When will this expansion be over / When will the next one be released?

[spectrefax]

Marketing standpoint, late spring early summer 2014

Going to guess May/June, but hopefully sooner.

Every single expansion, hordes of people come in with 4-6 month expansion release dates from the date of implementation of the final raid patch. And every single expansion, they are horribly wrong. How can people forget that for the last two expansions, the final raid patch of each lasted almost a full year (or more in ICCs case).

Not a chance in hell an expansion will be released before Sept 2014.

[ThunderPussy]

You will know all of this when they announce it.

[Callous1970]

As Blizz has been saying for years, they want to speed up the expansion cycle. The gap between ICC and was long only because the old world revamp ended up taking a lot longer than their original plan. The gap between Cata and Mists was shorter, but still not fast enough. Supposedly they've been staffing up recently, so here's hoping for a May/June release for 6.0. We'll probably get the pre-patch a month before that.

As for level, I expect it to go to 100 in the next expac.

As for the content. It will NOT be the Emerald Dream. They will NEVER make an Emerald Dream expac. Anyone that says they will is clueless. The Emerald Dream is Azeroth WITHOUT any intelligent life. So it'd just be empty fields and forrests with animals in them. Even with the Nightmare that's not enough for a whole expac. Besides, they already wrapped up the Emerald Dream story in a book.

I'm guessing it'll be related to the Burning Legion and Sargeras. It'd love to take the fight to them, on their worlds.

[xanzul]

Lets hope Blizzard do as he promised..., but well have many broken promises have we?

Considering most of the "promises" made by Blizzard were never promises at all, no.

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They won't release an expansion in the summer. If it's not ready by March/April ish, it'll get pushed to September.

Yes they will. People game year round. Not everyone is a college kid with no job who arbitrarily spends all their time outside simply because it is warmer.

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It's more than just making a promise (which I'm not sure they actually did). Even if they started Beta immediately after Blizzcon it's doubtful they could pull off a Spring launch. Major game titles only seem to launch in Spring or Fall, my gut is telling me the expac will launch next Oct/Nov, I hope I'm wrong though.

TBC was out in a January. Starcraft 2 was released in the summer. I have no idea where people got these asinine ideas that games can't be released in certain months especially when Blizzard already has a long list of games that released during those supposed months that are "terrible" for game sales. Wow is a subscription based mmo which relies on new content to keep people playing. I highly doubt a significant number of people would skip the expansion just because it comes out in spring/summer.

Blizzard has already increased their Wow dev team by 40% with plans to hire even more not to mention all the extra help they have gotten from devs moved over from Titan. Beta will start shortly after Blizzcon with an early spring release. Given significant subscriber loss they absolutely can not afford to have this tier last longer than 6 months. It just won't happen.

[Drakesong]

Damn kids these days. "oh i want new content every month or i'm unsubbing". Whiney babies. In my day we took 12 months for a new patch, AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!

Back in our day the content used to last a few months. 5.3 content lasts for 1 week while it was new, after that was just a simple repetitive weekly quest. 5.4 content is much better than 5.4, but I don't believe it will last much longer.

[Lbgr]

Every single expansion, hordes of people come in with 4-6 month expansion release dates from the date of implementation of the final raid patch. And every single expansion, they are horribly wrong. How can people forget that for the last two expansions, the final raid patch of each lasted almost a full year (or more in ICCs case).

Not a chance in hell an expansion will be released before Sept 2014.

I think this was true in the past, as they would always make the claim that "well hiring more people won't speed up things, yadda yadda" but now that they've nearly doubled their staff, it looks like spending more money will speed things up.

[xanzul]

They said that we won't wait as long as we waited with WoTLK and Cata, also they said that they will bring new paths and Expansions faster now

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Blizzard said that they will bring item squish cause they had problem when they tried to work with bigger numbers, so.... is really likely that we will see item squish for the next expansion

The time between Cata and Mop was shorter than it was between Wrath and Cata so yes Blizzard did release expansions faster just as promised (2 months is still 2 months) and we have gotten patches every 3-4 months in Mop which was faster than every 6 months in Cata. Looks to me like Blizzard was on target with their goals which only further indicates the same will happen with the next expansion. They have done significant work in streamlining and changing their development process and even their language used when talking about upcoming development has changed dramatically as well. It isn't just lip service anymore because they are backing up their words with actions.

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if anyone has been paying attention to blue posts recently, item squish is basically confirmed (although we all know blizzard has a tendency to lead people on). also blizz has mentioned that they want to try to do an expansion per year and the level cap is most likely going to be 100 (if anyone has gotten the BoAs from SoO, that gives us a rough idea on the level cap.) Also didnt blizz release a trademark name for something naga/Azshara related? would definitely be interesting as I dont think they would make another legion related expansion.

Telling players what they hope to do isn't leading anyone on. This is precisely why Blizzard has made a point of not discussing upcoming content and changes.

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Nov-dec 2014. If you disagree...would you really be surprised if this happened though? I mean really...hm?

That would be suicide. It isn't happening. In all honesty this is borderline trolling.

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Also... no, we didn't liked it, if you ever checked the forums you would have seen people crying all the time about it...

That is because you people don't like anything. All during Cata people bitched and whined that content was too slow and then during Mop the exact same group of people complained about too much content too fast.

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Every single expansion, hordes of people come in with 4-6 month expansion release dates from the date of implementation of the final raid patch. And every single expansion, they are horribly wrong. How can people forget that for the last two expansions, the final raid patch of each lasted almost a full year (or more in ICCs case).

Not a chance in hell an expansion will be released before Sept 2014.

There is a significant difference between players guessing an expansion will be out 6 months after release of the last tier and Blizzard actually flat out straight up saying that is their plan. Yet again the time between Cata and Mop was shorter than Wrath and Cata and this was without the huge amount of devs and artists that have been added to the team since Mop launch and they still aren't done hiring. If you are going to use past history to proof they won't be able to get content out faster then you need to take into consideration the amount of people they had working on the expansion back then compared to how many are working on it now.

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As Blizz has been saying for years, they want to speed up the expansion cycle. The gap between ICC and was long only because the old world revamp ended up taking a lot longer than their original plan. The gap between Cata and Mists was shorter, but still not fast enough. Supposedly they've been staffing up recently, so here's hoping for a May/June release for 6.0. We'll probably get the pre-patch a month before that.

As for level, I expect it to go to 100 in the next expac.

As for the content. It will NOT be the Emerald Dream. They will NEVER make an Emerald Dream expac. Anyone that says they will is clueless. The Emerald Dream is Azeroth WITHOUT any intelligent life. So it'd just be empty fields and forrests with animals in them. Even with the Nightmare that's not enough for a whole expac. Besides, they already wrapped up the Emerald Dream story in a book.

I'm guessing it'll be related to the Burning Legion and Sargeras. It'd love to take the fight to them, on their worlds.

Supposedly? And what does Blizzard have to gain about lying about hiring more developers for the Wow dev team? There is no supposedly about it and the content patch release dates for Mop speak for themselves. Clearly Blizzard is doing something different than before.

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Back in our day the content used to last a few months. 5.3 content lasts for 1 week while it was new, after that was just a simple repetitive weekly quest. 5.4 content is much better than 5.4, but I don't believe it will last much longer.

Don't even try it. Every single patch since Wow launched has had people bitching and whining about being bored within weeks of release. In fact there is more to do in 5.4 than there ever has been before so to claim the content won't last very long is quite dishonest. For people who aren't jaded and hate the game, 5.4 has plenty to keep them busy for a long time.

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I think this was true in the past, as they would always make the claim that "well hiring more people won't speed up things, yadda yadda" but now that they've nearly doubled their staff, it looks like spending more money will speed things up.

They said hiring people alone won't speed things up which is why now that they have streamlined how they develop content, hiring new employees can actually speed things up. Again the patch release dates in Mop speak for themselves.

[runedhill]

The current expansion has technically already ended, the final raid tier is out

Blizzcon is November 8th and 9th

Yes the item squish is happening, which I'm happy about

I speculate the level cap being 100 due to the BoA weapons

Yes dps is insane. When we first hit 90 people were doing around 50k dps, now people can do 250k dps.

I'd guess the next expansion will be in mid - late spring next year. This seems much faster than usual, but content has been coming much faster than usual.

Uh, not only is there going to be another patch after SoO but it's the first day of the second week of this tier. There isn't a single Hardmode boss down. Far from over for literally every single person who wants to see any of the content (which is pretty much most of the playerbase).

[Deleted]

I just hope it comes soon. Timeless Isle is most boring place in WoW ever created! Well, not raiding though at this moment.

[Monteverdi]

Previous end tier patches have lasted nearly a year at a time, and this has been a consisten complaint from players, none more so than during the end of cataclysm where the 8-boss Dragon Soul raid was all players had. Granted, SoO is an enormous raid with 14 bosses, but Blizzard is still very much aware of the concern as they have mentioned many times during this expansion that bringing out content quickly is their primary concern.

Given this, I expect a final content patch (an epilogue for MOP and quite possibly a prologe for the next xpac at the same time) to come out in November, probably around Blizzcon, followed by the release of the next expansion by march of 2014 - making SoO's lifespan 7 months.

[spectrefax]

There is a significant difference between players guessing an expansion will be out 6 months after release of the last tier and Blizzard actually flat out straight up saying that is their plan. Yet again the time between Cata and Mop was shorter than Wrath and Cata and this was without the huge amount of devs and artists that have been added to the team since Mop launch and they still aren't done hiring. If you are going to use past history to proof they won't be able to get content out faster then you need to take into consideration the amount of people they had working on the expansion back then compared to how many are working on it now.

The problem is they've been saying this exact same shit since before the release of WotlK. If Blizzard/WoW's history has taught us anything, it's that believing Blizzard's word on anything is pretty damned silly.

[Lazuli]

I want them to take their time but at the same time I want to forget this panda shit ever happened and move on asap.