Would you accept a 3 year epac cycle?

[Relapses]

Already unsubbed. You can keep paying a sub for no content all you want. 11 months and 1 terribly phoned-in content patch is an unmitigated disaster.

Absolutely there is the expectation that the sub fee is for ongoing and continuous content updates. If you think this is some sort of revelation, then I can't say I'm shocked, given your terrible attempt at humour.

If you think the game is worthy of a subscription, you pay for it. If you don't, you don't. This is not beholden to Blizzard. There's an expectation, yes; but there is no promise. It's not Copium to point this out but there definitely seems to be a faction of players who do nothing but complain about the game but stay subscribed because they can't actually quit. And for these people, it's apparently Blizzard's problem, not theirs. I was just making light of that, apologies for the heavy handed sarcasm.

[MoanaLisa]

No. For one thing Blizzard is doing just fine financially and doesn't need to save on development costs. All of this talk about how much trouble their in is nonsense. Their revenue for the first six months of this year was north of $850 million dollars. They're going to be fine. All of the budgets for those unannounced games they cancelled can be added to WoW's if it comes to that. For now, this is the horse they're riding and they need to take care of it.

The alternatives if they were to do this would be to have an extravagant content drought (or several of them) or develop enough content to stretch over three years. Content droughts at the end of expansions are bad enough now, never mind adding another six-to-eight months onto them. What exactly would be the point of a .4 content patch when they could just put that work into a new expansion?

No, the sub fee does not, and never has, gone exclusively back into the game. The game has a budget. Blizzard has revenue. They divide the revenue up into game budgets, server costs, employee pay and a million other expenses. Anyone that thinks or expects the sub cost should or is going exclusively to the game needs to reconsider exactly what it would be that pays for employee salaries, health care insurance, etc.