Legion's long wait

[Hexxidecimal]

When push comes to shove, this is where I’m landing.

For a number of years, Blizzard had said that they planned a couple of expansions in advance so that they knew where the story was going and didn’t have to guess about current storylines and how they’d play out. Warlords of Draenor, however, was only decided upon after the release of Mists; and that’s conceptually, not even from a feature or design point of view. Because Wrathion highlighted the return of the Burning Legion at the tail end of the Pandaria legendary quest line, they needed a MacGuffin in order to make it happen. That ended up being Garrosh, but the real intent was to find a way to bring Gul’dan back into the story.

As a result, something that could have been a small patch or short story ended up being (half) an expansion and the entire planning schedule was thrown out of sync.

They used the excuse that they were training designers for the sake of Warlords, so they can’t reuse it. That does, therefore, lead to the excuse of another 14-month wait being extremely weak. Warlords was ultimately shoved into the timeline as little more than a cash-grab so that the game would potentially make more sense to new players coming from the movie, and they clearly believed that Legion would be ready far sooner than it was. They also ended up with little motivation to extend Warlords, given how poorly it performed out of the gates and the frustration it caused amongst players.

The saddest part is that the game is now collapsing. There are dead realms everywhere, there’s no meaningful content, live servers were developmentally abandoned last June, and the community is at its own throat. Garrisons were a complete failure, Ashran didn’t work, the class and profession design was utterly deadpan, and 20-man Mythic has nigh-killed the top-end raiding scene as competitive guilds eat each other.

The problem is that, while Legion looks good, it’s potentially come an expansion too late to really arrest the slide. Player faith in designers is at an all-time low, an ignominy said designers have well earned, and another inexplicable 14-month wait was tacked on for good measure.

Now, obviously, this is speculation. I don’t have an “inside track”. But I think that if you were to ask everyone at Irvine who worked on Warlords of Draenor, if they were honest, they’d admit that it should never have happened.

Sadly, it did, and too many of us will remember it.

Well thought out. This level of dissent is realistic and not to tin foil hat like. I am not going to pretend that Blizzard does things for money, obviously everything they do they do for money. However I don't set them aside as paragons of greed and despicable untrustworthy actions for that sole purpose. But I feel your post puts WoD into perspective very well. The entirety of the expansion was simply to play off the movie in the hopes that the combined effort of them will bring in more players. People are now familiar with Durotan, with Blackhand and Doomhammer. They are familiar with Gul'dan and the Fel. WoD was set up to play off the movie (and vice versa) then lead into Legion.

As a long time player of WoW the idea behind WoD, the story line and how it got there made very little sense to me and was very jolting. I remember hearing and thinking...what? Why? Why play with "trap" themes like time travel? It made no real sense. Then the movie happened and it all began to fit together. WoD felt bolted on and not part of the natural progression of story that had been occurring up till now. Nothing felt very impactful in WoD because none of it was happening to OUR world. The drama and death of key figures (Velen for example) just felt hollow. It felt like a shitty after market add on cause it basically was. It was there to capitalize off the movie and vice versa. So it ended up just being a cash grab. It backfired.

That being said I still hold out hope for legion. There are things about WoD I really liked that I am glad to see the return of. If we can get the same sort of (or even more) presentation that WoD had with cool cinematic moments, with the release schedule and content of Wrath I would be a very very happy camper. Additionally it's happening in our world and timeline, so all the consequences of a demonic invasion happen to US and OUR cities, leaders and races. Also Illidan!!! *squeeeeeaaaaal*

[Pua]

It's such a fucking cop out.

Well, yeah.

By any objective measure, Warlords of Draenor was their worst expansion. And it was the worst, sadly, by orders of magnitude. Poor design, a shark-jumping story that made no sense, extremely lacklustre patch support and a horrific dearth of content compared with previous offerings.

I always felt those calling it a glorified patch were being horribly unfair, but it was a terribly light expansion.

I just hope more of us forget about it than remember it.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

My impression is that no one is really in charge any more at blizzard. They have some stock ideas/expacs/content sitting on the shelf, but nothing really gets done because no one is in command. It's not until their corporate entity starts pressuring them for a release that they squeeze out a WOD like expac. There might be talented people there, there might be some good ideas floating around, but they are so successful, have so little competition that they end up just milling around like a bunch of smug commies. The community is so sedated and disorganized that they'll probably never hold blizzard accountable.

Nor should they...objectively speaking the game is highly polished and more accessible than ever before.

[Pua]

WoD felt bolted on and not part of the natural progression of story that had been occurring up till now.

It really did, and not in a good way.

Rather than getting nitrous oxide tanks bolted onto a car, it got brakes bolted on badly during a routine service and then ran completely out of control. For me, the reason I think it did so poorly, was when Tom Chilton revealed that they came up with the story following Mists. That just didn't give them the lead in time that they generally need for an expansion, and players paid the price.

Yes, since Activision, Blizzard have definitely tried to monetize their existing players much more than previously; the shift to easier-to-design games such as FPS and MOBA is also noticeable. But I don't think Blizzard really want to run World of Warcraft into the ground deliberately, or that they're the faceless greed of corporate America.

I just think they made an incredible misstep with Warlords of Draenor, and would give their right arms to take it back.

I feel the developers regret it almost as much as the players.

[RedGamer030]

That reason is exactly the point of this thread. How could they even plan on WoD lasting for 1 year when they just had a 26 month long Mists of Pandaria expansion?

Because they thought they could do it and ere at the point that their teams were large enough to give it a shot.

[Shihao]

There's a point in software development that you can't throw more people at it to make it faster, Blizzard should've know that.

Said that, the argument that more people can't develop stuff faster but can develop more of it does make sense, and I think that a two year cycle is good as long as there's content patches to support this. Sadly there's no way to know if they'll deliver on this "more content patches" stuff, we'll have to wait and see.

[Pull My Finger]

I think the extreme delay of Legion is most certainly my business. And Blizzard agrees, as they've attempted to justify this very long wait for Legion (albeit with a very flimsy justification). Hence the point of this thread.

Yeah, you can keep telling yourself that, it's not gonna make it any more true. You're entitled to nothing. They're offering explanations because they choose to.

[Hexxidecimal]

Yeah, you can keep telling yourself that, it's not gonna make it any more true. You're entitled to nothing. They're offering explanations because they choose to.

Eh. Maybe he isn't entitled to any sort of explanation, that doesn't make it not his business though, especially if Blizz wants ours. That is to say, Blizz doesn't HAVE to provide any explanation in regards to the delays, to some people (not necessarily Styil) it's an important point. If someone is willing to base their continuation of their sub on that point, then it is their business. The right to something isn't the same as someone's business. In this case Blizzard feels that it's worth giving some sort of explanation.

[Deleted]

Biggest team ever yet less content comes out and takes longer?....sounds a lot like outsourcing.

[MoanaLisa]

I'm very sceptical of this explanation. I find it hard to believe that they would not have known that they were unable to deliver an expansion 14 months quicker and in less than half the time than the one they just did. I feel like there is another explanation for Legion's very long wait that they are just not sharing with us. Possibly internal chaos.

I don't know that their explanation matters much. I'm unsubscribed and not paying them for the service. At that point I cease to care about either the truth, rationalizations or anything else much. When there's new stuff to do I'll come back.

It's really a pointless thing. I don't think Blizzard lies exactly. I think the reasons they give for things are generally part of the truth but they withhold their own internal discussions and problems and that's completely appropriate. I worry about their management since they seem to wander into these blind alleys in terms of development that nearly anyone who has spent just a few years developing any sort of software would know. More people is never faster. More people allows you to get more done. Whatever the slowest part of the critical chain is, that's the pace at which it goes and very often in these cases, throwing more coders at something just confuses and breaks what is already done.

Whether or not it's internal chaos or because they all don tinfoil hats, climb up on the tables in their conference rooms and meditate for a couple of hours in the afternoon is really none of our business. There's no customer right to demand to know stuff that a company deems proprietary and the very implication that there is is so unrealistic I don't even know where to start.

So, long breaks? Unsubscribe? Don't give them money. Don't spend any time at all of your life--which is shorter than you can imagine sometimes--spinning up wild theories in vain attempts to gain some sort of attention to yourself. It's a waste of time and life.

Unsubscribe. Play other games. Read books. Whatever. Enjoy yourself and put BS like this out of your mind. You'll never know anyway.

[lanesia24]

Simply to be clear, I am not saying it's malice either. Just general disarray = incompetence.

\

I'm sure you could do a lot better with your vast repertoire of mmorpg game design.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know that their explanation matters much. I'm unsubscribed and not paying them for the service. At that point I cease to care about either the truth, rationalizations or anything else much. When there's new stuff to do I'll come back.

It's really a pointless thing. I don't think Blizzard lies exactly. I think the reasons they give for things are generally part of the truth but they withhold their own internal discussions and problems and that's completely appropriate. I worry about their management since they seem to wander into these blind alleys in terms of development that nearly anyone who has spent just a few years developing any sort of software would know. More people is never faster. More people allows you to get more done. Whatever the slowest part of the critical chain is, that's the pace at which it goes and very often in these cases, throwing more coders at something just confuses and breaks what is already done.

Whether or not it's internal chaos or because they all don tinfoil hats, climb up on the tables in their conference rooms and meditate for a couple of hours in the afternoon is really none of our business. There's no customer right to demand to know stuff that a company deems proprietary and the very implication that there is is so unrealistic I don't even know where to start.

So, long breaks? Unsubscribe? Don't give them money. Don't spend any time at all of your life--which is shorter than you can imagine sometimes--spinning up wild theories in vain attempts to gain some sort of attention to yourself. It's a waste of time and life.

Unsubscribe. Play other games. Read books. Whatever. Enjoy yourself and put BS like this out of your mind. You'll never know anyway.

This. It's mind boggling how so many people cannot figure out that they don't have to keep paying for something if they don't enjoy it or there isn't enough current content. You can always come back when they release new expansions or patches.

I mean a company is made of of many different people so trying to claim that a whole company is screwing you intentionally or they have malice doing it just makes you look incredibly stupid. There may be people that work there that could be like that but I'd be very hard pressed to believe that everyone at Blizzard is simply out to get you and ruin your life or whatever pointless drivel you people come up with to cry about every other day.

- - - Updated - - -

When push comes to shove, this is where I’m landing.

For a number of years, Blizzard had said that they planned a couple of expansions in advance so that they knew where the story was going and didn’t have to guess about current storylines and how they’d play out. Warlords of Draenor, however, was only decided upon after the release of Mists; and that’s conceptually, not even from a feature or design point of view. Because Wrathion highlighted the return of the Burning Legion at the tail end of the Pandaria legendary quest line, they needed a MacGuffin in order to make it happen. That ended up being Garrosh, but the real intent was to find a way to bring Gul’dan back into the story.

As a result, something that could have been a small patch or short story ended up being (half) an expansion and the entire planning schedule was thrown out of sync.

They used the excuse that they were training designers for the sake of Warlords, so they can’t reuse it. That does, therefore, lead to the excuse of another 14-month wait being extremely weak. Warlords was ultimately shoved into the timeline as little more than a cash-grab so that the game would potentially make more sense to new players coming from the movie, and they clearly believed that Legion would be ready far sooner than it was. They also ended up with little motivation to extend Warlords, given how poorly it performed out of the gates and the frustration it caused amongst players.

The saddest part is that the game is now collapsing. There are dead realms everywhere, there’s no meaningful content, live servers were developmentally abandoned last June, and the community is at its own throat. Garrisons were a complete failure, Ashran didn’t work, the class and profession design was utterly deadpan, and 20-man Mythic has nigh-killed the top-end raiding scene as competitive guilds eat each other.

The problem is that, while Legion looks good, it’s potentially come an expansion too late to really arrest the slide. Player faith in designers is at an all-time low, an ignominy said designers have well earned, and another inexplicable 14-month wait was tacked on for good measure.

Now, obviously, this is speculation. I don’t have an “inside track”. But I think that if you were to ask everyone at Irvine who worked on Warlords of Draenor, if they were honest, they’d admit that it should never have happened.

Sadly, it did, and too many of us will remember it.

This is how you make up stuff when you have no idea what you are talking about but want to sound like you do.

[angrys13]

I get that you don't want yearly expansions, but that isn't the point of this thread. It is about Blizzard's explanation for this long Legion wait.

Blizzard's explanation for the long Legion wait is that they thought they could deliver on yearly expansions, but it failed miserably.

Blizzard had just come out of a 26 month expansion with MoP. Why would they even think that a yearly expansion would be achievable at that point? It took them 26 months of MoP to deliver WoD, and they thought that all of a sudden it would only take 12 months to make expansions?

I'm very sceptical of this explanation. I find it hard to believe that they would not have known that they were unable to deliver an expansion 14 months quicker and in less than half the time than the one they just did. I feel like there is another explanation for Legion's very long wait that they are just not sharing with us. Possibly internal chaos.

I'd prefer quality over quantity. I honestly could care less how long it takes for expansions to come out, as long as they are of exceptional quality.

[Stellan]

I get that you don't want yearly expansions, but that isn't the point of this thread. It is about Blizzard's explanation for this long Legion wait.

Blizzard's explanation for the long Legion wait is that they thought they could deliver on yearly expansions, but it failed miserably.

Blizzard had just come out of a 26 month expansion with MoP. Why would they even think that a yearly expansion would be achievable at that point? It took them 26 months of MoP to deliver WoD, and they thought that all of a sudden it would only take 12 months to make expansions?

I'm very sceptical of this explanation. I find it hard to believe that they would not have known that they were unable to deliver an expansion 14 months quicker and in less than half the time than the one they just did. I feel like there is another explanation for Legion's very long wait that they are just not sharing with us. Possibly internal chaos.

The point is what did they do that should lead us to believe that there was a possibility of a one year expansion? I see absolutely nothing. So the excuse that there was so few patches because of a one year expansion or an attempted one year expansion is ridiculous.

So now we don't get the "one" year expansion and apparently not even a two year expansion? What's it going to be? Three years? Four years? And by the way, since the one year expansion excuse is garbage, why should we think they'll increase the number of patches? I see no connection between the length of the expansion and the frequency of patches other than that of late there's been fewer and fewer patches per expansion.

What I really wonder, though, is with fewer expansions are they going to start charging us for patches? It wouldn't surprise me in the least.

[Deleted]

I don't want faster Expansions at all. Blizzards Shareholders may want them, since they make more revenue with another Addon-release.

The Rate they release new Addons is actually just fine - but rate they release Major Patch Content in those Expansions is really not good - they need to space it out more evenly. I mean, there are so many other MMO's that can do it, certainly Blizzard should be able to do that as well .

[PrairieChicken]

People quit wow because of long break and move on to hearthstone/hots/overwatch, legion launches and people buy the box, unsub again, repeat. Seems like a legit business plan to me.

Also they seem to be systematically abandoning wow in favor of cheap (in terms of production cost). Things like hearthstone make astronomical revenues for ~0 money invested, so expensive (plus genre dying out) games like wow is not going to be supported as much.

[ComputerNerd]

Throwing more people at a problem is not always some magical solution to speed it up.
The content or systems in an MMO are often not completely independent of each other.
A lot of it will need collaboration, to try and ensure that it doesn't break the work of someone else.
And the more people you have, each with their own way of doing things, their own contributions, the worse that gets.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth".
Sums it up still very nicely.
There is such a thing as too many people.

[Nachtigal]

I get that you don't want yearly expansions, but that isn't the point of this thread. It is about Blizzard's explanation for this long Legion wait.

Blizzard's explanation for the long Legion wait is that they thought they could deliver on yearly expansions, but it failed miserably.

Blizzard had just come out of a 26 month expansion with MoP. Why would they even think that a yearly expansion would be achievable at that point? It took them 26 months of MoP to deliver WoD, and they thought that all of a sudden it would only take 12 months to make expansions?

I'm very sceptical of this explanation. I find it hard to believe that they would not have known that they were unable to deliver an expansion 14 months quicker and in less than half the time than the one they just did. I feel like there is another explanation for Legion's very long wait that they are just not sharing with us. Possibly internal chaos.

Blizzard really doesn't owe us, as players, any in depth explanations to begin with.

[Binaris]

Here is an explanation for you.

Coding takes time. Every expansion, new code is added, system are rewritten and updates are made. As time goes on the code evolves into a far more complicated process. I doubt that the code would even be recognizable from someone who only first worked on vanilla. Yes they added new people, and those new people will help them keep up with making content at a reasonable pace instead of slowly falling further behind due to the complexity of coding in todays gaming world. Better to have a content drought and a good expansion than new content right up until release

[Pua]

This is how you make up stuff when you have no idea what you are talking about but want to sound like you do.

Feel free to correct it, by pointing out the inconsistencies in logic and how you know better.

If you can't do that, and aren't a part of the Blizzard design collective, then your post will go down as petty grandstanding.

That'd be quite embarrassing, I'd wager.

[Deleted]

Another prob with WOD is that raids were too little apart from each other and thus last one, hfc, is sooooo damn looong.