8 months and no new content, holy grail WOD better be epic Blizzard!!

[Finnio]

go check wildstar seems promising, wod will come out october-november...

[Deleted]

Took you what? 4 expansions to realize nothing will change?

[Mongoose19]

You do realize that the original WOW alpha had 3 years of delays right?

If only expansions were like turds, then you could just shit one out in 12 minutes or less and everyone would be happy.

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Ok, so in BC, you had kara and it was still valid for alts even after sunwell came out, that's great, and even after they dropped the attunes people were running kara like crazy because it was the easiest fastest way to get all epic gear. I submit to you, that kara was the entry level raid for BC, and MV is the entry level raid for MOP. In that sense, MV is STILL VALID for gearing alts, except who would do that if you have Timeless gear right? So what you seem to be missing is that every raid in MOP is still valid, but there is now catchup gear to allow you to skip entry level raids and go into more current content. That is what early BC didn't have and why so many people were still running tier 4 when tier 6 was available and tier 5 attunes had not been dropped. There simply were no catchups until attunes were dropped and welfares introduced. (Which they did during BC or my god the complaints would not have ended ever). Without catchup gear, the only way to get your guild geared was to run raids over and over to the point of burnout or to hop to a better guild, and because of guild hopping, guilds had real issues SURVIVING (huge problem, this creates a class of guild that is stuck in T4 and cannot ever get to T5). This is why there were so many complaints, and in fact, why BC saw so many people doing PVP for way lesser gear or doing dungeons for even way lesser gears or token gears, or farming trash in sunwell for months, without ever killing a boss. The perception was that even getting into kara meant you had to have a guild that would run alts in there. People need catchups, and the game has been better off since then, even though some people just don't understand what the problem ever even was because they were not running guilds back in BC.

TLDR: Attunements in the end, turned out to be artificial gating of the worst kind, and yet somehow or other, people cannot fathom that is all it was.

All I read is - because of no catchups people actually had lots of things to do. Guild hopping ain't bad, it's just like real life you either advance in your company or you find a new better job. Guilds have harder time surviving now because people quit game due to boredom. Plus you burnout much quicker running the same dungeon over and over nowadays. Back then there was a reason to do Kara, Grull, Maggy, Heroics and if you had better group SSC, TK, MH and so on. So yeah people might've whined but the game was hella addictive and player population grew.

[Solarnova]

Unsubbed last month, looks like my gameplay expires in a couple days.

How hard is it to just make a really difficult boss to keep people busy for a few months, or add epic rewards to World PvP. It's so easy to create content that people will flock to. Another 5-7 months till WoD and no new content since Orgrimmar and the Timeless Isle, I'm sorry but that's really bad. There should be entire teams devoted to current-expansion content and another set of teams devoted to next-expansion content and another set of teams devoted to expansion after next-expansion content.

[Nerevar]

Holy grail? What?...

[Pua]

They can never develop content faster than we can consume it. Ever. I'd rather they focus and get WoD into the amazing expansion it promises to be than do a half-hearted job so we have a little more content now.

Besides, just unsub or stop playing for a little bit. You don't have to play World of Warcraft 7 days a week!

I don't see how.

Other studios can manage to get content out much faster, and I mean much faster. I know the usual response is "yeah, full of bugs" but that's simply not true for any other game I've played that's pushed out quick content. I seriously don't know what goes on at Blizzard, but their content turnaround rate is absolutely dreadful, there's just no excuse for it.

[clevin]

There is no solution. As I said, they can never develop content faster than we can consume it. They can't. No one can.

I don't get why unsubscribing for a little while or just not playing is such a terrible thing.

But they can pace the content better. Why don't they (after all, as you've pointed out they do this every expansion)? I'll tell you why? They don't care. Why don't they care? Because for the most part enough people stay subbed that it doesn't hurt them. They're more likely to be hurt by people being bored in the first half of an expansion and leaving. So they feed us content until they run out and then, because they can only seem to do 3 tiers per expansion, we're done about 12-15 months into an expansion.

Now, if people left (unsubbed), they'd have an incentive to fix this. But far too many of you don't. You'll whine and bitch about it, but you stay subbed. Here's the thing though - Blizz doesn't care if you play hours a day or once a week for an hour. It's the same money to them (pay per time in Asia excepted). So if you just don't play but stay subbed, they're FINE with that.

Bottom line - if you are out of things that you want to do unsub and tell them why (if you're canceling a credit card sub). But at this point, they're even in net subs for the life of SoO. Last quarter they lost 200k, the previous quarter they'd gained 200k. So, what's their incentive to fix this again?

[Copenhagen23]

The content gap is really going to screw them this time with ESO and Wildstar pretty much releasing at the perfect time. Even more perfect for Wildstar because it will be the beginning of summer, and it will be long enough for people to be bored of ESO. WoW won't be reigning champ much longer if Blizzard still thinks they can get away with this.

[Grumpy Old Man]

They can never develop content faster than we can consume it. Ever. I'd rather they focus and get WoD into the amazing expansion it promises to be than do a half-hearted job so we have a little more content now.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. But... still... I think they could have, if not avoided, at least decreased this raid tier long time just by increasing previous raid tiers by 1-2 months.
And since they already experienced this same problem two expansions in a row, I think they really really should've thought about this in advance. Oh well.

[Deleted]

The only way to let them know that they are doing something wrong and putting enough pressure on them to change it is by representing it through revenue. If people unsub their numbers go down and they start to get the hint.

The only thing that could achieve this is massive lost of players in a shot period of time ... in asia. Asian players are the real engine that mantain WoW right now. This game is turning slowly into a micro/macrotransaction aberration, losing its roots, and asian players don't seem to bother. So, we, westerners are officially fucked up .

[nyc81991]

They can never develop content faster than we can consume it. Ever. I'd rather they focus and get WoD into the amazing expansion it promises to be than do a half-hearted job so we have a little more content now.

Besides, just unsub or stop playing for a little bit. You don't have to play World of Warcraft 7 days a week!

I think it's time for Blizzard to start looking at a different content release model for WoW. It's obvious that they can't continue with the old way anymore and their efforts to release expansions faster has failed.

In my opinion they either have to drop expansions all together and just release content through patches or make expansions smaller at release but add more content to them over time.

There should never be more than 6 months without new content. And Content doesn't have to mean a raid tier necessarily.

[mvaliz]

They can never develop content faster than we can consume it. Ever. I'd rather they focus and get WoD into the amazing expansion it promises to be than do a half-hearted job so we have a little more content now.

Besides, just unsub or stop playing for a little bit. You don't have to play World of Warcraft 7 days a week!

They seemed to do a pretty bang-up speedy job during MoP between patches....

[Deleted]

The only thing that could achieve this is massive lost of players in a shot period of time ... in asia. Asian players are the real engine that mantain WoW right now. This game is turning slowly into a micro/macrotransaction aberration, losing its roots, and asian players don't seem to bother. So, we, westerners are officially fucked up .

If u think about it most of the 7.6mil sub are in Asia, so what would be left for EU and US tops 3mil i would guess and rest in ASIA. So your statement could be pretty right trauma. Biggest wow market is ASIA 4 sure.

[Vankrys]

i don't expect WoD be very different from previous expansion honnestly. First you level to max level, then you visit a few max level dungeon, start on grinding your rep, your profession, your weekly cap, then eventually go into raiding and/or PVP.

SSDD as they say.

[Neromius]

sadly, i agree

its not looking very appealing as of now imo. new features are meh at best and just rehash upgrades of what other mmo's have already implemented.
here is hoping for a real lore expansion after WoD this whole altered timeline bs is going to take a huge turd on the story built up so far. i dont think pandas were good or bad for it, but time travel never ends well in coherent stories.

I swear to Christ if people don't stop using "rehash" as a boogeyman, I'm going to destroy the internet. With the progress world civilization has made, it is near impossible to expect a truly original thought or idea outside the realm of technology and science. The most reasonable expectation one can have is that a new twist is put on a decent idea and then you have progress. Besides that though, you can't say you're hoping for a "real" lore expansion for a few reasons. A) Blizz writes the story and experience. It is now lore. B) You contradict your "hope" in the next two sentences saying the "altered timeline bs" is going to ruin the story built so far and that time travel never ends well in coherent stories.

A better way to think about what is happening simply for the sake of understanding what Blizz intendedis that Garrosh goes to a parallel dimension. It's a completely bullshit way to bring back old lore and characters with a new twist but it gets the job done. Now, if you want to play the "Time travel doesn't work like that game" go for it. It doesn't make sense but I don't care. I can still play.

[alkyd]

If you are so loyal to the game and the company, then you wouldn't be so upset. So why don't you take this opportunity and get a break from WoW instead of complaining.

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I don't see how.

Other studios can manage to get content out much faster, and I mean much faster. I know the usual response is "yeah, full of bugs" but that's simply not true for any other game I've played that's pushed out quick content. I seriously don't know what goes on at Blizzard, but their content turnaround rate is absolutely dreadful, there's just no excuse for it.

So how come that those other studios' games are falling behind Blizzard's WoW in terms of gameplay, player base and popularity? Unfortunately ESO has already proven its unworthiness, and Wildstar hype will quickly diminish after a couple of months. By the time WoD will come out, players will already be bored of Wildstar and ESO and return to WoW like wayward children.

[finskee]

All I read is - because of no catchups people actually had lots of things to do. Guild hopping ain't bad, it's just like real life you either advance in your company or you find a new better job. Guilds have harder time surviving now because people quit game due to boredom. Plus you burnout much quicker running the same dungeon over and over nowadays. Back then there was a reason to do Kara, Grull, Maggy, Heroics and if you had better group SSC, TK, MH and so on. So yeah people might've whined but the game was hella addictive and player population grew.

Because of no catchups people actually had lots of things they were FORCED to do. Guild hopping IS BAD. There is no argument for why it is good. Guilds have a much easier time surviving now. You think people burnout running the same dungeon but at least they finish it. Burnout in raiding happens when you wipe constantly on a mid-tier boss. You say if your group was good enough you would go to SSC, but what if I went to SSC, then we lost players to a group in BT, then we went back to Tier 4 EVEN THOUGH WE'D ALREADY CLEARED IT MANY TIMES AND HAD IT ON FARM. That is what causes burnout. Can you imagine still having to run MV every week for gear so you could pass a dps check boss at the start of TOT? Even though you really wanted to try SOO? That is what happened in BC. The people that whined were the GUILD LEADERS, RAID LEADERS, and TANKS, all of them complained about attunements, the people who like attunements likely got carried to their attunes and then probably quit raiding a few weeks later or something. There is no way they would like attunements if they had to help other people get them, a year after it was even valid content.

That is what you don't seem to get. The catchup stuff for SOO came out when TOT was already out for 6 months and TOES had been out for a year. THAT IS OLD CONTENT. At the time Sunwell was out, doing Kara was really POINTLESS, but you HAD to do it to get geared.

Basically it comes down to content you are FORCED to do, and content you CHOOSE to do. I prefer to choose.

[Pua]

So how come that those other studios' games are falling behind Blizzard's WoW in terms of gameplay, player base and popularity? Unfortunately ESO has already proven its unworthiness, and Wildstar hype will quickly diminish after a couple of months. By the time WoD will come out, players will already be bored of Wildstar and ESO and return to WoW like wayward children.

That's not really my point. Player numbers and popularity have nothing to do with the rate of content release, or its quality.

Yes, WoW's popularity is unchallenged and other games haven't kept up in the competition stakes but that doesn't change the fact that far smaller teams, on far smaller budgets, with far smaller resources can pump out content of a high-standard at a dramatically faster pace than Blizzard do with World of Warcraft.

What do they do with their time at Irvine?

Seriously; what the fuck do they do with their time?

All the while, they're raking in subscription money for doing absolutely fuck all and their fanboys across the Internet consistently (and often loudly) argue that they'd "rather have content with no bugs".

Other studios are proving, clearly, that you don't need months or, in the case of Warlords, a year to get your content out and relatively bug-free.

There's absolutely no excuse for this. And if the Warlords beta launches near the start of WildStar, which I suspect it will, we'll know the answer.

Blizzard are willing to fleece their players just to try and impact the launches of other studios.

It's scummy business, and a scummy way to treat your players, no matter how good a game you think they've made.

[Klingers]

They can never develop content faster than we can consume it. Ever. I'd rather they focus and get WoD into the amazing expansion it promises to be than do a half-hearted job so we have a little more content now.

Besides, just unsub or stop playing for a little bit. You don't have to play World of Warcraft 7 days a week!

True. But I'm sure Blizzard could maybe close the gap a bit if they optimized their software development lifecycle. There's some in-between space between 3 weeks of people tearing through the content and being stuck in limbo for 7-12 months.

[MasterHamster]

In short: Yes the downtime between last tier and next expansion is long and boring. Unsub and do something else?

What do they do with their time at Irvine?

Seriously; what the fuck do they do with their time?

Making sure content is of high quality?

Problem is they seem to do way too many iterations.