No 5.5 - How long will we be in SoO?

[Captiosus]

Like others, my belief is May/June. I know that puts the release in the dreaded "summer" season, but anything earlier is too early and anything later will be bad for subscriber bleed.

There's NO WAY this is going to beta before the first of the year. We're only two-and-a-half weeks from Thanksgiving in the U.S., then it's Christmas and New Year's rush. There's going to be a lot of employee (and player) downtime for the holidays and it would be absolutely foolish to start a beta when people aren't going to be able to put their best efforts into testing it (players) or tweaking it (developers).

By April we will have spent the same amount of time in SoO as we did in ToT. If Beta goes live in January/Feburary, figure 3-4 months of testing and tweaking, then a 1 month polishing period where we get the pre-expansion patch and the pre-expansion event, then live. Anyway, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

[Conjor]

We'll be in SoO until 6.0 goes live(not the expansion but the pre-expansion patch) which normally goes live about a month before the expansion, so you're probably looking at a 5 to 8 month wait, depending.

Pmuch agree with this timeline. I'm thinking around May, absolute latest would be Aug/Sept (and even I would be pissed off if it took that long).

[Morbownz]

Next week, Blizzard loves its loyal fanbase more than they love money!!!

[Deleted]

According to your sig you've been working on the ridiculously easy content 4x longer than it took the first groups to complete it, and you're still not done. So, I don't know, is it really that easy? Why haven't thousands of guilds cleared T16 HC?

Basing what I said more on the fact that guilds were halfway through HC content in the first week. There are some pretty lousy guilds from my old servers that have made a size-able dent in HC content, and we're running a relaxed schedule and have nearly cleared the whole lot in less than 10 weeks. Considering we probably won't see WOD for AT LEAST 6 months, it means around 35% of a full expansion is actually needed for raiding. With the exception of the mount, there's nothing to farm from raiding once it's dead.

And by "the first groups" you mean the top 0.25% in the world? LOL. Something tells me, that if we had their very heavy raid schedules, we might be finished as well.

[Deleted]

Hard to guess, estimate or even guesstimate. We'll be able to provide an estimate when we'll get an indication on beta status. Until then, no one knows and your guess is as good as mine.

I'm putting my money on a very pessimistic August/September '14.

[Orcindauh]

All I know is that SoO will last a loooonnngg time.

[FobManX]

I'm going to guess the expansion is released around May. Normally companies don't release big time products(esp. games)in late spring/early summer, but there is precedence, as Diablo was released in summer and I believe SC2 was as well.

That means 6.0 will probably come out sometime in April.

So...5 more months of SOO at least. Hey, our guild just killed 25m reg Garrosh for the first time last night, so maybe we'll have a shot at a Heroic Garrosh kill.