Blizzard's way of releasing content it obsolete and outdated

[Deleted]

The telltale model doesn't work. LotRO proved that. People rush through the zone, and then they are bored.

The waiting period OP describes in his first sentence are not what we are going to see in WoD. Yes, 14 months 5.4 is a catastrophe, but that wasn't planned.

[Lubricious]

Now, what would be a good proposal to make everyone happy?

You lost me right here. If you think there's a way to make everyone happy, especially in this game, there's no way we're going to be able to have a logical and reasonable discussion.

[Deleted]

GW2 released a small amount of new content every 2 weeks at its peak. People complained they didn't have enough time to consume it before the next stuff came out. I think what blizz do, apart from the terribly long waits before the new expansion, is fine.

That's because the content in GW2 only lasted 2 weeks, a month at best, after which it was removed, forever! It's partially fixed now, but my point is that WoW is not the same, for content is more or less permanent here.

so you want me to play one zone for 5 months?

Two zones, and a raid, and two dungeons, every 5 months. Tell me now, is that any better than... no new zones, no new dungeons and a single raid... for 14 months? You decide. But if you've been playing for the last months and are planning to play all the way to november, then you're already playing one raid for 14 months.

The waiting period OP describes in his first sentence are not what we are going to see in WoD. Yes, 14 months 5.4 is a catastrophe, but that wasn't planned.

It never is, yet until now the waiting periods at the end of the expansion have grown larger and larger.

[Radish Spirit]

Yes, their method is outdated because it's a method they established almost a decade ago. Once you have a massive content pipeline in place you can't just up and replace it without massive costs and problems.

They will continue to release content this way until they stop supporting the game.

Take it or leave it. It's not going to change. Period.

[Deleted]

Yes, their method is outdated because it's a method they established almost a decade ago. Once you have a massive content pipeline in place you can't just up and replace it without massive costs and problems.

They will continue to release content this way until they stop supporting the game.

Take it or leave it. It's not going to change. Period.

Then WoW will die. If they continue having these massive gaps between expansions more and more people will leave. Sure, it won't be tomorrow or next month, but rather in 4-8 years. And Blizzard can't afford for WoW to die. Why? Because it's their best revenue source, with it they keep up and produce other games as well, games that, while popular, are not nearly as popular as WoW.

I see many people here showing me how my idea is bad. Fair enough, maybe it is (though the arguments people bring are a bit weak). The issue is that WoW can't continue this way either, it's already lost countless people. Is it age? Yes, sure, age is a contributing factor, yet age alone isn't enough to kill a game if the game is fun. This is why people played Diablo 2 all the way until Diablo 3 appeared. This is why some people still play Red Alert 2. This is why so many people bought the HD remake of AoE and AoM. But the issue is that when you play the same content with no variation for over a year... people make breaks. And when they do, they start to think there are other good games out there. And that's when they are lost as Blizzard subscribers. This is the issue. If WoW would keep its subscribers, even lure a few more, they would need to do it by giving people things to do, for, if people see that there are other games (which they themselves might like more), they lose them as subscribers, forever.

Anyway, the main point is that Blizzard can't sit and wait WoW to die. And, while they say they will churn out content faster, we've already seen that they can't do that either. So the only solution left, in my view, is to give the content in batches.
You are all welcomed to disagree... but you need to either give good reasons why you do so or give another solution to the decreasing numbers of players.

[Disconnected]

That's because the content in GW2 only lasted 2 weeks, a month at best, after which it was removed, forever! It's partially fixed now, but my point is that WoW is not the same, for content is more or less permanent here.

You completely missed Dundebuns' point. He's not saying that people ran out of time to do the content in GW2 before it disappeared, he said they didn't have time to finish it before new content came out. Even if the old content stayed in, they would never get around to finishing it it because of the new content. In other words, each time new content is introduced, people who didn't get to finish what was introduced prior to that have to make a choice: finish up the old content and start on the new content when they're done or drop what they're doing and jump right into the new content. If they choose option A, they will eventually end up being so far behind that it will just seem pointless and they will end up skipping content to "catch up" to the newest content. If they choose option B, they will constantly be missing out on content because they move on to new content before finishing the old content. There's no denying that Blizzard's time between final raid tiers and the next expansion tends to be pretty long but you wouldn't want content coming too quickly either.

Two zones, and a raid, and two dungeons, every 5 months. Tell me now, is that any better than... no new zones, no new dungeons and a single raid... for 14 months? You decide. But if you've been playing for the last months and are planning to play all the way to november, then you're already playing one raid for 14 months.

Ahh yes, such a simple solution. Why didn't Blizzard ever think to create 2 new zones, 2 new dungeons, and a new raid every 5 months? Do you even realize the amount of development involved in doing something like that? Implementing a release schedule like that, especially with that amount of content each time, would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to maintain. It's simply not feasible without drastically increasing the size of the team. Also, before we go down the road of "Well, then they should hire more people," you have to realize that hiring people to become part of a team such as World of Warcraft's development team is much different than hiring someone to work at McDonald's. There are much fewer qualified candidates, there is a longer "training" period before new hires are up to speed, and the process as a whole just takes significantly more time. They'd love to add more people to the team and they constantly have openings on their website.

It never is, yet until now the waiting periods at the end of the expansion have grown larger and larger.

As MMOs get older, the back log of developed content for the future grows smaller and smaller. As a result, the gap between new content grows larger as the game ages. Eventually, the game reaches a point where there is very little, if any, future content already developed when a new expansion is released. Without either increasing the size of the team or drastically cutting the amount of content released with each expansion, that gap will continue to grow up until it reaches the point where the team doesn't begin development on new content until shortly before the next expansion is released. In this particular case, we saw this happen right around the time that MOP was announced. Up until then, the gap between the final raid tier of the current expansion and the next expansion was approximately 6-8 months. Also, as someone already mentioned, WOD took even longer than usual because they hired 80 (Don't quote me on the number) new people and it took longer than they expected to bring them up to speed. With them being part of the team now, it's perfectly reasonable to expect the development time to decrease going forward.

Then WoW will die. If they continue having these massive gaps between expansions more and more people will leave. Sure, it won't be tomorrow or next month, but rather in 4-8 years. And Blizzard can't afford for WoW to die. Why? Because it's their best revenue source, with it they keep up and produce other games as well, games that, while popular, are not nearly as popular as WoW.

World of Warcraft dying completely is highly unlikely, at least any time soon. Will the number of subscribers drop to a relatively low number after a few more years? Sure, but that's expected for any game, especially an MMO. A perfect example of this is Everquest 2. It is much older than World of Warcraft and yet, it still has players to this day. That said, it will still be profitable for Blizzard, although not nearly as much. In addition to that, I'm sure that Blizzard will have a new game to make up for the lack of revenue from World of Warcraft by the time that happens.

I see many people here showing me how my idea is bad. Fair enough, maybe it is (though the arguments people bring are a bit weak).

It's not that your idea is necessarily bad, it's just unfeasible. As I mentioned earlier in my post, constantly maintaining a release schedule like that with that amount of content is just asking too much. Also, and this is where opinions come in, I would much rather not have to wait for leveling zones to be released on a schedule like you proposed. If I manage to hit level cap after the first patch, which wouldn't be hard to do in 5 months, it's highly unlikely that I would ever go into the questing zones released after that. I would much rather have all of it introduced at once rather than have artificial gates set up "just cause."

The issue is that WoW can't continue this way either, it's already lost countless people. Is it age? Yes, sure, age is a contributing factor, yet age alone isn't enough to kill a game if the game is fun. This is why people played Diablo 2 all the way until Diablo 3 appeared. This is why some people still play Red Alert 2. This is why so many people bought the HD remake of AoE and AoM.

The issue is that people expect World of Warcraft to last forever. How many other games, including MMOs, do you know that have that many active players 10 years after they were first released? Most MMOs that were released after World of Warcraft, such as Warhammer, Age of Conan, Rift, SWTOR, and even GW2, have already lost a significant portion of players, and most of those are not even 5 years old yet. Most people stop playing video games after they are a few years old, with very few maintaining more than a cult following after that. However, my biggest issue with this part of your post is that you compared an MMO to a game without any form of a subscription fee. While there were definitely people still playing Diablo 2 after 10 years (12 years if you want to count until Diablo 3 came out), I'm fairly confident that it was nowhere close to 6.8 million people and that game didn't even have a subscription.

But the issue is that when you play the same content with no variation for over a year... people make breaks. And when they do, they start to think there are other good games out there. And that's when they are lost as Blizzard subscribers. This is the issue. If WoW would keep its subscribers, even lure a few more, they would need to do it by giving people things to do, for, if people see that there are other games (which they themselves might like more), they lose them as subscribers, forever.

I don't see what's wrong with taking a break from a game you've played every day for a year, let alone 10 years. Why is this seen as a negative thing? If you've finished all of the content that World of Warcraft currently has to offer, then take a break. Why are you forcing yourself to continue playing a game that you do not enjoy? Take a break, come back in a few months, and enjoy new content. Also, there's nothing wrong with losing subscribers forever after they've played for a long time. Many of the lost subscribers were not people who started playing recently, played for a few months, and then quit. Most of the lost subscribers are people who have be playing this game for over 5-6 years when they quit. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that and it should even be expected.

Anyway, the main point is that Blizzard can't sit and wait WoW to die. And, while they say they will churn out content faster, we've already seen that they can't do that either. So the only solution left, in my view, is to give the content in batches.

We haven't seen the new additions to the team in action yet. Personally, and this is where we may disagree, I'd say let's give them a chance and see if anything changes. If nothing changes, even after adding a lot more developers to the team, then I'd say you're right about them not being able to release content faster.

You are all welcomed to disagree... but you need to either give good reasons why you do so or give another solution to the decreasing numbers of players.

As a final note, I just want to say that you're looking for a solution for something that may not necessarily be a problem. Is Blizzard losing subscribers? Yes. However, it's completely normal for a 10 year old game to lose subscribers. You would have to be extremely naive to think that an MMO, not even just World of Warcraft specifically, could continue growing without showing any signs of stopping or growing to a certain number and remain there indefinitely. People get older, new games come out, life happens, and people move on. This is normal and at 6.8 million subscribers after 10 years, I'd say Blizzard has done a good job so far.

[hrugner]

Honestly, while WoW has broad appeal across a wide range of players with diverse interests, it's always going to have a content delivery plan that most people aren't in love with. If they focused on just raiders they could crank out tons of TotC like instances where people just chain pull loreless bosses in a room or they could focus on explorer types and open up more and more of the world and other worlds.

By doing both, they do both less efficiently and need to work on things in something like an order to keep the experience unified across play styles. By keeping staged production in place, they need to have a delivery stage so they can avoid feature bloat preventing anything from being released.

I personally think it's awful, and wouldn't tolerate it, but obviously it works for more people than not.

[Misuteri]

From a crafting/profession standpoint it wouldn't be ideal to do it the way the OP said.

Either your professions would max out way too early or too slow.

Take gathering you couldn't hit 600 on mining or herbing until you were into Dreadwastes.

Tailoring was difficult to hit 600 without daily discoveries/CD's. I assume the same was true for BS and LW too. If those CD's couldn't be done until a few patches in it's a kick in the head.

If on the other hand you have raid level crafted gear easily available zones become useless. If you're raiding every zone becomes useless after the first raid and instead becomes "Wow, hot farming zone!" or "Questing in raid gear is pointless."

We all know end of xpac content droughts suck. However it really is better to get a whole continent/expansion of content out at once instead of trickled out here and there.

As others have said the last thing we want to do is encourage Blizzard to do a crapload of $1.99-9.99 content and this is what would happen.

[Crenz]

I think Blizzard should make a dungeon making tool/editor, along with the possibility of a raid maker. Having the player base make content would be perfect for times like this.

Still have all the patches and expansions as is, but also player made content on the side. Player made dungeons/raids could only use a currency as drops (so nothing is over powered or too easy to farm). Sure, some players would create crap content, but I also think some players would make genuinely awesome dungeons and events, and those would quickly become the focus of most other players.

Also, it be nice to downscale/upscale older dungeons and raids, again for a currency drop (so there is not too many loot options). WoW makes its older content outdated and pointless besides transmog with every expansion. Sure, some people who played since vanilla may not get much benefit from this feature, but people who missed TBC or took an extended break would have something else to do. I know I would love to run some of the Wrath and TBC dungeons the way they were originally designed. Doing them at level 70/80 is just not the same (way too few players, and often gear scaling/etc is just bad). But doing the Occulus at lvl 90 and having it be moderately challenging again? That would be great! Keep in mind I do not want this as a replacement for new content... just a nice system to have as a filler.

I am not talking about redoing the dungeons either (like they did for Scarlet halls/etc). Simply scale the bosses and trash health/damage, fine tune anything that needs to be fixed, and done.

[Zantos]

No. This is not a good idea by any means for a MMO like WoW. I mean, why release 1 zone? They used to do content patches with 1-2 more dungeons in cata.

[ComputerNerd]

Because they hired 80 new people? They have to learn at some point, and the drops in subs are sending a message to them. The fact they hired so many people says they're trying to do something about it.

Hiring more people does not instantly solve any problem.
The old expression of "Too many cooks spoil the broth" is as true as it has ever been.
There are no doubt some tasks you can throw more people at, if they are largely independent of each other.
But those that require a lot of back and forth, a lot of feedback and interoperability will benefit more from less numbers.