BFA: the longest lasting xpac in the history of WoW

[Stormspellz]

It is a design choice, not a problem. As an aspiring game developer, I'd love to know your idea on how to solve ever-increasing in number abilities as expansions progress in a 16 year old game.

the design is the problem, as for what to do, instead of trying pass the "oooh shiny" thing off and hope we forget the horrible base/core, make the base/core of each spec and class actually complete and rewarding. and not pile system/borrowed power on top of each multiple times over.

[Shinrael]

the design is the problem, as for what to do, instead of trying pass the "oooh shiny" thing off and hope we forget the horrible base/core, make the base/core of each spec and class actually complete and rewarding. and not pile system/borrowed power on top of each multiple times over.

Well, no matter how complete it is, when you get "ooh shiny" and then lose "ooh shiny" you will feel incomplete. The design is a solution to the age of the game. If this was a game that only exists for 3-5 years, you could add new "ooh shiny" every year and be fine with it. But with WoW you gotta think a liiiiittle broader than that. It's 16 years. 16 years worth of "ooh shiny" would be overwhelming.

[Ielenia]

Or, and hear me out on this:

Multiple things can have the same purpose.

And then you go and list different purposes for LFR and Flex raiding:

LFR was to get people into Raid content. Flex is to help ease the transition from LFR to Normal

Flex was not created to let "more people see content they otherwise wouldn't", because LFR already existed and allowed people see the content (i.e. the raids). To say the purpose of Flex raiding was to "let more people see content they otherwise wouldn't" is just blatantly false, because the means already existed.

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-The fishing event wasn't content, is why. Explain what content it had. Spoiler: Fishing spots across northrend already existed. I'll wait.

It's a competition that drives players to engage with the world, and gives them special rewards for doing so. Also, it is horribly dishonest of you to dismiss the fishing event as "not content", and yet count the "cloud serpent riding" as content.

-LFD ALSO isn't content. It's a system used to EXPERIENCE content.

And yet you consider LFR and Flex raiding "content". Dishonest much?

-The legendary axe in Wrath is earned through ICC, it's covered in that point, the same way Fangs of the Father is covered in Dragon Soul, and the Legendary Cape is covered by SoO. If I really wanted to be disingenuous, I could have listed every raid in for the Legendary Cape quest in MoP, since every single raid was required by each character, so if you weren't caught up it was technically doable during the drought. I chose not to, because it's fairer to not list those. (And MoP still comes out WAY ahead.)

In your opinion. In my opinion, the cloak was the worse of all legendary quest lines from Wrath to WoD because it forced you to fight in PvP battlegrounds.

-Scenarios and Heroic Scenarios were different content.

They were the same content.

-INSURRECTION dailies were NOT removed. That's the 5.1 dailies which still exist in Krasarang Wilds. The Barrens HAD NO DAILIES, it was a big world event leading up to SoO involving rare spawns and item turn ins, not dailies, and that's why it got removed.

You're talking about Landfall dailies, then. Not "insurrection". Insurrection means "violent action that is taken by a large group of people against the rulers of their country, usually in order to remove them from office." So you can see my confusion, here.

-Time Lost Proto Drake had no mechanics, and was a random spawn. The dinosaur spawns each had 4 separate mechanics, all 4 on the big ones, and 2 random ones on the small ones. If we count Time Lost Proto Drake as 'content', we have to count every single random NPC in game as content, and I'm most certainly not going to go through that. We're talking content, not rewards, and you need to get that through your head.

"No mechanics"... It's a rare spawn. It doesn't matter if they had "mechanics". It's a rare mount spawn. So what if the dino mount NPCs had "separate mechanics"? You're really going with arbitrary definitions here. And on top of that, those mechanics could be found on other mobs and the mounts too could be found in different colors elsewhere, so by your definition they're not "new content".

-Wrath had no initial dailies. Or if you're trying to reach for the Tuskarr dailies, feel free, but you're stretching incredibly far for something which just doesn't work in your favor - One or two dailies doesn't match up to 4 reps worth of dailies every day. The same holds true for Cata. Their endgame at the start was the rep tabards which you used to grind dungeons more - But dungeons are already listed.

3 dailies in Borean Tundra: 2 in Coldarra, for Kirin tor; 1 for the Tuskarr.
3 dailies in Dragonblight: 2 for the Tuskarr; 1 for the dragons.
10 dailies in Grizzly Hills: 9 for the Alliance; 9 for the Horde; 1 neutral.
12 dailies in Zul'Drak: 12 for the Argent Crusade
3 dailies in Howling Fjord: 2 Alliance, 1 Tuskarr.
12 dailies in Storm Peaks: 1 for the goblins; 10 for the Frost Giants; 1 for the Alliance.
20 dailies in Ice Crown: 14 for the Alliance; 14 for the Horde; 6 for the Knights of Ebon Blade. And I'm not even counting the ones added in the ToC patch.

How's that for your claim of "Wrath had no initial dailies"? Second time I have to correct you.

But I'm through with this conversation. You claim I'm moving goal posts, when I haven't changed what I've said one time.

You flip-flop between what existed throughout the whole expansion, and just "what is added on last patch.

Then, coincidentally, when I point out that you've directly contradicted your own definition of 'content' in defining what is and isn't content, you somehow claim it's me who's done it and not you.

You're the one that hasn't defined what you think is "content".

You're impossible to hold a conversation with, since you can't stick to a point for more than half a post.

You're the one who don't seem to have a fixed position, considering you flip-flop between definitions. Also, I'll repost a question that you ignored:

You seem to have a warped, nebulous definition of "new content". Does every single thing about what is added has to be "new" for it to be considered "new content"? Because by your logic, the Barrens Insurrection wasn't "new content", since we would still be in the Barrens (old content) killing the Horde (old content). Flex raiding also wouldn't be "new content" since we could still be going into the same instance to kill the same bosses. Define what you mean by "new content", please.

[Mayia]

It is always amusing when people complain about borrowed power per expansion yet want it to go back to borrowing power per tier. It really is just the latest buzzword to use to hate on Blizzard/WoW.

ah, but it isn't by tier you can mix and match, it also changed or hotfixed some balance issues in real time.. as if your class is behind in power the following tier can have a small tier set change that makes balance tuning less required.
Its kind of like having a bunch of cups full of water rather than an entire jug.. its easier to filter a smaller issue if you dont have to dive through a swimming pool to address it.

[Nerovar]

That is the problem though. Not everything is a retcon just because it gives new information. Not everything is a retcon just because it changes what we knew with past events. Kael'thas reappearing in Magisters Terrace was not a retcon even though we last saw him die in Tempest Keep. It was new information. You are arguing that it was a ret con.

Shadowlands doesn't retcon the things you've stated here. It explains those things in further detail. Chronicles may have retconed a little but it still works with in the prior lore regarding Shadowlands, the helm, and the blade.

Okay, I'll give you an example.

Take Marvelman. When Alan Moore got his hands on the character, he changed his backstory in a way that reframed all of his previous adventures, deeds i.e. his entire experience as a superhero so they were basically just memories that were implanted into his brain as part of a simulation for a military research project. Does that change any particular details about his backstory? Not really, because the stories themselves haven't changed. In a way, Moore also only "added" new information here but that new information completely reframes the entirety of his character, his stories and thereby completely changes their meaning.

I'm not saying that it's on the same level but it's the same thing in principle. Going back into the past and adding/changing information to reframe events and therefor altering the meaning of those events is a retcon.

[Raelbo]

Or, and hear me out on this:

Multiple things can have the same purpose.

Shocker, I know. LFR was to get people into Raid content. Flex is to help ease the transition from LFR to Normal, since they realized it was getting huge and they couldn't properly make both work AND have a proper progression in their previous states. Both were to help people see content they otherwise would not.

I agree partially.

There is a shared purpose between LFR and Flex that was to make raiding more accessible to a larger portion of the playerbase than just the hardcore Heroic (which would later become mythic) raiding audience. But I disagree that the purpose of FLEX was provide a bridge from LFR into normal. I would argue that LFR and what is now Normal/Heroic/Mythic are two different progression paths designed to cater to different modes of play. Specifically LFR provides an automated group formation mode of play, while N/H/M are a mode which requires players to form groups. Flex and LFR differ significantly in their target audiences.

At its inception, I believe Flex was intended to address two significant problems with raiding that were contributing towards a lack of accessibility:
1) The growing gap between content difficulty and player ability. In short, raid encounters were getting progressively harder as top end players were getting better, and two difficulty settings wasn't enough to cover the spectrum of players who were interested in raiding outside of the LFR mode.
2) The fixed group size constraint for raiding was a significant problem for a lot of groups. Firstly it meant that all raiding groups had to have a big enough bench to ensure enough people to fill the group, which meant people having to sit out which isn't fun. Secondly, it meant a risk of not being able to raid if a few people can't make it (or have to cancel at the last minute). Flex meant you could include everyone all the time.

It's almost like, all expansion long they struggled to find a proper fit in difficulty between LFR and Normal, almost like the part of the playerbase who enjoys braindead queueable content isn't the same as those who enjoy raid content that is easy to acces or something

The point of LFR is to have queueable content. The difficulty (or lack thereof) is an inevitable consequence of that mode of play. Flex was a way of making regular raiding more accessible by removing some of the unnecessary constraints.

As I see it there are currently 3 modes of raiding and 4 difficulty settings. The modes are:

• Queueable
• Flexible
• Fixed

Queueable is only feasible on the lowest difficulty, a difficulty that is laughably easy for anyone who would be bothered with actually organising a group - hence LFR is both a mode and a difficulty - although, as previously mentioned, the difficulty is purely a consequence of the mode.

Flexible works for non-competitive forms of raiding. The only reason there is no LFR level difficulty for Flex is that it would be basically pointless.

Fixed group size is necessary for competitive raiding. Given the existence of flex it makes no sense to apply it to the lower difficulties

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Flex was not created to let "more people see content they otherwise wouldn't", because LFR already existed and allowed people see the content (i.e. the raids). To say the purpose of Flex raiding was to "let more people see content they otherwise wouldn't" is just blatantly false, because the means already existed

The fact that LFR existed and allowed people to see the content doesn't disqualify Flex from doing the same thing for a different subset of players. A lot of players have little or no interest in doing LFR, but do have an interest in doing it in Flex

And the pertinent point being made is that Flex gave a lot of players something to do at the end of MoP which helped to mitigate, to some extent, the impact of the long content drought. Unless you disagree with this premise, there seems to be little reason to continue to argue this particular point.

[Ielenia]

It's almost like, all expansion long they struggled to find a proper fit in difficulty between LFR and Normal,

Except... this is nothing but your opinion. And you're wrong in that assessment, as I explained earlier.

On top of that, "flex raiding" was not introduced to "bridge the gap" between LFR and Normal, but to test the new "flex raiding" mechanic that allows the raid instance to auto-balance itself according to the number of players in the raid, and according to the number of players that enter/leave the instance automatically.

The fact that LFR existed and allowed people to see the content doesn't disqualify Flex from doing the same thing for a different subset of players. A lot of players have little or no interest in doing LFR, but do have an interest in doing it in Flex

But there was no "different subset of players" who "could not do normal raiding" and "refused to do LFR". If they wanted to see the raid content, LFR was there for them, because that was the intention for its implementation: to give players who could not, for whatever reason, allocate a fixed amount of hours per week to dedicate to organized raiding. I.e. players who could not see the raid content, by allowing them to do parts of the instance at their own time.

[Kazjin]

The worst expansion of all time is the longest...

[PaladinBash]

IDK man for all the faults of this expansion, the pacing was pretty good for content releases, as mediocre as those content releases sometimes were. There never really felt like there was nothing to do except for like the last couple of months and look at that, we're a couple of weeks from pre-patch. I'm fine with a few boring months at the end of an expansion where there's nothing left to do rather than 6+ months of that shit like everything from Cata onwards.

[Kuja]

Is it coincidence that best expansions have had the shortest duration? Except wrath.

[Very rare pepe]

I love blizzards games but they simply do not care about the quality at which shit is being released anymore. Any problems that occur day one of it being released is on blizzard, and has nothing to do with the pandemic. Look at games like cyberpunk. They knew the pandemic might slow some of their progress so they delayed the game. Simple as that. They had a hurdle, they worked around it.

Blizzard isn’t going to do this because they just want to make as much money with the most minimal amount of effort, which is what we will get.

Amen, the game had to be released this year for the shareholders. When SL comes out, we will all be beta testing it until 9.1
If this happens and it most likely will, then we will have another BFA on our hands where blizzard then scamper around trying to save the expansion with a decent 9.2 patch next june/july. I'm almost tempted to just play other releases until 9.2 when inevitably the game will be that much more playable.

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never really felt like there was nothing to do except for like the last couple of months and look at that, we're a couple of weeks from pre-patch.

That depends on what you do in game though right? My heroic guild had tons to do in Legion. From release until Christmas we got EN,ToV,Karazhan.
In BFA we got Uldir + additional warfront/Island? + 8 new war campaign quests.
So naturally my guild died, Legion offered so much more earlier on.

[rhorle]

Amen, the game had to be released this year for the shareholders.

No. It did not. Blizzard has delayed games before and were not required to do anything. The game releasing on October 27th long before the end of the year also indicates this isn't true. It also ignores how offering a sub standard product and the bad press can be just as important to share holders as getting a product out on time.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Wrong. Mists of Pandaria lasted 26 months, as well.

However, MoP's last patch (5.4: Siege of Orgrimmar) lasted fourteen months: from September 14, 2013 to November 13, 2014. Whereas BfA's last patch (8.3: Visions of N'Zoth) will last only ten months. And on top of that, MoP's last patch only gave us Proving Grounds and Timeless Isle as "repeatable content" and even then those didn't have much to do. Visions of N'Zoth gave us two "new" quest zones that changed every week, and Horrific Visions. On top of that, BfA has the benefit of Mythic+ dungeons.

All of that put together makes BfA not feel anywhere near as "long" as MoP did, really.

Don't you remember how bad the "MoP content drought" was, back then, while we waited for the next expansion?

Yeah, that primarily because they fucked up the pacing by dropping 5.2 way too early. 5 months between the start of the first raid of T14 and T15, 7 months between T15 and T16, and then we had T16 from September 2013, until October/November 2014. 5, 7, and 13 or 14 months for t14, t15, and t16 respectively (I am terrible when it comes to dealing with time on any scale beyond a single wake/sleep cycle, this includes doing math with it).

The had enough content, they just shoved 5.2 out less than 16 weeks after the heroic mode of the final raid of T14 was even open (Heroic ToES opened up November 20th, 2012, Normal Throne of Thunder opened March 5th, 2013). MoP's content drought was almost wholly due to poor planning and an insanely optimistic expectation of the release date of WoD. As we discovered from the blue posts during the drought, Garrisons ate up a fuckton of time from the art teams, and since they were a launch feature they had to delay the release of the whole expansion for them.


Blizzard needs to stop planning around this insane notion that they'll get an expansion out in 18 months because it just isn't realistic, and they've never come close to actually achieving it.

[IndCold]

IDK man for all the faults of this expansion, the pacing was pretty good for content releases, as mediocre as those content releases sometimes were. There never really felt like there was nothing to do except for like the last couple of months and look at that, we're a couple of weeks from pre-patch. I'm fine with a few boring months at the end of an expansion where there's nothing left to do rather than 6+ months of that shit like everything from Cata onwards.

I'd say 8.2 overstayed its welcome for about a month (it lasted almost 7 months). That said, just when I was getting tired of it we got the anniversary event and then the holidays, so I guess it works?

I sure hope we keep getting month long "events" like the current rep buff or the 5 weeks of TW, it breaks the monotony a bit.

[Raelbo]

But there was no "different subset of players" who "could not do normal raiding" and "refused to do LFR".

Why are you putting in quotes something I never said? If you have to invent words to attribute to me in order to win the argument, maybe you need to realise there is a problem with what you're trying to argue.

Flex raiding made access to what is now Normal Difficulty raiding a lot more accessible to the players who raid at the that difficulty level (whether it be in pugs or in casual guilds). And those players are often not the same players who want to raid LFR. When they extended Flex to heroic raiding it made the situation even better for a substantial portion of the raiding population.

If they wanted to see the raid content, LFR was there for them, because that was the intention for its implementation: to give players who could not, for whatever reason, allocate a fixed amount of hours per week to dedicate to organized raiding. I.e. players who could not see the raid content, by allowing them to do parts of the instance at their own time.

I am not trying to argue that this isn't one of the intended purposes of LFR. That doesn't mean that LFR is the ideal solution for everyone, especially for a raider who enjoys doing raid content in an organised group at more challenging difficulty levels.

Honestly, I am struggling to understand how you're still arguing against this: Flex improved the raiding situation for a sizeable chunk of players at the end of MoP and gave those players more of an incentive to participate in raiding, thus effectively giving them more content to do.

[Ielenia]

Mop content draught wasn't as bad as you think it was. Versus last patch time frames HFC was actually 5 days longer then Siege lasted (give or take). The BFA content has been pretty garbage for pretty much the entire duration of the expac.

Maybe, but we're comparing the two most long-lasting expansions in Warcraft: MoP and BfA.

Why are you putting in quotes something I never said? If you have to invent words to attribute to me in order to win the argument, maybe you need to realise there is a problem with what you're trying to argue.

Except you literally said that, here:

The fact that LFR existed and allowed people to see the content doesn't disqualify Flex from doing the same thing for a different subset of players.

Flex raiding made access to what is now Normal Difficulty raiding a lot more accessible to the players who raid at the that difficulty level (whether it be in pugs or in casual guilds). And those players are often not the same players who want to raid LFR. When they extended Flex to heroic raiding it made the situation even better for a substantial portion of the raiding population.

Again: false. Flex raiding was never about "letting more people see and do content", nor did it have that effect. LFR already existed for those who could not do normal raiding, regardless of reason. The reason for "flex raiding" is solely to make raid sizes more flexible. Not to "let more people see and do content", nor did it have that effect, regardless of purpose.

I am not trying to argue that this isn't one of the intended purposes of LFR. That doesn't mean that LFR is the ideal solution for everyone, especially for a raider who enjoys doing raid content in an organised group at more challenging difficulty levels.

And yet those people who "enjoy doing raid content in an organized group at more challenging difficulty levels" apparently had so much trouble doing 10-man normal raiding (the easiest difficulty at the time, LFR notwithstanding) that they "needed" Flex raiding to be able to "see and do the content"? Something doesn't add up in that statement.

Honestly, I am struggling to understand how you're still arguing against this: Flex improved the raiding situation for a sizeable chunk of players at the end of MoP and gave those players more of an incentive to participate in raiding, thus effectively giving them more content to do.

Because your statement is just objectively false. Everyone could already "see and do raid content" thanks to LFR. The purpose and effect of Flex raiding was never to "let more people see and do content" and simply just test a new technology that allows raid instances to automatically balance itself to any raid size (within 10 and 30 players). Again: it was never about "letting more people see and do raid content".

[Kathranis]

MoP's content drought was almost wholly due to poor planning and an insanely optimistic expectation of the release date of WoD. As we discovered from the blue posts during the drought, Garrisons ate up a fuckton of time from the art teams, and since they were a launch feature they had to delay the release of the whole expansion for them.

That's not all that was going on during WoD, though. With WoD and Legion they were trying really hard to make annual releases happen by parallelizing development and growing the development team. But the big lesson they learned was that there were development bottlenecks they just couldn't overcome by throwing more people at the game. Team expansion also required some restructuring and training that took a toll, too.

After that they gave up on the idea of annual expansions and tried to settle into a consistent two-year cycle with 3 major content patches and minor .5s in between.

That schedule worked pretty well in Legion and they tweaked it in BFA in order to space things out better and ultimately shorten the gap between the last content patch and the next expansion, which I'd say has been a success. I'm sure that if they hadn't had to take time adjusting to working from home, it'd have been even shorter.

[Sondrelk]

Blizzard needs to stop planning around this insane notion that they'll get an expansion out in 18 months because it just isn't realistic, and they've never come close to actually achieving it.

When have they done this in BfA? And even before then it was yearly.
If you are thinking of why the last patch is always longer it has more to do with how large the next expansion is as well as relatively consistent launch dates being good for business.

Even beyond that I am sure that if you asked any of the developers of Blizzard their personal feelings I am sure that they would say that noone is forced to play the last few months. Take a break if you are really hating logging on, it prevents you from getting burnt out as well as building up anticipation ofr hte next expansion.
Even if you asked the marketing teams I am sure they would agree that getting players to take a break after the final patch is better long-term.

[Zantera]

I would be more hyped for Shadowlands if it wasn't for covenants and the importance of them and the abilities. New zones and locations look nice but for me they seem to have gone full focus on the small details like new customization options - which to me is a bit like "who cares?" when class design isn't getting the proper attention it needs.

[Sondrelk]

That's not all that was going on during WoD, though. With WoD and Legion they were trying really hard to make annual releases happen by parallelizing development and growing the development team. But the big lesson they learned was that there were development bottlenecks they just couldn't overcome by throwing more people at the game. Team expansion also required some restructuring and training that took a toll, too.

Blizzard probably could have made annual releases happen if they put the work into restructuring the teams to work more efficiently, though I think the reason they scrapped it was because they would likely have to sacrifice the pacing of each expansions story to fit into a 12 month gap instead of a 24 month one.
Even with that the expansions would have likely ended up similar to what we have now anyways. With buildup in the initial areas followed by larger areas with the payoffs. Let us not forget that we even get new crafting materials and such in the middle of the expansion.