I believe the problem here is moreso that the entire World of Warcraft only seems to be defined by whatever raid patch is the latest. I don't believe the lifeblood of the game should revolve around the developers packaging disposable content on an assembly line, ready to be swarmed by locusts and then left to rot when the level/tier is no longer relevant to character progression. It's even worse if you're someone like me who honestly doesn't care much about raiding.
Blizzcon has nothing to do with the state of developement. It just happens to be at a certain point of developement. So in this case I guess it will be at the door of beta already when they happen to have a Blizzcon and can announce the new game. It will also be a shorter beta. Their "loyality test" last time was as experiment, but I guess they got the result and saw that more ppl in the beta won't necessarily grant them more/better test results so half of the testing will be done by themselves. Things change with every expansion, this kind of developement isn't far fetched at all.
next expansion will likely launch early 2014, no way blizzard is going to allow 5.4 to last a year, they did a fantastic job so far getting out content quicker, i don't think they're stopping yet.
dragonmaw - EU
Expansion announce @ Blizzcon. Developed SUPER fast - release Spring 2014. I really hope we don't have another DS, and the a little bit worse. They know they screwed up 4.3, and hopefully they've learnt from that and won't repeat tht mistake. But anyways, I expect 5.4 will be a fantastic raid, so no worries.
I think it will launch in December to capitalize on holiday sales as well as when a lot of people are on break to get the sub numbers back up.
While you're correct in saying we've gotten the same number of raids overall, I don't think it's fair to compare Tier 11, Firelands and Dragon Soul (12, 7 and 8 bosses) to Tier 14, Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar (16, 13, and 14 bosses). A fair criticism is that we haven't been receiving enough dungeons. That's because Dungeons and raids are made by the same team, so they've been picking and choosing where to use those resources. Raid content lasts longer than dungeon content. I'd agree that the audiences for raids and dungeons are no longer the same, so using the same team's development time doesn't make a lot of sense with the current model.
Pandaria has included more content than other expansions, it's just not all dungeon and raid based. I suppose you could argue that the big patches (5.2 and 5.4) are similar to 4.2 and 4.3, but we also got 5.1 and 5.3, which didn't really have Cataclysm analogues. Isle of Thunder is comparable to Molten Front or the Argent Tournament, but with more activities (and a larger raid). Timeless Isle certainly provides more content than the Darkmoon Faire.
As for SoO's lifespan, I think their targeted release date is around March/April, but it may get pushed back as far as May/June. Ghostcrawler stated in an interview (I believe it was with The Instance around MoP launch) that they had intended to release Pandaria earlier, but held it off for more polish. My guess is that MoP was supposed to release around June/July, but the delays in reworking Jade Forest really slowed it down (along with fine tuning class balance and such).
The announcement has nothing to do with when they'll release it. The start of beta, however, will be telling. Every beta we expect the process to be shorter, but it ends up taking even more time. Even if the beta begins at Blizzcon or shortly thereafter, it could still be up to six months before we get our hands on the expansion. I'd expect a 5.5 in November, and the pre-expansion patch of 6.0 (containing system changes and a world event, probably closer to Scourge Invasion than Theramore) to launch in March/April, a month or so before the expansion.
Last edited by Aligerous; 2013-08-21 at 02:10 PM.
I think they said one expansion per year, or at least faster release pace in a blue post not long ago. May aswell get a january release if they can keep their word.