Why would anyone want an expansion a year? Going the CoD/Assassin's Creed route is not a good idea.
https://www.hotslogs.com/Player/Prof...ayerID=1579599
"MMOC forums let me keep my job again. Whew." -Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street
I'm thinking around Easter at earliest. And I'm being optimist.
Spring 2014 at earliest.
Hoping Q1, expecting Q2.
I wish they could release it before cristmass but dont think so. They will realiese it after 6 or 7 months.
I don't think they'll even start the beta before next year, and that should take around 3 months.
My vote is on the expansion being released around may / june, if things go well. That would mean around 6-7 months of SoO, with around a month for 6.0.0 before the launch. It's also around the time in which they released D3, so they seem to be fine with that period of the year.
Exactly, which is why I advocate Blizzard cutting out their large scale beta testing for an expansion. There are too many very vocal players who have become vocal through a life time of nobody wanting to listen to a single word that clambers over their tongue, and for good reason.
- - - Updated - - -
Yeah, that's a pretty likely pace. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some playable content available at the Blizzard Convention.
They pretty much will "have" to get an expansion out really, really, really fast, (Like, by April or so. Even then, I honestly think that's cutting it a bit thin. We're talking about a game where the majority of people are doing LFR here. The majority of them probably will of lost interest by the end of 2013.) if they don't want a really massive subscriber drop.
That being said, they probably won't be able to do it. Expecting September-November window, and a drop to 4 or 5-ish million subscribers in the pre-launch time.
Actually, if they increase their team size with 40% first. Say from 100 to 140 then they plan another 40% increase then the number would be 196 and that is infact a 96% increase over the original 100. Increases like that are quite telling tbh. WoW is being rebooted behind the curtains....
No way, It'll be April at the very earliest. I'm guessing something like May/June.
Not in time for Christmas, but I believe this one will be released earlier for a few reasons:
Blizzard specifically stated on the topic of speeding up expansions and patches "We have increased our staff by 40% and are going to increase again by another 40%", I believe this was half way through MoP? So thats an 80% increase.
This expansion sort of needs to come out earlier, due to subs and Blizzard has been really firm on SoO being the final raid, sure we had this before and got Sunwell etc, but if they have increased staff and streamlined...it's simple, we will either get another Sunwell, or an earlier expansion, we aren't going to raid SoO for the next year, plus BETA tests aren't as long as they used to be, it doesn't have to be several months of beta testing.
Third, this is more than likely irrelevant now, but that oh so famous photo of Blizzards timeline for the next few years, which was wrong for the WoW movie and Titan yes, they list X5 as Q4 of 2013, this is likely out the window, but shows what they are aiming for, this gives me hope it will be end of Q1 2014.
Last edited by Toiran; 2013-11-03 at 01:27 PM.
No one "really" wants it, except Blizzard. Because end of expansions lead to a lot of sub drop offs, especially from the more casual player base, because they increasingly lack things to do. So, they'd, ideally, like to keep those people constantly engaged, so they keep paying their sub fees. Plus, an extra few million x $40 is always good to them, I'm sure.
Well they have been working the expansion, since 5.1....but I'm still going to say no, there would already be a beta if it was coming that early
Shall I be dramatic and say "You haven't heard the last of me,"?
LIFE
(L)ive, (I)nfluence, (F)ight, (E)njoy
That might be true, but I was talking about something else - increasing the team size by X% does NOT translate into X% more stuff, that's not how things work, and that's not the intention. Increases in output are much smaller than X% at first, and the aim is to get much more than X% later. I think that right now the team developing WoW is in the first phase, and will be there for at least a year.
June launch, maybe? That gives development teams 4-5 months to test from a January open beta.
That's...a month of Beta testing, and it'd have to be immediately after Blizzcon. That's CRAZY.
My estimate is April-June