When will they release chains of domination?

[SkyTides]

I hope they don't cut SL short. Although a lot of people seem to dislike or be ambivalent about the lore/setting, I'm enjoying the story and am curious to see where they take it. The potential to set the stage for more cosmic entities and realms is right up my street.

I'm not too hyped for the new zone and raid in 9.1 just because it seems like asset reuse overload, but they could take us to some really unique places in this expansion.

[Nyel]

2. WoW's delayed SL before, and that didn't really affect their schedule. And if WoW delays the patches cause of COVID, them not going with their 2 year plan schedule is probably just as fine, so long as we get a completed expansion. Blizzard's said multiple times that they do NOT want to pull another WoD again.

I must repeat myself, this is the only point I do not agree at all. Not hitting the +- 24 month mark for expansion releases is disastrous for their revenue. Spikes in revenue will always, always beat completing an expansion (whatever that means). Shadowlands can be completed by 9.2 easily, it can completed by 9.3 as well - there's no reason or indicator that a patch in between is mandatory or necessary to finish Shadowlands' plot. It will add more to the Shadowlands lore in general, but it's far from being mandatory.

Let's quickly look at the numbers: WoW has one spike per year when it comes to revenue: the time of a brand new expansion launch. In 2018 this was BfA, in 2019 it was Classic, in 2020 it was Shadowlands, in 2021 it will be TBC and in 2022 it will be another retail expansion again.

If we take the Superdata analysis on top of it: https://www.superdataresearch.com/bl...l-games-market

World of Warcraft player numbers fell back to normal levels as the excitement around November’s Shadowlands expansion subsided. From November to January, revenue fell by 61% and user numbers declined by 41% (these figures do not include China). This roughly matches the pattern seen for the past several expansions, though Shadowlands had a bigger launch. Blizzard does appear to have found a way to increase how often expansions are able to boost earnings. The publisher recently announced that it will be adding the 2007 Burning Crusade expansion into World of Warcraft: Classic this year. Alternating between releasing all-new and classic expansions could cause WoW revenue to spike annually for the near future, instead of every two years (the typical development time for the title’s expansions).

Some important takeaways: even with Shadowlands' bigger launch its player numbers and revenue drastically decreased over the last 3 months and are back on the business as usual. Now imagine how that looks until 9.1 is launched which takes another 2-3 months. The numbers pretty much will be disastrous until either TBC launch happens in June or 9.1 gets released in June / July (although the 9.1 increase in subs is going to drop faster than that of TBC because TBCs initial lifetime is way bigger than that of 9.1).

Shadowlands pretty much won't recover from the massive drops that took place until the 9.1 launch. Why would Blizzard then deliberately extend Shadowlands' lifetime with very low sub numbers and sacrifice their -+24 months release schedule for less revenue than they could possibly generate by shifting manpower to work on 10.0 instead of 9.3 and eventually releasing the new expansion sooner / on time for big $$$?

So if you're from the WoW team and you want to release 9.3, which causes a delay of 10.0 by 4-6 months and brings the overall lifetime from the +-24 months to a 28-30 months, how would you justify that in front of your WoW management from a financial standpoint? And how would the WoW management justify that in front of the Blizzard management where only $$$ seems to count anymore? Honest question. Give me an elevator pitch on why releasing 9.3 is more important than to focus on 10.0 and stick to your annual revenue spikes for WoW. I'm just curious to hear different opinions on this.

[glowpipe]

you all need to remember that what we got in 9.0.5 was supposed to be in 9.1, so they have been working quite a bit on this patch. They are starting almost immediately with raid testing. so my guess is early to mid july

9.1 ptr is not like other ptr's. since they postponed the patch and released parts of it earlier

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Let's quickly look at the numbers: WoW has one spike per year when it comes to revenue: the time of a brand new expansion launch. In 2018 this was BfA, in 2019 it was Classic, in 2020 it was Shadowlands, in 2021 it will be TBC and in 2022 it will be another retail expansion again.

Not gonna spike that much for tbc classic tho. The people who are going to play it is already playing regular classic and there is no sale price for tbc classic. They are getting some new people. But its not gonna be close to what classic did

[CaptainV]

Ehhhh, I wouldn't say that. If SL cuts at a .2, that would leave a LOT to be desired. We still have to explore the Gardens of Life, which is pretty essential to Ardenweald and the forces of Death, especially the Jailer.

WoD at least can still continue it's stuff with Farahlon and Shattrath in later expansions.

No offence but if they planned to use WoD more than for an allied race, they'd have done it by now and im saying that with sincere concern for the lack of faralohn.

[huth]

I must repeat myself, this is the only point I do not agree at all. Not hitting the +- 24 month mark for expansion releases is disastrous for their revenue.

Get off your hyperbole. It'd be a rather predictable event, which for a company is always preferable to unpredictable developments. Especially if they're already planning for it.

For that matter, your takeaways are missing that the drop in numbers was itself already business as usual, and there's nothing disastrous about it at all. Business is going as expected outside of the Shadowlands launch going better than they thought.

Dropping 9.3 also isn't going to make 10.0 arrive any sooner. That's not how their dev pipelines work.

[Swnem]

I don't see the point of this question. It comes out when Blizz says it does.

If we must predict based on previous PTR's, it starts in 2 weeks, it usually goes for 2.5 months. So, add 3 months to today and you got your estimate.

Aka nowhere soon, so your question won't yeild the results you wanted.

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Get off your hyperbole. It'd be a rather predictable event, which for a company is always preferable to unpredictable developments. Especially if they're already planning for it.

For that matter, your takeaways are missing that the drop in numbers was itself already business as usual, and there's nothing disastrous about it at all. Business is going as expected outside of the Shadowlands launch going better than they thought.

Dropping 9.3 also isn't going to make 10.0 arrive any sooner. That's not how their dev pipelines work.

How is it hyperbole if they literally did it before?
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Development is about project management and assigning tasks and setting milestones. The next expansion is already in development. If milestones aren't hit, you will have to shift resources from somewhere else to make the new milestone.

So, if you say cutting a patch won't make the next xpac come sooner? Sure. It will make it come out as planned before milestones were missed.
That is literally what happened with WoD to Legion.

[huth]

How is it hyperbole if they literally did it before?
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Development is about project management and assigning tasks and setting milestones. The next expansion is already in development. If milestones aren't hit, you will have to shift resources from somewhere else to make the new milestone.

So, if you say cutting a patch won't make the next xpac come sooner? Sure. It will make it come out as planned before milestones were missed.
That is literally what happened with WoD to Legion.

No, that isn't what happened with WoD. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. Legion took way longer than it was intended to be since WoD was originally projected as only lasting about a year.

If milestones aren't hit, your best option is to re-schedule. Throwing more resources at it is unlikely to make the problem go away and may in fact make it worse, especially if it's the wrong kind of resources. Developers aren't freely interchangeable - 10.0 development isn't likely to have much use for animators right now.

[Alanar]

Wait so:

New zone
New mega dungeon
New 10 boss raid
New campaign quests
New collectibles
New invasion events

Is now considered a “very empty patch” by the forums?

What would be a “a very full patch” by comparison that was done previously?

Well yea.. it might look like alot to you, but then it worked on you. Gg blizz.

1 new zone is part of the maw, sort of like an extension.
2 mega dung isnt exactly interesting. In ends up getting split in 2, because people dont have time to spend hours doing 1 dungeon and lets be honest its fire and forget. The only thing it does is to give m+ some varierty

New quests, new story or new collectables...

Idk who gets excited about new quests these days, but if these are what we call content. Then thats quite weak.

I am not a raider, not anymore atleast and I might do it once for the story so ye..

Not very exciting stuff tbh.. within a few weeks people go back to what they were doing.. either m+/ raid or arena. They will find out its still the same and people leave again.

Sad, bur this is future with wow these daya.

[LemonDemonGirl]

The Zandalari uprise is kinda dead. BFA’s already established that shit died quite a bit ago. We could still see some smaller factions here or there, but that’s it.

As for G’huun, nothing really implies he’ll come back. For the moment, he’s dead.

I'm hoping for a tiny bit of a 'revamp' to Nazmir that fixes up some of the ruined places. Maybe even a new Rep, but probably not going to happen.

And yeah, G'huun is gone forever. He was a Titan-made Old God. Unless the Void Lords bring him back, then we'll be fucked lol

[Nyel]

Not gonna spike that much for tbc classic tho. The people who are going to play it is already playing regular classic and there is no sale price for tbc classic. They are getting some new people. But its not gonna be close to what classic did

TBC is the biggest revenue generator for WoW until the next retail expansion is available.

Will it be as huge as Classic? No, most likely not. But it will bring a lot of people that already left Classic and it will bring back people that are bored af by Shadowlands. Will it last? Who knows. But one thing‘s for sure:

TBC launch will be the most profitable event for WoW right until 10.0 happens. Neither 9.1, nor 9.2 or a possible 9.3 will generate as much buzz or revenue as the launch of TBC will.

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How is it hyperbole if they literally did it before?
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Development is about project management and assigning tasks and setting milestones. The next expansion is already in development. If milestones aren't hit, you will have to shift resources from somewhere else to make the new milestone.

So, if you say cutting a patch won't make the next xpac come sooner? Sure. It will make it come out as planned before milestones were missed.
That is literally what happened with WoD to Legion.

Thank you, finally someone who’s rating it from a business / financial perspective.

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No, that isn't what happened with WoD. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. Legion took way longer than it was intended to be since WoD was originally projected as only lasting about a year.

No it wasn’t. That was never said, mentioned or even tried by Blizzard in the case of WoD. They were thinking about annual expansions, but that plan never came to fruition.

I even want back and looked for any official comments on this topic and this might be it: https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-see...-back-players/

"We find that expansions are what bring players back to World of Warcraft," Street tells Digital Spy . "Really good patches will keep them, but they aren't as good at bringing players back to the game.

"We really want to get to a cadence where we can release expansions more quickly," he says. "Once a year I think would be a good rate. I think the best thing we can do for new players is to keep coming out with regular content updates."

Funny enough, the first part is exactly my standpoint on why 10.0 will always win a battle against 9.3 if they have to make this decision.

[Argorwal]

Well yea.. it might look like alot to you, but then it worked on you. Gg blizz.

1 new zone is part of the maw, sort of like an extension.
2 mega dung isnt exactly interesting. In ends up getting split in 2, because people dont have time to spend hours doing 1 dungeon and lets be honest its fire and forget. The only thing it does is to give m+ some varierty

New quests, new story or new collectables...

Idk who gets excited about new quests these days, but if these are what we call content. Then thats quite weak.

I am not a raider, not anymore atleast and I might do it once for the story so ye..

Not very exciting stuff tbh.. within a few weeks people go back to what they were doing.. either m+/ raid or arena. They will find out its still the same and people leave again.

Sad, bur this is future with wow these daya.

What is an example of a patch that was good in your eyes?

Because this is looking to be as large of a patch as ever.

[Kralljin]

-snip-

I want to underline this post and take it a little further.

This whole news about 9.1 being late obviously did not pass Blizzard without notice and they surely know that Players getting antsy about the next patch facing a significant delay means trouble for them, it just smells a bit like they're now trying to push a PTR client to calm the waves.

After all, the duration of how long a patch is on the PTR is not set in stone, those 8-10 weeks might easily become 12 or more.

At the least the BfA patches were announced with a bit more promotion, an hour long livestream or so going over the details of what the patch entails, such as Essences or Corruption - now you just got a bluepost that basically reads "PTR will come in about two weeks, more info coming".

[Alanar]

What is an example of a patch that was good in your eyes?

Because this is looking to be as large of a patch as ever.

I guess it depends on what you like.. I mean if you do all types on content for example then sure it is alot.

I honestly cant remember when I truly thought that tbh.

[Swnem]

No, that isn't what happened with WoD. In fact, what happened was the exact opposite. Legion took way longer than it was intended to be since WoD was originally projected as only lasting about a year.

If milestones aren't hit, your best option is to re-schedule. Throwing more resources at it is unlikely to make the problem go away and may in fact make it worse, especially if it's the wrong kind of resources. Developers aren't freely interchangeable - 10.0 development isn't likely to have much use for animators right now.

Of course you don't just assign resources that won't get the job done. That goes without saying.

That is totally not what happened with WoD.
What interfered with WoD was that titan was cancelled and they now had to coach new devs coming to the WoW team.
Because those resources were shifted, milestones weren't going to get hit as the devs were working on both WoD patch content and Legion. Having had to split resources into the coaching simply meant something had to give. Either WoD patches get cancelled or Legion would get delayed.
This was said officially by Ion at some point. They decided to focus on Legion so we wouldn't have to wait longer for the new expansion.

Due to that precedent, i expect them to make the same decision, if again confronted with it, but this time due to covid and other setbacks.

[TheFirstOnes]

No offence but if they planned to use WoD more than for an allied race, they'd have done it by now and im saying that with sincere concern for the lack of faralohn.

I mean, do you know why WoD got mostly scrapped in the first place? or?

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I must repeat myself, this is the only point I do not agree at all. Not hitting the +- 24 month mark for expansion releases is disastrous for their revenue. Spikes in revenue will always, always beat completing an expansion (whatever that means). Shadowlands can be completed by 9.2 easily, it can completed by 9.3 as well - there's no reason or indicator that a patch in between is mandatory or necessary to finish Shadowlands' plot. It will add more to the Shadowlands lore in general, but it's far from being mandatory.

Let's quickly look at the numbers: WoW has one spike per year when it comes to revenue: the time of a brand new expansion launch. In 2018 this was BfA, in 2019 it was Classic, in 2020 it was Shadowlands, in 2021 it will be TBC and in 2022 it will be another retail expansion again.

If we take the Superdata analysis on top of it: https://www.superdataresearch.com/bl...l-games-market

World of Warcraft player numbers fell back to normal levels as the excitement around November’s Shadowlands expansion subsided. From November to January, revenue fell by 61% and user numbers declined by 41% (these figures do not include China). This roughly matches the pattern seen for the past several expansions, though Shadowlands had a bigger launch. Blizzard does appear to have found a way to increase how often expansions are able to boost earnings. The publisher recently announced that it will be adding the 2007 Burning Crusade expansion into World of Warcraft: Classic this year. Alternating between releasing all-new and classic expansions could cause WoW revenue to spike annually for the near future, instead of every two years (the typical development time for the title’s expansions).

Some important takeaways: even with Shadowlands' bigger launch its player numbers and revenue drastically decreased over the last 3 months and are back on the business as usual. Now imagine how that looks until 9.1 is launched which takes another 2-3 months. The numbers pretty much will be disastrous until either TBC launch happens in June or 9.1 gets released in June / July (although the 9.1 increase in subs is going to drop faster than that of TBC because TBCs initial lifetime is way bigger than that of 9.1).

Shadowlands pretty much won't recover from the massive drops that took place until the 9.1 launch. Why would Blizzard then deliberately extend Shadowlands' lifetime with very low sub numbers and sacrifice their -+24 months release schedule for less revenue than they could possibly generate by shifting manpower to work on 10.0 instead of 9.3 and eventually releasing the new expansion sooner / on time for big $$$?

So if you're from the WoW team and you want to release 9.3, which causes a delay of 10.0 by 4-6 months and brings the overall lifetime from the +-24 months to a 28-30 months, how would you justify that in front of your WoW management from a financial standpoint? And how would the WoW management justify that in front of the Blizzard management where only $$$ seems to count anymore? Honest question. Give me an elevator pitch on why releasing 9.3 is more important than to focus on 10.0 and stick to your annual revenue spikes for WoW. I'm just curious to hear different opinions on this.

Finance is cool and all, but there's legit a pandemic going on and ALL OF BLIZZARD is getting fucked schedule wise. Also, who cares about pushing shit faster if people are gonna quit the game over a half assed story?

[CaptainV]

I mean, do you know why WoD got mostly scrapped in the first place? or?

Lackluster development, lazy work effort, the fact they were developing other games at the same time (Diablo 3 reaper of souls/starcraft 2 legacy of the void and overwatch).

The game got panic launched because ESO was about to hit launch and activision wanted WoD out just around the same time ESO was comming out, its why alotta folks had nightmare convos about WoD being rushed like Cataclysm was.

And it was, because they ultimatley cancelled 2/3rds of the content they promised to release, plus the game was also having a content drought of over a year of Siege of Orgrimmar and REALLY needed a patch 5.5 instead of Warcrimes, infact, it was even speculated 5.5 was meant to be the Warcrimes Novel serving as a transictionary patch but it never got released.

There were evidences that hinted at it, such as the Kairoz stuff in timeless isle never going anywhere significant, or the fact that there were hints that something was meant to be going on with Arathi in 5.5 (Which later became Warfront in 8.0)

Blizzard got mega lazy with WoD and it showed.

[TheFirstOnes]

Lackluster development, lazy work effort, the fact they were developing other games at the same time (Diablo 3 reaper of souls/starcraft 2 legacy of the void and overwatch).

The game got panic launched because ESO was about to hit launch and activision wanted WoD out just around the same time ESO was comming out, its why alotta folks had nightmare convos about WoD being rushed like Cataclysm was.

And it was, because they ultimatley cancelled 2/3rds of the content they promised to release, plus the game was also having a content drought of over a year of Siege of Orgrimmar and REALLY needed a patch 5.5 instead of Warcrimes, infact, it was even speculated 5.5 was meant to be the Warcrimes Novel serving as a transictionary patch but it never got released.

There were evidences that hinted at it, such as the Kairoz stuff in timeless isle never going anywhere significant, or the fact that there were hints that something was meant to be going on with Arathi in 5.5 (Which later became Warfront in 8.0)

Blizzard got mega lazy with WoD and it showed.

Actually, the main reason was that Chris Metzen had multiple panic attacks during WoD's development, which caused Blizzard to ditch it. But the other reasons count too.

They still don't impede on SL's development tbh.

[Nyel]

Finance is cool and all, but there's legit a pandemic going on and ALL OF BLIZZARD is getting fucked schedule wise. Also, who cares about pushing shit faster if people are gonna quit the game over a half assed story?

I‘m not sure if you’re aware of it, but you basically supported my case with this argument. And nobody is saying that they’re pushing shit faster. It’s about shifting resources from something that doesn’t bring revenue to something that is the most important revenue generator each year.

I’ve never heard that droves of people quit because of a half assed story. They quite WoD because it had no content and they quit BfA because it had shit content (granted, they had half assed shit stories on top of that). And as I said, Shadowlands storyline can be told and finished with 9.2 with ease. Like the faction war storyline in BfA was finished in 8.2.5, for example. That would have needed more than that, but hey, they gave us a 5 min scenario!

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Actually, the main reason was that Chris Metzen had multiple panic attacks during WoD's development, which caused Blizzard to ditch it. But the other reasons count too.

They still don't impede on SL's development tbh.

That’s all right. What wasn’t a reason for WoD‘s problems is that it was meant to be and developed as a 1-year expansion.

[TheFirstOnes]

I‘m not sure if you’re aware of it, but you basically supported my case with this argument. And nobody is saying that they’re pushing shit faster. It’s about shifting resources from something that doesn’t bring revenue to something that is the most important revenue generator each year.

I didn't really support anything you said. If anything, I'm saying Blizzard's likely going to handle SL longer because of the fucked scheduling. Kinda doesn't help that rushing the biggest cosmic threat atm to 2 patches just seems dumb.

Listen, I just want my Gardens of Life. If the Heart of the Forest, that Dreadlord shit, etc is apparently big in the Jailer plotline, and IF the Eternal Ones lose to Zovaal this patch, we kinda have to go there for extra aid. We also don't know how we could cleanse Anduin from his domination magics. AND, ONTOP OF ALL THAT...

I want a patch that deviates from all the death n shit. This expac ain't JUST about Death. The same way Legion wasn't just about Disorder.

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That’s all right. What wasn’t a reason for WoD‘s problems is that it was meant to be as a 1-year expansion, which was never the case, but gets repeated in this forum quite a lot.

You'll find that a lot of the WoW forum peeps love to fearmonger or say shit that's flat out wrong.

Besides, we'll likely go back to AU Draenor in the Light/Shadow expansion.

[Soon-TM]

No offence but if they planned to use WoD more than for an allied race, they'd have done it by now and im saying that with sincere concern for the lack of faralohn.

As far as Farahlon goes, I remember reading somewhere some datamined text from Farahlon quests that made reference to a small party of high/blood elves who were visiting the place in order to do some kind of research about the Void. It looks like the concept of allied races, and specifically void elves, had been on the table for quite some time prior to Legion.