Back from the void

After some eventful moving it's time to get back into this and as such it's straight to the point of the matter.

Being gone for a week made it painfully obvious how hard it is to keep up with things if you aren't checking some of the pages every single day (as I'm used to). I didn't have access to the internet for almost 2 weeks and upon getting back there were updates in the double digits. Unfortunate for me that meant several pages of patch notes, data mined information and community updates for me to look into. It took me a couple days to catch up simply because I can't sit around all day and watch videos and read pages of mmo-champ or diablofans.

I'd like to mention that D3 being recently launched and MoP being in beta has drastically amped up the community activity and developer notes. This was an atypical week but it gets one thinking about how fast things should be changing and how fast is too fast before people have trouble keeping up.

Lets face it, with 10 million active subsribers, warcraft isn't just for the hardcore progression guilds. I know a lot of people would like to believe those people are the player base but there has to be a large bunch of players from which we can make a bunch of money selling BoEs. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a valid play style and I have several friends who log on sporadically and I could go on about why people play the game and what is in it for those who don't try to "beat" it.

From design and marketing standpoints the release scale is hugely important. Too fast and those who aren't logging in every morning and checking the patch notes several times a day get confused and lose their place when their abilities don't function the way they expect them to one day. Too slow and those who are pushing the boundaries and are in heroic raids on week 2 get bored with nothing to play. Clearly there is a middle ground and finding it may not be all that easy.

Mists Launch (4.0.1): 12 October 2010
Zandalari (going to call this a mini patch even though it has a full version number 4.1): 26 April 2011
Firelands (4.2): 28 June 2011
Dragon Soul (4.3): 29 November 2011
(Dates taken from the wowwiki)

6 Months from Mists launch to the Zandalari patch, another 2 months until Firelands. This means 8 months with only one tier of raid content. A lot of people were pretty sick of it by then. 5 months in the Firelands. We've been in dragon soul for nearly 7 months.

What do these times mean? Using the MoP beta as a guidline we waiting a fair amount of time going from 86 to 87 in terms of what we had for a level cap. People got pretty used to what was going on before that increase came along. From there we had a much smaller gap in the remaining level increases. There are several reasons for this including people getting used to what the beta was showing among other things but the point here is that there was time for people to experience things before new content came along.

Along the same vein we need to consider how much is there to experience. For example we had 12 (13th on heroic) bosses with Mists launch. 8 months might have been a bit long but in my opinion it was a fair time for that amount of content, on the same token it being the first set of bosses in the expansion it's lifespan is somewhat extended due to the need to progress (for most people) through the heroics and to a lesser extent levelling.

From there we had Firelands for 5 months. Again I felt like I was sick of firelands by the time dragon soul came around. I know I don't have a lot of hard evidence around it but as someone who raids progression and spent every night on heroic rag for several weeks near the end I was done with it. I think at that point most raid groups had either completed what they were going to complete, or had already done it all. The nerfs are another story and can modify how much people finish, again another topic. However, with 7 bosses, a relatively small number, and uninspiring heroic encounters that short time was still a lot for what we had.

I'll probably comment more on DS after Mists launches but I'll suffice it to say I've been done with it for several months now. What it comes down to though is how much time can you spend in a give spot without getting bored. This extends to individual bosses as well. We had spent a couple weeks in early DS due to some crazy raid roster changes including losing 7+ raiders in a week, and I was almost fed up with spending time on Zon'ozz or Yorsahj, and then we made some really good progress and really caught up through the back half. Everyone has a different measure of how long they want to stick to some content before it gets old. Looking at the Zandalari patch we had the same 2 dungeons (which can be run over and over) for 2 months. Most people were fed up with them after barely a month, the QQ on the forums were endless.

So the amount of time you have for content is really important. This is almost an entirely different problem for people who aren't playing the game at least every week (for example just logging on for raid) or those who aren't even on every month or might take an extended break from the game. This could be voluntary or involuntary and I've known several people, many in the military, who were deployed and when they came back had a hard enough time adjusting to the content changes, but I think that's an entirely new post that I'll continue next week since I'm running out of planned space.

I feel I've shown that while it isn't a strict "this much is too long," there are clearly intervals in which people run the course of enjoyment on a set amount of content and that they desire more content. This interval seems to be somewhat similar from various viewpoints but without a terribly large sample size I can't really make a call. Please comment on this if you have opinions, let me know what your gameplay schedule is normally like (3 night a week or chilling out in /g with your buddies running heroics). Next week we'll take a look at how fast is too fast.