So, how does this look any different than WoD going into Legion?

[Dejiko]

havent been PUBLICALY tested, i doubt they are well tested internaly as of yet, but we cant be certain



now, here ill play devils advocate a bit, i wont realy blame them for keeping info "light", bcs of how people are, blizz says something, "fans" twist it, and then make it somehow blizz fault, so its probably better to say as little as possible...

remember the zandalari trolls?
at reveal they said they will be in BFA, 3 or 4 months before release they said they wont be in 8.0, and when the bfa released people were shocked and whined about them not being there, despite being told months before, and called blizz liars bcs they werent there at release, despite blizz never saying that...

Some customers being whiny isn`t an excuse to withhold information from the broader public.
It may be a foreign concept in this day and age, but just ignore them.

Also saying something will be in an expansion is quite misleading if you don`t then follow up with a more specific schedule of release.
By your words it seems they did that, but back and forth like that will create misunderstandings.

And just 5 months of public testing doesn`t seem like it`s enough.
Especially so considering how much is changing.

However they might pleasantly surprise me with their internal development progress.
I just won`t be terribly surprised if it ends up being a rushed mess that requires tons of bugfixes and adjustments post launch.

[Eosia]

People are saying it is too soon because if you take december 31st as release day we would have been in alpha by now.

And yet we are seeing movement on the test servers. WoWHead reported that WoWVendor3 got updated to 10.0, build 44351. Prior to this, it was at 9.2.5 Build 43741.

If they've done their job, then the alpha/beta won't need to be that long. Especially if they listen to feedback this time around instead of implementing tit five months later in 10.1.5 like what happened in Legion.

Are we right to be skeptical? Sure. But there's a world of difference between skepticism and the more prevalent fatalism.

[cordrann]

In addition, it had the single worst opening raid in WoW history, a raid so terribly tuned it was cleared on US before EU even had their reset.

Wrath Naxx was worse by several orders of magnitude.

[Loveliest]

People decided it is rushed so in their eyes it will be rushed from now on. Literally doesn't matter what they come out with. Ppl in WoW label stuff before even seeing them and then they do everything in their power to prove they were right, to the point the deny themselves trying to enjoy the game.

[MrCool]

People decided it is rushed so in their eyes it will be rushed from now on. Literally doesn't matter what they come out with. Ppl in WoW label stuff before even seeing them and then they do everything in their power to prove they were right, to the point the deny themselves trying to enjoy the game.

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t
That is the MMOC way

[Biomega]

Wrath Naxx was worse by several orders of magnitude.

Wrong. Naxx was never intended to be a challenge in any way, so it couldn't fail at being a challenge. In fact, it was from an era before we even had HEROIC content, let alone mythic. Naxx did exactly what it set out to do - deliver welfare epics to the broad masses. Whether or not that was a good design goal is debatable, but it worked as intended.

Whereas EN was in an era WITH competitive world-first raiding, where heroic and mythic existed as difficulty stratification. Yet EN mythic was stupidly, mind-numbingly easy and severely undertuned even for an opening raid; which is why we've never had a raid this easy before or since.

[LordVargK]

Wrong.

Legion BECAME good. It didn't START good.

In fact it started TERRIBLE. The legendary system was predatory and abusive, with hidden caps and diminishing returns to artificially gate fully randomized acquisition with ludicrous power disparities - forcing people to run multiple identical characters just to gamble on drops if they wanted to be competitive.

In addition, it had the single worst opening raid in WoW history, a raid so terribly tuned it was cleared on US before EU even had their reset. And with class balance so off they had to do some emergency redesign of core talents to get things even remotely in balance (hi there Warlocks).

Later on, Legion had some great stuff. Nighthold was a fantastic raid. Soaking memes aside, Tomb was also quite good. Legendaries were eventually fixed with a vendor. M+ was a new exciting paradigm shift for endgame content.

BUT ON LAUNCH, LEGION WAS TERRIBLE.

If anything, it's an argument FOR people's fears about DF, not against them.

quoted for truth.

[kranur]

Because other expansions that had a lot more test time in public alpha/beta turned out bad. A short time for testing, tuning and feedback is not exactly a recipe for success.

The 1 good and 1 bad this is just a garbage theory that holds 0 value.

[micwini]

Legion wasn't that good. It was better than BFA, but the only difference is the extra focus on class content and the writing. Apart from that they followed the same pattern of annoying grind shit and annoying systems, while getting fixes over the expansion, while being decent in the .3 patch.

[Manhands]

If they are rushing to get it out because of product or financial pressure, then fuck them.
But if they are rushing to get players into the new systems early and stay in the polish cycle longer, then I'm 100% on board...as long as they actually listen to player feedback this time.

[Starfals]

You say BFA was bad, meanwhile a ton of people used to (still do) hate Legion. Me? I love both. Both are the most amazing WoW expansions IMHO. Plus Pandaria and Wrath.
My biggest WoW regrets are the netherstorm missing from WoD and BFA not getting Nzod zone/5 man dungeon.

[TheRevenantHero]

If they are rushing to get it out because of product or financial pressure, then fuck them.
But if they are rushing to get players into the new systems early and stay in the polish cycle longer, then I'm 100% on board...as long as they actually listen to player feedback this time.

You and I both know they won't listen to player feedback.

[Fantazma]

I'll put this here and run away. Ion Hazzikostas needs to be fired and in his place they need to put someone who is not an ex-raider who only sees fun in things that only please 1% of the player base.

When that happens we will have good expansions and not just failures after failures...

[arkanon]

I am just a bit confused and have found this site (Despite the amount of trolls) to be the best source for feedback that isn't silly 1 liners, so here I am to ask:

Why are there so many who claims that "Dragonflight is coming too soon" and that "This reeks of rushed" when to my memory, this just seems like a repeat on how WoD went into Legion; And Legion was phenomenal.

- Both SL and WoD stopped at the X.2 patch (Since no, X.2.5 is not really a content patch)
- Both SL and WoD seem to be lining up in about the same way in terms of "time between when things got released"
- Both SL and WoD got crap (For understandable reasons)

I get that:

A: With SL - Blizzard "broke the cycle" of having "Bad expansion - Good expansion - Bad expansion" by having BFA and SL be bad back to back.
B: A lot of s*** has happened since after Legion that has put Blizzard in a darker light and it is clear that lots of former devs have moved on.

And with this I am fully aware of and do not expect Dragonflight to be a banger or save WoW in any way. Heck, I don't expect WoW to get back on it's feet again until whatever expansion 12.X is since by that time I hope Microsoft has gotten their foot deep enough to make some actual changes. So while I am not saying that I do not understand why people are skeptical: I just can't get where this "it is too soon" is coming from. I keep seeing people being mad on the daily because "Dear lord 9.2 is going to last SO LOOOOOOOOOONG, I'm already bored" <- And yes this should not translate too "Please Blizzard, rush the game" (As that always goes down the toilet) but I just wanted to know why wo many have this "Too soon" view when this looks little to no different than when WoD rolled into Legion. Could someone who has this viewpoint explain their mentality about it since I am a bit confused about it.

For the bad expansion good expansion to work, you have to believe either tbc or wrath were "bad" expansions. And considering many consider cats to be one of the worst expansion, people who believe this theory obviously think wrath was a bad expansion.

- - - Updated - - -

I'll put this here and run away. Ion Hazzikostas needs to be fired and in his place they need to put someone who is not an ex-raider who only sees fun in things that only please 1% of the player base.

When that happens we will have good expansions and not just failures after failures...

So you want a fundamental shift from the core of wow, a core that has remained unchanged since launch, in an attempt to return to the good expansions?

Or you are saying wow has been trash since 2004 and needs to totally change the core of the game because ......it's current year?

[Mardux]

It was though.

It wasn't though.

[arkanon]

Legion wasn't that good. It was better than BFA, but the only difference is the extra focus on class content and the writing. Apart from that they followed the same pattern of annoying grind shit and annoying systems, while getting fixes over the expansion, while being decent in the .3 patch.

I didn't love legion. The classes were decent but not great, and I personally find the space demon stuff pretty lame, so the story did nothing for me at all. But I do fondly remember the weapons and mage tower. One thing I do find amusing is that the mage tower saw quite low participation rates right up until the end when it was a freeforall candy scramble.

- - - Updated - - -

It wasn't though.

Not sure what you guys hole to achieve here. You obviously disagree on the legion expansion, maybe outline why you thought it was amazing, or why you thought it wasn't.

Personally I liked the weapons and mage tower, but didn't like the techno space shit, and really didn't like many of the armor sets at all. I feel like the overall quality of the armor designs took a huge step back, and we havnt really taken a step forward since. There were (and always are) some standout fantastic sets, but overall, it felt second rate.

[Mardux]

People are saying it is too soon because if you take december 31st as release day we would have been in alpha by now.

Blizzard's MO of lately has been annouce new expansion -> annouce release date -> Alpha -> Beta -> Launch

What i think is going to happen is we are not getting public Alpha, and we might not even get Beta, or just a short Beta. Blizzard likes to copy what other successful games have been doing, and one of the praises FFXIV gets it is that it is all tested internally and it has very few bugs when it comes out.

Dragonflight release isn't going to have nearly as many stupid borrowed power systems as expansions like Legion, BFA, and SL. It won't need the almost year long testing that Legion needed (just to be the trash it was at launch).

[arkanon]

Some customers being whiny isn`t an excuse to withhold information from the broader public.
It may be a foreign concept in this day and age, but just ignore them.

Also saying something will be in an expansion is quite misleading if you don`t then follow up with a more specific schedule of release.
By your words it seems they did that, but back and forth like that will create misunderstandings.

And just 5 months of public testing doesn`t seem like it`s enough.
Especially so considering how much is changing.

However they might pleasantly surprise me with their internal development progress.
I just won`t be terribly surprised if it ends up being a rushed mess that requires tons of bugfixes and adjustments post launch.

5 months of public testing isn't enough? Really? And what is really changing? I don't see anything that's changing that would require much testing at all.

[Biomega]

Dragonflight release isn't going to have nearly as many stupid borrowed power systems as expansions like Legion, BFA, and SL. It won't need the almost year long testing that Legion needed (just to be the trash it was at launch).

That's a bit of a fallacy. It wasn't JUST borrowed power that was bad about those expansions, and it's not like we didn't IMMEDIATELY know things like SL Covenants would be a problem as initially described; heck it took about 30 seconds for people to list the problems after the BlizzCon announcement, and wonder oh wonder those were exactly the problems we had to wrestle with for the first half of SL until they fixed it the way people said from the start they should be fixed (like free swapping).

Testing periods exist for a reason, and that's largely to identify problems that AREN'T immediately obvious after 5 minutes. In fact, you could make the argument that because DF doesn't have egregious BP systems it'll be MORE important to thoroughly test the systems it does have to make sure everything is working out fine.

[Revamp Man]

Because there is still no even alpha to be tested by players and all we got is 5min video of a new race showing 'new flying'... and they want to release it in less than 6 months.



It wasn't.

I mean BfA had short testing
BUT this can't be like BfA because there's no idiotic system that needs constant Balance around

Testing starts this week