Is the gap between last raid and next expansion growing too large? I made pictures!

[Mac223]

These really long periods without raiding content can be annoying, so in an attempt to decide whether or not to get Legion, I made some graphical representations of the density of raiding content. I neglected to include world bosses and Naxxramas 2.0, and I could probably have pruned away things like the Obsidian Sanctum. Aaaand I based things of when the bosses were killed, as opposed to when they were technically released.



It's worth noting that the midpoint in terms of bosses introduced is Ulduar. That is to say there were roughly as many bosses made before Ulduar as after.



The gaps on the right side of the graph are rather striking. But not entirely unprecedented when you consider that the gap between BT/Hyjal was filled by Zul'Aman, which wasn't quite suitable for most 25-man guilds. I'm not sure what blizzard can do to avoid this issue, but consistently having gaps of over a year between raiding content is going to make it more common for people to stop playing a year before each expansion.

The code can be found here.
Credits for compiling the dates go do Yarini, whose reddit post I stole shamelessly from.

[Zulandia]

[url=http://imgur.com/Sf5Gs19.png][IMG]http://imgur.com/Sf5Gs19l.png[/ IMG][/ url]

[url=http://i.imgur.com/6uBVmiI.png][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/6uBVmiIl.png[/ IMG][/ url]

Should help with your sizing issue (click for full size)...just remove the space after each of the '/' in the closing tags.

[Deleted]

I neglected to include Naxxramas 2.0

You shouldn't. It spent a LOT of time from raiders. It wasn't extremely hard but it had its learning.

Actually the last boss was quite hard to be done early.

[Mac223]

neat stuff

Thanks! That does make things look better.

You shouldn't. It spent a LOT of time from raiders. It wasn't extremely hard but it had its learning.

Actually the last boss was quite hard to be done early.

Maybe. But it didn't make sense to me to give blizzard double credit.

[arr0gance]

Thanks! That does make things look better.



Maybe. But it didn't make sense to me to give blizzard double credit.

?? Naxx 2.0 was the only relevant raid for an entire tier.

[Styxxa]

The "density" at the start of Cata and MoP is interesting along with the pretty steady releases of each tier within those expansions (though I did feel like BRF was a bit quick to the trigger). I just hope those wide gaps between the final tier and the next expansion aren't going to become too much of the norm - I guess we'll see once we have an official release date.

[Deleted]

Thanks! That does make things look better.



Maybe. But it didn't make sense to me to give blizzard double credit.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense imho. Much more people experienced Naxx 2.0 compared to Naxx40
The entire reason Blizzard 'reused' Naxx was that they were bummed so little players got to experience their expensive (art)work. Regardless of the difficulty change (hardcore endgame vs. entry lvl) it seems to me Naxx 2.0 made a bigger impact than Naxx40 on the population as a whole.

[Kryos]

Bars and different colors to see where a tier ended and an new begins would have been helpful.

[jMerliN]

It's pretty annoying that Blizzard thinks the solution to this is to just ship a new expansion after 14-16 months rather than just add more content to the same expansion.

I really don't want to see WoW reduced to anemic and watered down rapid fire expansions with little more than some leveling story quests and one or two raids. There's nothing epic feeling about that.

Oh and.. utterly breaking lore to reduce development time?