Originally Posted by
Omedon
I'm seeing a lot of people assuming that, because of some intuition of "early development" for Shadowlands at Blizzcon, we're somehow doomed to a late 2020 release and not the usual late august to early october window that's become (in my opinion, intentionally) the standard for the last two expansions.
While I'm sure there are a lot of good reasons for or against this viewpoint, the assumption I've had all along is that the real bullet in the argument is how much they have pushed these all-encompassing "seasons" as the branding for the content rollout cadence. The idea being that WoW has and must(?) reset its power curve every 6 months with an X.Y patch so every season is equally worth re-subbing for as it relates to efficiently rewarding power resets. It's been my assumption that the reasons every patch and subsequent raid-a-month-later moment in BFA has felt a bit "later" is to lock that 6 month window down to even remain true between 8.3 and 9.0.
Doesn't a seasonal branding kind of fit in with the idea that the answer to "why not just wait for the last patch because that's when *everything* will be out" is "even the expansion tail is only 6 months so don't do that, play now" as a purely marketing decision? Doesn't an expansion tail of 9 months or so kind of... break that whole idea?
I just don't see how a seasonal branding works when one season is 1.5x longer than the others. The sense of intentional FOMO that comes with this approach is just evaporated if we're back to "the smart game is to sub at X.3."
Am I missing something? How does seasonal cadence branding work with a prediction of "no shadowlands until november-december?"