Blizzard: Expect More WoW Expansions, Sooner

[WWmelb]

I actually like the sound of the direction they are taking raiding, and that's the first time i've said that in quite a few years.

I still probably won't go back, as that is tempting the addiction demons once more, and i don't want to lose myself in MMO's ever again.

However, if dungeoning becomes more like vanilla, then it would be very tempting.

The main thing i missed were the complex dungeons like Dire Maul and BRD, where you had to actually learn quite a bit to do everything that was possible in them.

Grrr... the re-sub finger is getting twitchy.

 

[Icehearted]

"We're hemorrhaging players too fast! Quick, throw expansions at it, NOW!"

"But our content is already getting really convoluted and dilut-"

"I don't care! EXPANSIONS! HURRY!"

End scene.

You do the dailies to grind the rep to get the gear to do the heroics to get to the raids to wait for the patch to do the new raids and farm the new rep to wait for the patch to do the new raids and farm the new rep...

...and the world keeps turning, and Blizzard promises more expansion packs, and they're gonna come out faster this time! Just like they've said before!

Let me know when they update the combat and break out of that fucking horrible mold of literally grinding dailies non-stop. Then I'll gladly pay the $15 a month.

At least my dwarf who's been in purgatory for the last 4 years will look more like a dwarf and less like Play Dough if he ever sees the light of day again.

This and the crap player community drove me off by the time WotLK arrived. By then I was just so tired of grinding for gear to grind for gear to grind for gear....and the dailies, ad infinitum.

I kind of miss my Night Elf, and those 12+ hour AV matched back in vanilla. Sure they were loaded with whining and a very bitter bunch of kids, but switching off chat and holding the line for hours kind of made those really tough times for me pretty okay. It will never be that again, I know, but I do miss it, oddly enough.

 

[WWmelb]

I kind of miss my Night Elf, and those 12+ hour AV matched back in vanilla. Sure they were loaded with whining and a very bitter bunch of kids, but switching off chat and holding the line for hours kind of made those really tough times for me pretty okay. It will never be that again, I know, but I do miss it, oddly enough.

Yes.. i miss those AV matches a hell of a lot. ahhh the memories

 

[Ferisar]

You do the dailies to grind the rep to get the gear to do the heroics to get to the raids to wait for the patch to do the new raids and farm the new rep to wait for the patch to do the new raids and farm the new rep...

...and the world keeps turning, and Blizzard promises more expansion packs, and they're gonna come out faster this time! Just like they've said before!

Let me know when they update the combat and break out of that fucking horrible mold of literally grinding dailies non-stop. Then I'll gladly pay the $15 a month.

At least my dwarf who's been in purgatory for the last 4 years will look more like a dwarf and less like Play Dough if he ever sees the light of day again.

They've said that this expansion's max level will have no dailies for any foreseeable future. At least that's what was said at one of the panels at Blizzcon.

 

[Li Mu]

Like a man desperately doing chest compressions to a corpse, maybe if blizzard compresses faster it might jump start it's heart.

A corpse which still has 7 million subscribers. I wouldn't call that a corpse quite yet.

Personally I always found the problem with WoW to be how easy it became. I was always a casual player and back up until TBC I was happy to see players with really cool gear that I would never get as a casual. It didn't bother me. I sucked at WoW.
Then when Cata came out I suddenly found myself winning...and winning ALL the time. The fact is, I suck at PvP and if I suddenly start winning arenas then PvP is clearly broken.

WoW really became overly noob friendly and as a noob, I didn't like that.

 

[Aeshi]

It's almost as if people want World of Warcraft to sputter, fail, and cease to exist.

I must ask, why? If people continue to enjoy the franchise what harm is there in letting it continue to be?

If you were to ask those people, they'd probably go on about how WoW is stagnating the industry because everyone is copy-pasting it, and when it dies said people will magically forget it ever existed and the millions it made[footnote]Kind of like how nobody wants to be rich anymore because when the first rich person died everyone just went "well sure he had a life of luxury we can't even dream of, but he died in the end so what he did was clearly worthless and not worth repeating.[/footnote] right before they pull hithero-unseen/unused creativity out their asses to create new Super-MMOs.

Personally, I suspect they just want to see the game that makes more in a month than they do in a lifetime fail due to "Crabs in a Bucket" Syndrome[footnote]Aka. "I don't have that, so I don't want anyone else to have it either"[/footnote]

Personally, I also suspect that if WoW were to die the only change that would happen to the MMO market would be everybody would just migrate to the best of the WoW-clones and everyone would just copy-paste that instead.

 

[Nimcha]

I swear this is like the third or forth time I've heard somebody from Blizzard say that they are going to make expansions more frequent and have less time between them.

Pretty much. But to be fair, the two expansions I participated in came out somewhat on time.

 

[Zaeseled]

snip

No one cared about Deathwing. No one. No one cared about the Pandas, until Garrosh got heavily involved and we got to fight him.

I liked Deathwing, I read the books and I think he was one of the best characters in the world :'(
I never really liked orcs (except Thrall) cause they all sound like the (obviously superior) tauren but with more bloodlust and savageness

 

[Kahani]

Once you get to end-game raiding the game's a ton of fun, but there's so much pointless boondoggle crap between you and those raids

I think this really sums up the problem WoW has. Not because I agree with your assessment, but because it wouldn't be possible for me to disagree more. As far as I am concerned, raiding, and indeed the entire concept of an "end-game", is utterly boring crap that I will never waste another second of my life on, and it's the process of exploring and progressing through the huge world up to that point that is the fun part. I'm not saying you're wrong or that you should only like what I like, it's simply an issue of different tastes. But it's a big problem for WoW, because Blizzard have to try to cater for both our tastes, as well as a huge variety of other tastes that enjoy different aspects of the game.

And the real reason it's a problem is that what some people want isn't just different, but often actually mutually exclusive with what others want. You basically want each new expansion to be a standalone game that you can import your old character into, with no need for all the early stuff to exist at all. I want a new expansion to just add a bit of extra stuff that I can get to in my own time. So far, the compromise Blizzard has tried to use is pushing people faster through the early content, which makes it less fun for me, but still too slow for you. Unfortunately, the only real alternative is to completely ignore one group and focus on the other. That would guarantee a big immediate drop in numbers, but would likely be the healthiest option in the long term.

 

[[zonking great]]

Jesus christ let this franchise die already. This is like WW1 where an entire generation was butchered and damned. This time, virtually.

 

[unindexedsearchengine]

snip

While I see where you're coming from, I feel I should enlighten you that people aren't exactly tolerating StarCraft 2 being spilt, or Diablo 3 being online. Both have resulted in shitstorms which continue to this day. Blizz is starting t get EA levels of hate on these forums alone, with boycotters around every corner.

The problem here is that despite their questionable business practices, they make good games, good here meaning they sell well. Why do certain games sell well? Because people like them. What do people do to games they like? They buy them... usually.

As long as the customer believes the good in the game outweighs the shite in business, tolerance to always online, splits, etc. will continue.

Certain people decided that the baggage tacked on to a game which may, or may not be fun for them is too much, and decided to not buy/play/support/etc. said game. Certain people like you, I assume. And that's okay.

Certain people decided that the potential fun from a game is worth the shitty business practices, and decided to buy/play/support/etc. said game. Certain people like me. And that's okay too.

And blizz ain't alone when it comes to "big name AAA dev with shitty business practices and games that sell well". Ubisoft, the aforementioned EA and more are pulling stuff like this. This is how it's gonna be from now on, you need to weigh the game against the additional shite that's been flung at it by them greedy evil corporations.
While it's harder in this genre than most others, we're gonna have to start separating the art from the artist, the game from the dev/pub.
Would these games have sold well without the blizzard name on them?
Unlikely.

 

[Strazdas]

Wow is in decline, as many old MMOs went though. ive been playing MMO long enough to see these trends. eventually they will loose majority core base, have a lot of old people on it, no new one (in one game we would celebrate when we would see actually new player and not just another character of an old one. it was THAT RARE). Eventually it will stabilize at a bit bellow its current userbase, be ridden with problematic players who dont chose to change the game for whatever reason (been there, till i gave up eventually) and its going to be slowly forgotten. It had a long run so yay?
The only game i saw that avoided this fate was Eve Online. the game is very slow in its userbase change, but it keeps rising, and rising, and rising, for 10 years.

"It is not possible to kill that which has no life."
To quote a certain story.

Isnt it "You can't kill if it is already dead" or are we thinking of different stories?

 

[Chester Rabbit]

Blizzard: oh shit our ship is sinking! Quick throw more paper towels at the hole that'll slow it down! FASTEEEER!!!

 

[Meight08]

I'd love to see them sky/ocean civilizations.

Not really a WarCraft lore type, but it would be nice to see them add some new areas...and some way to skip/limit the 'kill ten of x' quests.

We saw what happened in cataclysm with vashj'ir. I don't think anybody wants that again.


I like that they are getting away from the side quests to collect 10 bear asses and replacing most of them with events in the area. Hopefully its just all main story quests and zone events and rare mobs for that extra xp. They said there won't be a grind like previous expansions which is a plus.

What's wrong with Vashj'ir? D:
I loved that zone, It looked good the quests were fun and you got to ride around on a sea horse.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

They have been saying that for years now, so this will be a case of believe it when I see it.

If I'm not mistaken, in the past their pitch was to offer "more content faster." which I always took to mean small content patches through the life of an x-pack before dropping another. And with that definition I think they've actually been doing a decent job of it.

Pandaria was released in September last year, followed by the Landfall, Rise of the Thunder King, Escalation and Siege of Orgrimmar patches. And each of those was actually a fairly substantial content patch offering new questing zones, world bosses, scenarios, raids and story content.

 

[spartan231490]

If WoW wants me back, there's only one way they'll do it, cutting their subscription price. With so many free to play options out there, it's a miracle (in my mind) they've lasted this long, you pay almost $200 a year, not interested. I have been missing the play, but it's just not worth it.

I think, for me to go back, it would have to be cheaper than XBOX live gold. Frankly, I think that the era of pay to play MMOs has ended. WoW is so huge it will hang on a little longer, but I think it will be dead inside a decade, unless they switch to a free to play model.

 

[Deathfish15]

They said this during Mists of Pandaria's development, stating that it would release an expansion once every year instead of every 2-3 years. Well....that was incorrect. And even IF they are in development -and on time for release of- a new expansion post WoD, there's the issue with WoD lacking content that might have just been pushed to the next expansion to milk money out of consumers.

Other than a minor new story, 10 levels, and making the MoP farm into a "Garrison", there's almost nothing new to WoD. There's no new classes, no new races, no new enemies or allies (Orcs vs Draeni). The zone itself is taking Outland and repairing the broken stuff while adding light to where dark is now...that's the basic of it. Unlike MoP, this expansion they have coming just screams "milking customers dry, because they don't know any better."

 

[michael87cn]

Yep... like I said, its downhill from here on out. Never again will an expansion be as good at WotLK. They're just going to pump these out with minor changes and updates from here on out.

"INVENTORY SPACE UPGRADE! 10 EXTRA SLOTS!"

"NEW ZONE: JUNGLEBERRY MARSHLAND!"

"NEW FEATURE: DYE YOUR PVP GEAR!(PURPLE!)"

"NEW CHARACTER PERKS: +10% RUN SPEED!"

ONLY $39.99!

COLLECTORS EDITION FEATURES!

"12 EXTRA BAG SLOTS!"

"MINI PET: ANGRY TURTLOCK"

"EXCLUSIVE MOUNT: FLAMING GRYPHON"

ONLY $89.99!

-_-

 

[Micalas]

MoP has been the best expansion yet and Siege of Orgrimmar has been the best raid since Ulduar in my opinion. I'll be buying WoD. I'm a bit apprehensive with what they're doing to gear and stats but as long as the raid content keeps coming I'll keep playing.

Siege has indeed been amazing, but no, Burning Crusade was the best expansion.

Vanilla > BC > WotLK > MoP > Cataclysm