Has Time Gating Been In WoW Since Vanilla? What is Time Gating Exactly?

[RobertMugabe]

What most people consider time gating is essentially when you stretch the availability of some content for no other reason than keeping players waiting (which in case brings blizzard more money).

So yeah sure, some things since the early days of WoW where somewhat time gated, but it's only been rather recently where they began to massively stretch out the availability of content such as quests, accessing certain zones or parts of the game, access to flying etc etc.

Also there is a rather simple solution to avoiding players from consuming content too fast and that is by not spoiling everything through beta's and ptr's.

[heldok]

Time gating is what people whinge about when they aren't whinging about lack of content.

People either do stuff all at once then whinge about lack of stuff to do, or the game imposes real time limits on how often things can be done - then people whinge about time gating.


It is the way of the world, back in Vanilla things were time gated more subtly (time to walk, materials shortages, gold etc etc). These days it is more overt - with cool downs, or delays in days etc.

With timegating, "lack of content" happens sooner, because if you have 7 chapters of a story and you only let me play through the first one on launch day, then I run out of content after 30 minutes, instead of after several hours. Timegating doesn't create more content. It just makes playing through the content even less fun.

[Sucralose]

It has come and gone depending on patch cycle much less expansion. It usually is done exceedingly poorly.

[Bladesyphon]

All of the above examples are NOT actually time gating. The limitations behind these 3 examples rested solely on time played, not time WAITED. Time gating is only an issue when there is no other choice but to WAIT and in a game where you pay a subscription monthly to PLAY having to WAIT instead of PLAY is absolutely RIDICULOUS.

EDIT: You were close with TBC Heroics, if you had said Heroics having a daily reset was time gating you'd partially be correct, but only in the sense that you could get unlucky and run all of the heroics and still not get any of the gear you want, forcing you to wait until the next day before you could continue heroics to progress to raids (a very unlikely and not very limiting scenario).

Alright so... If we don't want to include AQ20/40 as a time gate, which is fair, that still doesn't change the fact that Time Gating began as early as BC with Sunwell Plateau.

Only the first three bosses were available at launch, the remaining bosses unlocked one by one over the proceeding weeks on a time-based release schedule completely independent to the progress of the Shattered Sun Offensive Rep.

Similarly, Wrath of the Lich King had time gating in both the Trial of the Crusader as well as Icecrown Citadel, where in the former the raid released a single boss encounter each week for a duration of five weeks, and for ICC, an additional wing was released (I believe) one week after the first week.

So the TC is right, Time Gating has been in WoW since it's first expansion, though we can still use the AQ War Effort as an example as well, as servers that lagged behind for too long simply had the raids unlocked after a certain point of time.

[MoanaLisa]

As long as I can remember dailies have time-gated reputation awards which in many cases included power upgrades. I don't know what else you would call requiring daily quests that are available in limited quantities once every 24 hours other than gating by time. Vanilla dungeon and raid attunements were arguably limited in how quickly you could acquire them.