raids you missed, which were still being ran and progressed on while newer tiers were available. This was because there were literally zero catchup mechanics and raiding was balanced around gear requirements rather than skill and strategy. Nowadays you come back to the game in the last tier, get all kinds of fast free catch up loot and get carried through the current tier til your gear is caught up enough because carrying is so easily possible now.

Anyone that came back to TBC during Sunwell was NOT going straight in to Sunwell.

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Can't take this post seriously with all the blatant hyperbole. Try again.

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Holy shit get over yourself.

Did they not out a quailifier in? It be if I robbed a place and then said but I was brought up poor, sadly most do use this. It is a way of making an excuse during your apology. It wasn't needed. Just say they will and plan to do better. I don't need excuses for something that already happened and can't be fixed.

[Stellan]

"There was a period where the team focused on faster expansions, sacrificing things that they shouldn't have. This made the experience worse."

Saw it on the front page of mmochamp and cannot believe they would say those words. When exactly were those faster xpacs? All of them have taken forever. If the past xpacs have been "fast" for them, when will the next one be? 2020?

Well this is such an insane comment from the developers, it's hard to know where to begin. When did they rush an expansion? They've all been two years. One right after the other and many of them have had very long content delays. What the hell are they talking about?

So should we assume from this that the next expansion will be three years from now or more? That's the only logical conclusion to this truly weird claim.

What happened is that in recent years they took a long time to create any content at all and they will continue to be slow to produce content. I find it hard to believe that we won't continue to have year long content droughts. The only difference is we will, in the future, have fewer expansions.

[Nyel]

Pandaria is when they said they were going to try for faster expacs

Actually they said this years before MoP.

[Xss]

"There was a period where the team focused on faster expansions, sacrificing things that they shouldn't have. This made the experience worse."

Saw it on the front page of mmochamp and cannot believe they would say those words. When exactly were those faster xpacs? All of them have taken forever. If the past xpacs have been "fast" for them, when will the next one be? 2020?

I'm confused on why people are finding this concept of their development process so hard to understand.

Blizz wanted to release an expansion once a year, which would keep the content new for everybody on a yearly basis. Why? Since it's a brand new expansion with all new content (mind blowing, I know). That means that new content development for the current expansions are closed so all developers can work on the NEW expansion/content. No more new content for the current expansion. Blizz couldn't keep their promise on new expansions every year for whatever reasons, most likely technical, which resulted in NO new content being released for the current expansion since developers were focused on the new content for the NEXT expansion, and the NEXT expansion (which contained ALL of the new content they've been working on) being delayed due to whatever reasons they had. End result of all of that is a content drought.

So now Blizz is stating releasing expansions quickly is no longer their main priority, which means they will be putting resources towards content development for the current expansion (Legion), unlike in the past when they put all of their resources towards releasing a new expansion every year, which failed.

When exactly were those faster xpacs? All of them have taken forever.

That's pretty much exactly what they're admitting to. They stated their plan didn't work.

[Eon Drache]

Without actually saying it yes. It is a lame way to admit it without actually admitting it. Blame it on not working and not on themselves releasing an expansion light on content and then adding next to nothing to it after release.

Expansion launched with enough. It just didn't put content out after release.

[Echo of Soul]

Wrong.

And not to attack this sentiment (I know where you are coming from), but since TBC/WotLK, we've actively stated our goal was to get the length between expansions down to one-a-year as our way of combating a lack of content

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...6000?page=3#56

WoD was effected the worst because they grew the WoW team significantly and a large part of WoD was spent training and bringing developers up to speed with the product. You can't just plop a developer into one of the largest codebases in the world and expect them to instantly be at 100%, hence when they moved onto the next expac at the slowed rate WoD was left with nothing.

However all previous expansions were effected by this same goal, from TBC (Black Temple was supposed to be the last raid instance) to WOTLK (ICC was supposed to be the last raid) to we all know how the previous expansions have gone.

I think that the "actively stated" isn't at all true. They've said multiple times that they wanted to shrink the gap between expansions. It wasn't until WOD this yearly expansion nonsense came in to play and it caused an uproar in the community. Even if that's been their goal all along this was the first time they stated that yearly expansions was going to be a thing and that we would be getting fewer content patches as a result.

Shorter gaps is a good thing, everyone agrees with that. Shorter expansions isn't and it just can't work not unless you cut down on the quality A LOT.

[Lilija]

If I made a mistake and that was how I apologized to you would you accept it? I wouldn't.
Why not say they expanded thier brand with hearthstone, heroes of the storm, and overwatch and they got spread a little thin?
Remember they charged more than ever before for WoD. They literally had a patch that added a selfie cam and Twitter and that was it. Then add in they had the flying debacle too. WoD was a disaster and the sub numbers show it, which by the way for so bad they don't reveal those anymore. This is a half ass admittal at best. I hope they did learn from this and it gets better but to say this is a true apology/admittal is wrong.

Someone is really full of themselves...
Do you want a personal letter with apology? Maybe a cookie to make you feel better? Really, get over it. They said what was their mistake. They didn't harm anyone. No one died because of this mistake. This is enough.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

WoD is most noticeably much shorter than every other recent expansion... by a whole raid tier!

[Tharkkun]

They're referring to WOD being abandoned, so they could try to rush out LGN which will also suffer from being rushed as I'm sure we'll see soon enough. In the past, they may also be referring to when expacs were released on a two year deadline, leaving them to have to abandon work on any aspects of it that were not finished yet.

They're basically now swearing they will only release expacs when they are quote, "fully finished" and still release consistent content on live to keep us busy while we wait, rather than endless content draughts -- but that's a joke, we all know that promise is an empty one. It amazes me there are people trying to defend them and claim they've "learned their lesson" and "will keep their word this time". They've been wrong about that -every- time they've said it, every expac after TBC.

This time will be no different. BLIZ has always clung to a relatively ancient method of doing things and their dungeon/raid/daily quests model just doesn't work in today's gaming market but they don't seem to understand that, so they keep trying to carry on with it anyway.

Favorite this so we can revisit it in 2 years. There's a 50/50 chance Blizzard is right.

[Pantalaimon]

Except that back then if you just came back you would have to legitimately progress through raids you missed, which were still being ran and progressed on while newer tiers were available. This was because there were literally zero catchup mechanics and raiding was balanced around gear requirements rather than skill and strategy. Nowadays you come back to the game in the last tier, get all kinds of fast free catch up loot and get carried through the current tier til your gear is caught up enough because carrying is so easily possible now.

Anyone that came back to TBC during Sunwell was NOT going straight in to Sunwell.

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Can't take this post seriously with all the blatant hyperbole. Try again.

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Holy shit get over yourself.

Sorry but you're only partially right. It is true that you wouldn't go straight from no raiding to Sunwell, or Kara to Sunwell, but you by no means had to go from Kara/Mags/Gruul to TK/SSC to BT/Hyjal to Sunwell. I started WoW in the second half of BC and level capped & geared myself for Kara a little before Sunwell, or a little after it released. Joined a raiding guild that took me & 1-2 other people through Kara for a month or two, then Gruul & Mags each once or twice. After that we joined the guild doing 3/6 (almost 4/6) in Hyjal without ever touching Tier 5 content at all, with the exception of that NE dude in SSC. I literally could not tell you what most of the encounters in T5 were even about since I have played through them. Plus some pieces of badge/valor gear was on par with some pieces of T6 content as well. You most certainly did not have to go through a linear progression late into BC.

[Hctaz]

There could have been 15 raid tiers and 97 dungeons. If only the final patch's "island + raid" is worth doing, then it's no different than a two raid expansion with 8 dungeons.

No no the point is that they planned to make Warlords last for only one year which is why they failed to make an interesting story and why they only had two raid tiers. Had they done three tiers and split them up a little bit, we would have only had to deal with HFC for like 6-7 months instead of 14.

[Jewsco]

Someone is really full of themselves...
Do you want a personal letter with apology? Maybe a cookie to make you feel better? Really, get over it. They said what was their mistake. They didn't harm anyone. No one died because of this mistake. This is enough.

But they didn't say any of that they just said they tried something and it failed. I don't need an apology but I also don't need them saying the same thing they have said every expansion from tbc on. They always say thier will be less content droughts and never keep thier word. My problem is why say it again? Why even open that door again? It will just lead to them once again not delevering on that promise and more threads on it. Why even do it is my point?

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No no the point is that they planned to make Warlords last for only one year which is why they failed to make an interesting story and why they only had two raid tiers. Had they done three tiers and split them up a little bit, we would have only had to deal with HFC for like 6-7 months instead of 14.

Would we of? It is the last raid tier what last raid tier in any expansion lasted only 6-7 months? How long was Soo? 14 months right? They have always had this problem and always say they won't in the new expansion why keep saying it? At this point they are the boy who cried wolf. Just worry about making a good expansion I don't need this promise anymore.