Reason for persistence of content droughts in WoW?

[Alvito]

At times to different degrees everything on the list, at others none of it. With each expansion they are in uncharted waters and testing new ways to do things.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Ineptitude/mismanagement by far. Let's add infinite catch up mechanics to get everyone into the same raid and have difficulties for everyone, except not everyone wants to raid and you can't do the same 13 bosses for 8 months without being bored.

[Pawestruck]

I'd say it has more to do with a complacent playerbase. Blizzard knows that even if a large chunk of subscribers get bored and unsub for a few months, that they will come crawling back for more whenever content is released, regardless of the time frame. WoW has content droughts because it can.

That is true. I remember when TotalBiscuit flipped his lid over the sparkle-pony and everyone called him a doomsayer. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did that thing earn Blizz in its first day? I mean, why make new content when you can basically print money?

[Selastan]

Lack of attunements and the existence of LFR make content draughts. Very, very few people complained about the lack of content in BC.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Lack of attunements and the existence of LFR make content draughts. Very, very few people complained about the lack of content in BC.

You forgot catch up mechanics. Couldn't join during BT and instantly get hyjal quality gear and hope into black temple in a weekend. You had to go through normals until you had rep for heroics, then go through heroics until you were geared enough for kara, then do kara until you were geared enough for ssc/eye/gruul/mag, then after FULLY CLEARING eye/ssc you had to do hyjal until you killed the final boss and were finally capable of doing black temple.

Compare that to:
Ding 100. Go do ashran for 5 hours, now you're high enough ilvl to do the current raid. FIVE hours, ZERO raids, ZERO dungeons, ZERO PVE, and you're set up to do the current raid.

Not only does this breed bad players with no idea how to play their class, but it makes the game have NO CONTENT AT ALL.

[Relapses]

I mean, I suppose you can poll people's opinions as to why they think content droughts occur but without knowing exactly what's going on at Blizzard ourselves, they're just guesses. I also dislike that all of the responses are negative. It'd be like doing this as a poll:

Why doesn't Jimmy clean his room?

a.) He's lazy

b.) He's retarded

c.) He's enjoys masturbation too much

d.) He's actually blind so he doesn't know his room is dirty

e.) Something else

[Echo of Soul]

It has to do with a couple of things all related to Blizzards' current design philosophy.

1. Easy versions of all the content. Within a month of new content being released you have seen it all, and for many that's enough.
2. Gear inflation. With gear being handed out left and right it has lost its meaning. There's really no point in getting the best of the best or even decent gear, there's always a catchup mechanic waiting around the corner so why bother right?
3. Gear quantity. Since we get so much gear those that do care about point #2 are usually done within the first couple of weeks anyway. Compare this to vanilla for example when raid bosses dropped 2 pieces of loot for a raid of 40 people, forget how long it'll take to get your item you would be lucky if you got it at all. This somewhat ties in to point #1 too. Since the content can be cleared so quickly it increases the gear quantity even more. In vanilla and TBC it wasn't uncommon for a dungeon run to take one hour or more, and just getting the group together probably took almost as long. The bosses drop roughly the same amount of gear today but you can do so much more of them within a certain time period so you'll burn through the content faster.
4. Faceroll world. Since nothing is dangerous point #2 really makes itself even stronger. What's the point in getting stronger since you are in no danger what so ever? And with PvP specific gear and the lack of world PvP the character progression you do in PvE really have no impact at all even on if you're playing on a PvP realm.

[Schattenlied]

A combination of 1, 2, and 4.


To be honest, with how many subs this game had, if the devs couldn't keep up with the content release goals (or any reasonable schedule at all, anything near 1 year content droughts is unacceptable) they should have hired more people to keep the content flowing at a reasonable pace... the investment would have paid off bigtime if it resulted in millions of people not quitting the game, and it likely would have done just that.

[Donair]

I mean, I suppose you can poll people's opinions as to why they think content droughts occur but without knowing exactly what's going on at Blizzard ourselves, they're just guesses. I also dislike that all of the responses are negative. It'd be like doing this as a poll:

Why doesn't Jimmy clean his room?

a.) He's lazy

b.) He's retarded

c.) He's enjoys masturbation too much

d.) He's actually blind so he doesn't know his room is dirty

e.) Something else

Can you provide an alternate poll with positive reasons for persistent content droughts?

I mean, I guess I can think of some good things for myself.

a.) I experience more varied titles and give my money to different game developers
b.) I watch more movies than I used to
c.) I work more
d.) I spend more time outside

I don't particularly see any benefits for Blizzard there as they are now only getting a fraction of the sub money from me per year as they used to in vanilla/tbc/wrath when they actually updated their game more than once every couple of years.

But I guess I've benefited more as a whole which counts for something right? Thanks Blizzard for intentionally making your game shittier so I'm forced to find additional means of entertainment and personal recreation!

[clevin]

I'd say it has more to do with a complacent playerbase. Blizzard knows that even if a large chunk of subscribers get bored and unsub for a few months, that they will come crawling back for more whenever content is released, regardless of the time frame. WoW has content droughts because it can.

The weird thing is that if they did more patches they don't have retain that many more subs to make it pay off. Say they cut 6 months off the droughts (so the end of the expansion lasted 6-8 months). Say that they retained 100k more subs for those 6 months. At full price ($15) that's $9m. At $150k per developer fully loaded costs that's 60 people. Sure, there are taxes etc... say it's 40-45 people after all of that. I have to believe that 40 something people could do patches.

And that's all just from retaining a measly 100k subs. What if they kept 300,000? 500,000?

[swaggers]

I'd say it's the Peter Principle. The good managers have been moved to newer IPs. What's left is those who say "I've been here 10 years, I deserve a promotion." So the new hires are under the control of people who, while they may have been good coders/artists/designers, are terrible at managing people.

[Breccia]

I'm not sure "greed" is really the right word here, but, they know for a fact millions of people will pay for their service whether there is content or not. Spending less effort and still making a lot of money isn't so much greed as a business decision.

[Malkiah]

something else.

"content drought" as a concept is caused pretty much 100% by lack of post-level-cap progression, and if you look at every single MMO in existence that's older than 5 years you see the exact same thing happen:
1. there's a big chunk of leveling content on initial release and very little post-level-cap content, most of that being being very tediously grindy for very little reward, or very niche reward (for example farming resist gear).
2. this trend continues through at least the 2nd expansion and as far as upwards to the 4th, depending on the release schedule for expansions.
3. for much of this time period a significant chunk of the player base will not reach max level - this means existing leveling content is sufficient for most people, and the lower numbers of max level people means that meager raiding options will take longer to consume due to overall lower numbers of raiders.
4. after about 2-3 years of the game being out, if it's popular enough, the majority of the player base will reach max level and then catch-up mechanics will be added to the leveling experience so that fresh new players or friends of existing players can more quickly get to the point where they can play with the majority of the population.
5. the game focus either shifts to post-level-cap content, or heavily stagnates.

WoW was built from its inception with no viable post-level-cap character progression design philosophy besides raiding, so you combine that inherent fact with WoW's relatively slow expansion release schedule and you get the content drought seen over and over again.
so basically the problem is fundamental to how WoW was built from the ground up, since there hasn't ever been a viable character progression path built into the game's structure.
you hit max level, you do a bit of dungeons/raids to your personal taste until you have enough gear to satisfy your personal impulse for chasing a carrot on a stick, and then you're just done and there's nothing else to do - there's nothing in WoW to actually use that gear for (except get more gear) in terms of player interaction with the game world, so the entire system basically crumbles in on itself.

[Eggroll]

I'd say it's the Peter Principle. The good managers have been moved to newer IPs. What's left is those who say "I've been here 10 years, I deserve a promotion." So the new hires are under the control of people who, while they may have been good coders/artists/designers, are terrible at managing people.

Plus - I feel - the new hires really don't seem to be all that creative, which is sad.

- - - Updated - - -

This sounds like a post by someone who has never worked in software development and dealt with a development schedule.


Things are very rarely done on time within original estimates.

Really? Why is it that they cannot create more content than in previous expacs when they presumably have the biggest dev team in the history of WoW?

[Pull My Finger]

What would any of you kids really know about it? It's a lame topic anyway. Who cares.

[Bosen]

I think the timeline is a conscious one. Blizzard determined how much time is enough time for every customer and potential customer to see all content during an expansion.

[Surfd]

You missed option 6: It is literally impossible for them to produce quality content faster then we can consume it.

I mean, lets be honest, if Blizzard wanted to, they could stuff us with content all the time. It would be shitty, shallow, unfulfilling medeocre content with bad design, a boatloads of bugs, and no balance testing, but it would still be content, right? I guess that's what you want right?

Or they could take their time, do a good job and give us some content worth the sub fee we wpay them for.

Personally, I much prefer quality over quantity, even if the ratio isnt as good as it might have been in the past.

Also, I think it is kind of funny that you seem to think that they "must" have new content all the time, as if the majority of the player base has even come close to completing even HALF of the currently available content as it stands.

When it comes down to it, if you truely feel that you have run out of content, just take a break and stop freaking playing. Go play something else for a few months and come back when the next batch of content hits......or is there a blizzard corporate drone standing behind you with a gun forcing you to keep logging in every day?

[Deleted]

Diminishing return, they have a good team who do WoW content, to enlarge the team will reduce it in efficiency, and the enlarge team will only produce a little more content.

The requirement of the quality of the new content has also increased over the years.

You can no longer on a large scale recycle old models and make them as boss and only give them one or two menial ability and put them in a very simpel cave as in Molten Core. Tolerance for bugs has decreased. You have to do 3 more class armor to each raid, new armor need to be more 3D insted of simpler bodypaint. You need to give each class 3 working raid spec, insted of one working raid spec for more classes and then they need to be fairly balanced among themselves....

The list can go on....

[Wildtree]

something else..

unless you have the max amount of achievement pts. you aren't out of content.
instead you're only out of content you want to have catered to you individually.
but the game itself doesn't lack content.

[Rafoel]

Because this:

1) Create content that can be completed only with huge time commitment.
2) Get whine from "casuals" who can't complete X because they "have lifes".
3) Remove time commitment neccesity.
4) Content is completed asap.
5) Get whine that there is no content.