Its Sad the rate that Blizz pushes out content for WoW...

[FattGuy]

Doesn't matter. This game, no matter the amount of flaws, has tons of pros for any player to have. Same with other games. The only MMO that I have ever played besides wow that gave me the addiction feeling was guild wars 2 and it has tons of content as well.

[Xeraxis]

Are you for for real? That armory he linked is obviously not the character(s) he got those achievements on. fuck man look at your activity feed on a low level alt. all your toons shit shows up on it

No but once you find that toon it takes like 5 seconds to find his toon that is the most progressed and yeah Dars hit the nail on the head pretty much.

[Darsithis]

And you're forgetting an important variable: if the first generation of WoW players is "moving on", where's the second generation? You don't need to tell me, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say something along the lines of WoW being less valuable in a more and more competitive market with forces like LoL, DoTA 2 and Smite to compete with.

That's still ignorant of the fact that WoW is failing to entice more players. Most new WoW players don't go past level 10.

I was going to say that MMO's in general are struggling to retain long-term players. WoW isn't the only one feeling that kind of impact.

[MFDOOM]

I was going to say that MMO's in general are struggling to retain long-term players. WoW isn't the only one feeling that kind of impact.

Which is due to the factor of increased competition for online gaming as of recent years that I had mentioned. You did, however, say that WoW had a bright future ahead of it. You're saying now, verbatim, that "MMO's in general are struggling to retain long-term players". Pair that with the high turnover rate of new WoW players that even government employees in the TSA couldn't imagine.

Do you still mean to say that WoW has a bright future ahead of it, or do you cede your statement and admit that you are wrong to say that?

[Heladys]

Do you still mean to say that WoW has a bright future ahead of it, or do you cede your statement and admit that you are wrong to say that?

It's got a brighter future than any other MMO. Isn't that enough?

[Deleted]

And you're forgetting an important variable: if the first generation of WoW players is "moving on", where's the second generation? You don't need to tell me, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say something along the lines of WoW being less valuable in a more and more competitive market with forces like LoL, DoTA 2 and Smite to compete with.

Somewhere around the heyday of WoLK subs, they said in investor call (or maybe Blizzcon, can't be arse to google, sorry) that about the same amount of people had played WoW at some point but quit (i.e. they had around +20M registered accounts, with 10M active). So even back then, during the there was a fair amount of "moving on" but as their retention of active accounts was still positive it didn't matter.

That's still ignorant of the fact that WoW is failing to entice more players. Most new WoW players don't go past level 10.

WoW's steady decline in subscriptions is only becoming evidence of the fact that it will soon plateau and become a shadow of the game that had much more significant cultural significance and revenue back then.

This happens to lot of games as they grow older - looking at Play-By-Mail strategy games - they used to be "the thing" before Berners-Lee came up with this WWW-nonsense, but today hardly anyone apart from the real hardcore crowd know they even exist. Same with early browser based "simulation games". WoW is in that category now - the only thing that might save it is complete rehaul of the game engine, but then again, it might not (EQ->EQ2).

I'm quite sure Blizzard management and ATVI board are extremely tuned to the issue, which is why WoD tries to offer a bone to the "hardcore gang" by reminiscing back to TBC times - but at the same time, they're doing a lot of heavy lifting to try to keep new player retention (new models, easy access to content, easy access to endgame through paid boosts). But they know all the charts are declining - they just try to keep the decline from turning into a free fall.

This is why they need to be ready with their next product - which was supposed to be Titan.. except it wasn't good enough and went to rewrite. I think this might have been because players in general are leaving the genre (all MMO's have these player retention issues), so they need something else.
And then their Chief Creative Officer leaves... hmm.. wonder why?

[Chickat]

I do believe they are doing as much as they can. They dont have enough people to push out content like we want, and they wont hire just anyone. The reason WoD is taking so long, is because every delay and scrapped feature we have had was art related. Garrison buildings plus character models have stretched their art team so thin they cant finish things in time. After these models are done content should start flowing much faster. Patches and 7.0 will look better im sure.

[Deleted]

I do believe they are doing as much as they can. They dont have enough people to push out content like we want, and they wont hire just anyone. The reason WoD is taking so long, is because every delay and scrapped feature we have had was art related. Garrison buildings plus character models have stretched their art team so thin they cant finish things in time. After these models are done content should start flowing much faster. Patches and 7.0 will look better im sure.

This has been their problem for many years. They've said time and time again they can't find good enough people to hire.
The playerbase often uses the "billion dollar revenue"-line as a stick to poke at them in forum wars, but the fact is - revenue (or even profit) does not magically turn into resources that fit your company culture. Recruiting is not easy and recruiting for niched competence (like 3D designer) is even harder.

Having said that - I think there's something wrong with either their project management or development models - they seem extremely monolithic and waterfallish in their approach - which makes it feel like watching glacial movements to an outsider. But who knows - developing with ~12 year old core engine isn't all that simple I bet.

[Deleted]

After Blizz got taken they fired 600 ppl. Pure math less ppl less content (and poorly made).

[Deleted]

After Blizz got taken they fired 600 ppl. Pure math less ppl less content (and poorly made).

90% of them came from departments other than game development, so only about 60 of them had any connection to the devs and I bet those 60 were support-type jobs. I doubt that's got very much to do with it.

[Deleted]

When you have alternative things to do in life, like work, go out, etc, then the time between patches doesn't matter, and if anything is a godsend as it allows us to keep a balance between playing and having a social life.

But if you're 24/7 in front of the screen I can see why not having new content every month can get tiresome.

[Ratyrel]

Exactly. While new content would be nice, we're at the end of an expansion, and nearly all resources are funneled into getting that ready. What they can control, however, is the pacing of the content they release. Instead of a year and a half of SoO, they should have added a month or two onto the previous tiers.

They have a rough idea of how long they expect an expansion to last, and they know exactly how many raids they will have during the expansion. It doesn't seem too difficult to break it up so that it's disbursed more evenly. Obviously the final raid tier will still be the longest, but maybe it doesn't need to be four times longer than the others.

I agree with this really. My guild is a pretty casual, tight-knit group and has a pretty even, though slow rate of progression - roadblocks will stop us, etc. Both T15 and 16 lasted long enough for us to kill the endbosses and start heroics but without managing to kill one. In SoO we're now 5/14 hc, which is probably pretty much our level, give or take a couple. With more time on the first tiers, this would have evened out a bit.

[Deleted]

With more time on the first tiers, this would have evened out a bit.

I think with MoP,their idea was to push that release envelope, dropping content updates more regularly and faster than ever before.
And they did a smashing job for getting all the updates out of the door - and at the same time it seemed like they would steamroll the expansion in similar fashion as well (judging by their Blizzcon comments). And then long silence... and what we have now in beta is really not the quality we're used to seeing at this point.

I'd like to know what happened between Blizzcon and the release of the beta. Or maybe not, it's probably not that pretty.

[Deleted]

After Blizz got taken they fired 600 ppl. Pure math less ppl less content (and poorly made).

First things first:

Blizzard merged with Vivendi in 2008, then BAM 4 years later 600 people are made redundant.

Plus how much content would these customer service reps would have put out?

Following a completion of the review, the company is conducting a global reduction in workforce of approximately 600 employees. The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development. The World of Warcraft® development team will not be impacted

http://www.businesswire.com/news/hom...s#.U9oknGParCo

And let's not forget the devs that were moved from Titan:

http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/05/28/ru...lopment-reset/

the as-yet unannounced Project Titan has seen seventy or so developers reassigned to other projects and a slimmed down thirty person team remains on the project. MMO-Champion reported that sources indicated that the changes were made in part due to a desire to make significant technology changes to the project and that the rest of the developers are being moved to World of Warcraft, Blizzard All-Stars, the upcoming Diablo III expansion and Battle.net.

Or shall we just assume you don't know what you're talking about?

[Darsithis]

After Blizz got taken they fired 600 ppl. Pure math less ppl less content (and poorly made).

That was years later and almost all of them were from non-game development departments. The World of Warcraft team was not affected. You don't know what you're talking about.

[Txiv]

Isn't ironic that a company that has billions of dollars of revenue each year, pushes out content patches for their MMO at a rate slower than all the other companies making MMOs in the industry?

Now this is not a game vs game thread so dont turn it into that.

But its sad quite frankly that WoW has 1 year luls between content, and other games have awesome content being pushed out every two weeks, every month, or every other month (GW2, Rift, and SWTOR being a good example of this). The other sad thing is that these other games have free to play models.

So why pay for something when you can get more for free?

You say wow pushes out content much slower than other mmos, but then say it's not a game verse game thread? So you post an opinion and immediately insulate against criticism if your argument?

I think the time between this last patch and wod has been a little long but in between patch cycles are right on the money. I would like to have done tot a little longer ( 1-2 months) before SoO but I didn't feel I was rushed out if it either. I think thier development times are just fine, wod is close in sight!

[Deadite]

If I knew you were going to rip a tiny fraction of my post out of context and get butt hurt about it, I would have been more careful about using generalizing statements like that. My apologies, wasn't my intention at all to "speak for you." I'll go ahead and correct it and you can go back to crying about whatever else you take personally in my post.

EDIT: Fixed the original post.

Why would i take anything personally? When you start a post with...

Oh look, this thread again, and with arm chair software developers that have no idea about how the software development process works comparing World of Warcraft to games that came out much later as usual.

Then go into some long winded opinion piece and try to sound like you are the font of all knowledge about games you probably haven't played and games in general. I disagree with most of your conclusions. No point in getting into a quote war about some guys subjective opinion. So rest assured that my butt is hurt free.

[wych]

Blame the money men at the top who decided not to hire more devs despite the game making 100s of millions in profits

[Deleted]

Such a specious and incorrect statement.

On topic - I'm not happy with how slow the content has been since 5.4.8 but having money != tons of content. Don't pull the old "hire more devs" card, either. Too many cooks spoil the broth and so on. While I'd love for content to be out faster I also like that when Blizzard does release content it is usually, to me, of higher quality and less bug-ridden than the quick, free content thrown out by other game developers.

then maybe they should fire the current cooks and hire more capable ones?

I don't want them to rush wod, but the wait time IS unacceptable.

[Sylreick]

Sucks to be sure, but it gives me time to do other things, and play other games. I also want/expect top quality out of them, so I'll give 'em a bit more time than I would give some other mediocre game.