Should Blizzard Skip 9.3?

[kamuimac]

lol I love how people ignore that FF14 has been gaining popularity and catching up to WoW and has been the #2 mmo for years now. Game was released over a decade ago is now flavor of the month ok.

FF14 is the nr 1 mmrpg for months now

and keep getting more and more subs each month

once new expansion is released and all important streamers will stream it its popularity will absolutely explode.

you dont have to have major in marketing and business to realise it

[Hitei]

FF14 is the nr 1 mmrpg for months now

and keep getting more and more subs each month

once new expansion is released and all important streamers will stream it its popularity will absolutely explode.

you dont have to have major in marketing and business to realise it

Doesn't really seem likely. It's not like FFXIV is some unheard of, just released game. Everyone knows about it. It's popular right now because people bored of wow and other mmos are looking for something else to play, there's no standing population to generate an actual popularity explosion because most people playing video games do not give a shit about, or want to play mmos.

New expansion releases only generate a massive upswell in players for games when they are bringing back returning players, because new expansions don't really act as a huge appeal to people who don't play the game, the current and previous expansions are already new content, so "We have new content!" means nothing. You can observe this in actual data form if you look at early wow subs: Even at the height of mmos being popular, and wow's era of constantly gaining players, BC and Wrath being released didn't do much to the trend of increase players, it stayed the same, and Cata release didn't alter the tapering, it just continued to taper.

Now, if FFXIV lost like 50% of its subscribers before the next expansion release, you'd see a huge "popularity explosion" but as it is, the release won't make much of a difference.

Numbers from any source for either game aren't very reliable, but most estimates have FFXIV's numbers tapering the past few months, which is to be expected because (as pointed out above) it's primary source of new players was people migrating from wow and other games to check it out. The MMO market in general has become seasonal, most people no longer just play a game endlessly for years on end, they just come and do new things and then get bored because they've been playing MMOs for decades and new stuff wears out much quicker. So expansion release for FFXIV will probably see numbers increase very slightly and then continue to taper off.

You're never going to see any MMO actually explode in popularity ever again. Not short of some really innovative production, like a full-on VR MMO, or something along the lines of Pokemon Go, which had the triple threat of beloved, popular franchise, ease of access (mobile) and wasn't a traditional MMORPG (which aren't very popular anymore). So you might see some explosive success if you get like, a Star Wars MMOFPS, or some MMO iteration of minecraft or something.

[Spiffums]

Flavor of the month game? Final Fantasy XIV is the biggest MMORPG in the world at the moment and an expansion is launching soon which will further boost it.

At the moment and it took them from 2013 to get there.

[Lahis]

At the moment and it took them from 2013 to get there.

Great, in 8 years WoW might have gotten its shit sorted out again!

[Drusin]

I like how the poll is damn near 50/50 lol

[Paperfox]

Many of the comments have been around patch cadence and that's all well and good.

There is one question that I don't think has been talked about, and that is:

What do the shareholders want?

There is more to ActiBlizz than just WoW, it does make a significant contribution to the dividends shareholders get. Over the last while Blizz has released a new expansion every 2 years or so. Do you think the shareholders would like it if they took 3 years? Dividing a number by 3 instead of 2 is quite a significant reduction in dividends.

This is another reason why I think we'll see 10.0 next year.

[Nyel]

Many of the comments have been around patch cadence and that's all well and good.

There is one question that I don't think has been talked about, and that is:

What do the shareholders want?

There is more to ActiBlizz than just WoW, it does make a significant contribution to the dividends shareholders get. Over the last while Blizz has released a new expansion every 2 years or so. Do you think the shareholders would like it if they took 3 years? Dividing a number by 3 instead of 2 is quite a significant reduction in dividends.

This is another reason why I think we'll see 10.0 next year.

Yeah, that's what I'm always saying as well. Delaying the next expansion for 6 months means postponing pre-order cash that might be between $100.000.000-150.000.000 in your financial results.

[Dracullus]

If it would depend of shareholders, we would have 60$ expac every Christmas. But they don't have magic spell for insta expacs.

It's really question of "is 10.0 advanced enough to start Alpha less than 2-3 month after 9.2". If not, 9.3 is just needed. Expac production is far longer process and could be affected by same shit that screw up patch schedule.

[Lahis]

If it would depend of shareholders, we would have 60$ expac every Christmas. But they don't have magic spell for insta expacs.

It's really question of "is 10.0 advanced enough to start Alpha less than 2-3 month after 9.2". If not, 9.3 is just needed. Expac production is far longer process and could be affected by same shit that screw up patch schedule.

9.3 would just delay the expansion further, unless it is just some lazy ass recycling with no new zones like 4.3 or 8.3.

[Dracullus]

9.3 would just delay the expansion further, unless it is just some lazy ass recycling with no new zones like 4.3 or 8.3.

Yep, 3 dungeons in 4.3 or 12 boss raid, new loot system and Orgrimmar/Stormwind visions in 8.3 we so lazy cause new sandbox zones were revamp.

We had WoD->Legion situation and people still say bullshit that cutting patch makes faster expac. You just can't speed up bottlenecks with throwing more people on it. Major patch gives extra 6 months, cost much less.

And since it's MMO-Chamption, I repeat - I'm not sure if 9.3 will be a thing or not, I just think we don't have key piece of into - 10.0 progress right now.

[hecpercu]

Should? What? THEY ALREADY DID.

In case you didn't notice they didnt pull the ripcord cuz they love you, they pulled it because 9.2 will end this shitfest, they need the new xpac asap by 3rd quarter next year and that includes 9.1.5 in a month and 9.2 in 4 months. And thats it.

They know maple online and fiesta online will have more players than wow in a year if they dont do anything, the thing that they dont know is that wont work, they killed their own game and player base trust, Noone will come back, and so wow died.
Let it die.

This is HHPC, wow white knight and 12h a day player for 15yrs,not anymore. Ever.

[Kralljin]

We had WoD->Legion situation and people still say bullshit that cutting patch makes faster expac. You just can't speed up bottlenecks with throwing more people on it. Major patch gives extra 6 months, cost much less.

Well, it certainly did increase the total value of content.

Like Legion or not, in terms of content it was one the biggest expansions that Blizzard has ever done and frankly the patch cycle is something Blizzard must aspire to.
That is just happens *right* after an expansion that clearly was cut shurt is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Disregarding that you cannot look into an alternate universe and see how their schedule would've looked like if Blizzard had not cut WoD short of one content patch, it's obvious that Blizzard fucked up something royally during the early production of WoD and thus chose to focus on Legion.

[Dracullus]

Well, it certainly did increase the total value of content.

Like Legion or not, in terms of content it was one the biggest expansions that Blizzard has ever done and frankly the patch cycle is something Blizzard must aspire to.
That is just happens *right* after an expansion that clearly was cut shurt is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Disregarding that you cannot look into an alternate universe and see how their schedule would've looked like if Blizzard had not cut WoD short of one content patch, it's obvious that Blizzard fucked up something royally during the early production of WoD and thus chose to focus on Legion.

Giving unique class quest and switching big zone from leveling to max level made Legion feel bigger, but expac with most amount of content was BfA, beside dungeons. But devs during BfA made opposite choices - cutting many content in half (for Horde and Ally) made BfA feel much smaller than it was.

But it doesn't change fact than in BfA they were able to deliver 6 big zones, 1 'Argus' size zone, 1'Broken Shore' size zone + 2 big zones revamp after full patch support and one of shortest droughts during Legion.

[Kralljin]

Giving unique class quest and switching big zone from leveling to max level made Legion feel bigger, but expac with most amount of content was BfA, beside dungeons. But devs during BfA made opposite choices - cutting many content in half (for Horde and Ally) made BfA feel much smaller than it was.

BfA didn't have an equivalent to Suramar, didn't add a new Class and also didn't have anything close to Artifact weapons, Azerite armor, especially in terms of visuals, is nothing compared to Artifact weapons.

You had stuff like Warfronts, Island Expeditions and Visions, but that's about it.

And that also doesn't change the fact that Legion was much better paced in terms of patch cycles.

[Dracullus]

BfA didn't have an equivalent to Suramar

Read what I wrote again. Legion had 5 zones, 4 for leveling, 1 for max level. BfA had 6 zones - and all 6 were bigger than Legion leveling zone (both by size and especially amount of quests). But BfA felt smaller because H/A split. From this amount of content they could carve full leveling experience, two Suramars and maybe there would be some content left.

But we are going away from my point - Blizzard could perfectly fine deliver Legion size expac after shortest drought and full patch support. So it's all about planning. If 10.0 is badly planned like SL (I'm talking here about both launch and patches), cutting 9.3 won't make 10.0 any bigger.

[Iliena]

I don't see any point in skipping 9.3, I don't see the current WoW team being able to do anything different to the boring systems they have had in the last 2 expansions. BFA felt like Legion lite with a lot of the fun removed, same for Shadowlands, different names for the same type of shit systems that you need to grind out and on top of that nothing new and interesting to balance it out, it just isn't fun.

[Kralljin]

Read what I wrote again. Legion had 5 zones, 4 for leveling, 1 for max level.

I fully understood what i wrote.
Doesn't change the fact that Suramar is an extremely unique zone, not just because it's an endgame zone but also because it has a giant city.

And that also doesn't address stuff like a new class, Artifact system and so forth.

[Lahis]

Yep, 3 dungeons in 4.3 or 12 boss raid

12 boss raid that featured ZERO new zones and models apart from Deathwing Hentai Form.

[Daronokk]

Implying there is a 9.3 in the works in the first place

[Puri]

Has there ever been the slightest hint how many patches SL was supposed to have in the first place?