(TLDR: Scroll to Bottom SUMMARY)

I think many people who have been around since the beta of original world of warcraft may be seeing a somewhat trouble trend with blizzard.

In short, blizzard has slowed to a crawl with content. What I mean by content is major content patches.

Now Please, hear me out. I am not about to spew hyperbole. I come with evidence. I also come with the answer on why they are possibly slowing down.

First let us begin to analyze WoW's Major Content patch history:
This will be a extensive and complete list. It will be long but I am calculating the months in between patches to prove a point. This may also give you a good prediction on when newer patches are coming out in the future. Keep in mind that testing and problems always push back patches no matter what(voice chat caused a massive headache and split patches in two as you can see below).

I have also done some statistics analysis for a more indepth look at the variance. See the data below the dates listed.


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WoW was released in November 24 2004. This is actually Patch 1.1
http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.1.0

Release date for the Patch was actually November 7th 2004.
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Patch 1.2.0 Mysteries of Maraudon 18 December 2004
(This is 24 days after WOW Release)
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Patch 1.3.0 Ruins of the Dire Maul 7 March 2005
(this is 79 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.4: The Call to War 8th April 2005
(this is 32 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.5: Battlegrounds 7 June 2005
(this is 60 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.6: Assault on Blackwing Lair 12 July 2005
(this is 35 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.7: Rise of the Blood God 13 September 2005
(this is 63 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.8: Dragons of Nightmare 10 October 2005
(this is 27 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.9: The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (One of the best patches IMO) 3 January 2006
(this is 85 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.10: Storms of Azeroth 28 March 2006
(this is 84 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.11: Shadow of the Necropolis 20 June 2006
(this is 84 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.12: Drums of War 22 August 2006
(this is 63 days after last patch)
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Patch 2.0: Before the Storm / The Burning Crusade December 5th, 2006
(this is 105 days after last patch).

Statistics from this Data Set:
Mean(Average): 61.75 Days
Standard Deviation: 26

ON average during this period patches came out every 61 days. Just eyeballing the days above you can pretty much see that.

(Continued on next post)

(Continued from Post Above)
The Burning Crusade: (Jan 16th 2007)
(This expansion came out 42 days after patch 2.0)
(I will not take this amount into consideration due to outside forces getting the game into players hands, 42 days will not be included in the dataset but I thought it was informative to know)


Patch 2.1: The Black Temple 22 May 2007
(this is 126 days after the release of Burning Crusade Retail
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Patch 2.2: Voice Chat! 25 September 2007
(This is 126 days after last patch)
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Patch 2.3: The Gods of Zul’Aman 13 November 2007
(this is 49 days after last patch)
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Patch 2.4: Fury of the Sunwell 25 Mar 2008
(this is 133 days after last patch)
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Patch 3.0: Echoes of Doom/Wrath of the Lich King October 14, 2008
(this is 203 days after last patch)


Wrath of the Lich King: (November 13th 2008)
(This expansion came out 30 days after patch 3.0)
(Not going to include this in the data set, but informative to know)

Statistics from this Data Set:
Mean(Average): 127.4 days
Standard Deviation: 54.53

This is where it gets really funky. Clearly something is terribly wrong, or terribly right. Blizzard has almost doubled the amount of time it takes for a content patch. Because two patches were broken up as well it throws the data off.

However from what you see, the average amount of time it has taken Blizzard in BC is around 130 days.

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Summary:
Did I needlessly have to post this data to prove to you all that content has slowed to a crawl? No, you can tell. Those of us from back in original wow can feel it the most.

The point here is that while patches should be done when they are done, they are progressively taking longer over time while not containing the same amount of content in each. They aren't taking longer because they have more content. They are taking longer because of unforeseen circumstances.


A easy example is The amount of time between Black temple and Gods of Zul'aman. I should NOT have declared Voice chat a Content patch but I did.

The amount of time between the release of Black temple and Gods of Zul'aman is 175 Days(Not 301, I added 126 twice)

Thats extremely long when compared with the Difference Between the Release of Blackwing Lair and Zul'gurub. Both are Raids. Both have enormous amounts of content(comparitively).

This is somewhat troubling and I will simply state that there is obviously a lack of amount of developers working on WoW now.


Whats insane is the fact that WoW back in Vanilla was NOT making the amount of money it is today. Its backwards. I understand things will be done with they are done but look at the history above. Most if not all of their patches were on par for awesome content. Some of them could even be rolled up into a expansion but they were released as content patches.


Quite simply, blizzard is lagging behind really badly and they aren't being called out for it like they should.



You released quality content before, within 70 days. What happened Blizzard?

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Q u o t e:
(Continued from Post Above)
The Burning Crusade: (Jan 16th 2007)
(This expansion came out 42 days after patch 2.0)
(I will not take this amount into consideration due to outside forces getting the game into players hands, 42 days will not be included in the dataset but I thought it was informative to know)


Patch 2.1: The Black Temple 22 May 2007
(this is 126 days after the release of Burning Crusade Retail
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Patch 2.2: Voice Chat! 25 September 2007
(This is 126 days after last patch)
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Patch 2.3: The Gods of Zul’Aman 13 November 2007
(this is 49 days after last patch)
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Patch 2.4: Fury of the Sunwell 25 Mar 2008
(this is 133 days after last patch)
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Patch 3.0: Echoes of Doom/Wrath of the Lich King October 14, 2008
(this is 203 days after last patch)


Wrath of the Lich King: (November 13th 2008)
(This expansion came out 30 days after patch 3.0)
(Not going to include this in the data set, but informative to know)

Statistics from this Data Set:
Mean(Average): 127.4 days
Standard Deviation: 54.53 days

This is where it gets really funky. Clearly something is terribly wrong, or terribly right. Blizzard has almost doubled the amount of time it takes for a content patch. Because two patches were broken up as well it throws the data off.

However from what you see, the average amount of time it has taken Blizzard in BC is around 130 days.

-----
Summary:
Did I needlessly have to post this data to prove to you all that content has slowed to a crawl? No, you can tell. Those of us from back in original wow can feel it the most.

The point here is that while patches should be done when they are done, they are progressively taking longer over time.


A easy example is The amount of time between Black temple and Gods of Zul'aman. I should NOT have declared Voice chat a Content patch but I did.

The amount of time between the release of Black temple and Gods of Zul'aman is 301 DAYS(ALMOST A FULL YEAR)!

Thats extremely long when compared with the Difference Between the Release of Blackwing Lair and Zul'gurub. Both are Raids. Both have enormous amounts of content(comparitively). Yet it takes Blizzard almost 1 full year in between content patches for Black temple->Zul'aman.

This is somewhat troubling and I will simply state that there is obviously a lack of amount of developers working on WoW now.


Whats insane is the fact that WoW back in Vanilla was NOT making the amount of money it is today. Its backwards. I understand things will be done with they are done but look at the history above. Most if not all of their patches were on par for awesome content. Some of them could even be rolled up into a expansion but they were released as content patches.


Quite simply, blizzard is lagging behind really badly and they aren't being called out for it like they should.



You released quality content before, within 70 days. What happened Blizzard?

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Activision reassigned a significant amount of WoW developers to develop other projects. They went as cheap as possible on WoTLK. On re-hashed raid instance. Two single encounter raid instances. Heroics that require little thought and effort. They hoped adding achievements would be an adequate replacement for legitimate content.

The PvP balancing, the length of time between patches and even basic Q&A problems with minor patches makes it obvious that something is off.

I'd wager they're getting by on the cheap with the xpac, assigning developers to Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 to avoid hiring as few new warm bodies as possible.

yea, I've seen this happening since BC. a 1 year wait just for a new raid after BT was pretty sad.

I think the main reason for this is because back pre-BC blizzard was just trying to get new stuff out for the game. When they released BC they said to themselves "Ok, we could keep making level 70 stuff, or we could just make a new expack to make people spend more money"

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Q u o t e:



Activision reassigned a significant amount of WoW developers to develop other projects. They went as cheap as possible on WoTLK. On re-hashed raid instance. Two single encounter raid instances. Heroics that require little thought and effort. They hoped adding achievements would be an adequate replacement for legitimate content.

The PvP balancing, the length of time between patches and even basic Q&A problems with minor patches makes it obvious that something is off.

I'd wager they're getting by on the cheap with the xpac, assigning developers to Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 to avoid hiring as few new warm bodies as possible.

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What are you talking about? Activision doesn't interfere with Blizzard in that way.

Oh right, you're just talking out your ass.

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Q u o t e:



Activision reassigned a significant amount of WoW developers to develop other projects. They went as cheap as possible on WoTLK. On re-hashed raid instance. Two single encounter raid instances. Heroics that require little thought and effort. They hoped adding achievements would be an adequate replacement for legitimate content.

The PvP balancing, the length of time between patches and even basic Q&A problems with minor patches makes it obvious that something is off.

I'd wager they're getting by on the cheap with the xpac, assigning developers to Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 to avoid hiring as few new warm bodies as possible.

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This is the only conclusion I have come up with as well myself.

Whats troubling is the fact that Blizzard has decided that maybe its fine that patches wont come out as fast as they used to. That its ok for us to wait 4 months to an entire year for a single content patch.


The amount of people playing hasn't decreased, why should to amount of time between content increase? The only thing I can surmise is that they feel that we will play no matter what so they can do whatever they want and still succeed.

This is precisely the train of thought that SHOULD NOT be supported. Just because we have nothing else out there to play, shouldn't give developers the right to be lazy.


Keep in mind, the content hasn't increased at all. Its about on par with the content in the past. The only thing that has changed is the amount of time it is taking them to release it.


I will say this though, One could say that the content just takes longer to develop because it is just more complex than that of Vanilla WoW.

I don't understand how blizz is lagging behind when they are rushing things out since the Activision merger.

I also have noticed the slow pace on updates to wow, you would think as long as we wait on these patches it would be massive updates to the game but there not really that big.

things seemed to slow down alot !!

whats going on Blizzard ?

I kinda have the feeling they took alot of people off the team to work on other projects " starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and there new MMO"

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Q u o t e:
I don't understand how blizz is lagging behind when they are rushing things out since the Activision merger.

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I don't think Activision has quite as much control over blizzard as people think. Keep in mind that it was a mutual Merger.

Activision as far as I know didn't completely BUY OUT blizzard. They merged. I am sure the companies have to agree on things but activision knew that blizzard in the past usually took a while and pushed out quality material.

it's not easy to come up with content. it's not like they write the story and an NPC pops into Azeroth and goes to work. sure, it's slowed down some because with every major content patch they seem to be trying something new. it takes time to work all the bugs out. 5 years after going live there are still bugs to fix, it's the way MMOs work. it's a massive, expensive undertaking.

with that said...MORE CONTENT DAMNIT!!!

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Q u o t e:
yea, I've seen this happening since BC. a 1 year wait just for a new raid after BT was pretty sad.

I think the main reason for this is because back pre-BC blizzard was just trying to get new stuff out for the game. When they released BC they said to themselves "Ok, we could keep making level 70 stuff, or we could just make a new expack to make people spend more money"

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having most of their dev team working on a new expac really slows down the rate you can crank out raids.

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Q u o t e:
it's not easy to come up with content. it's not like they write the story and an NPC pops into Azeroth and goes to work. sure, it's slowed down some because with every major content patch they seem to be trying something new. it takes time to work all the bugs out. 5 years after going live there are still bugs to fix, it's the way MMOs work. it's a massive, expensive undertaking.

with that said...MORE CONTENT DAMNIT!!!

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The point isn't that coding isn't hard. The point is that there has been a significant shift in the amount of time for content and just as importantly, the quality of the content.

The question we're asking it why.

We're not saying that making a game isn't difficult.

To put it simply: Blizzard has a lot more on their plate.

They have more things to keep track of now: Arenas, more classes, two different versions of raid content, two different versions of 5-man content, an extra class, a PvP zone, and a metric ton more items to create.

Pre-TBC had a short development time because Blizzard had to worry about less things. If you were around when vanilla WoW was out, you'd remember that very few specs were viable, and raid set gear often only catered to one spec out of three. Then when you add all the different difficulties for raid dungeons, and all the PvP additions, it results in a much longer development process.

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Q u o t e:
it's not easy to come up with content. it's not like they write the story and an NPC pops into Azeroth and goes to work. sure, it's slowed down some because with every major content patch they seem to be trying something new. it takes time to work all the bugs out. 5 years after going live there are still bugs to fix, it's the way MMOs work. it's a massive, expensive undertaking.

with that said...MORE CONTENT DAMNIT!!!

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Its really not at all fair to compare Blizzards ability to release content to other MMOs because Blizzard would ultimately fail.

Keep in mind that Monthly patches for most MMOs is and was common place before WoW. Everquest, Asheron's Call and even the infamous Asheron's Call 2 would release patches regularly.


This was thought to be as ok for WoW because of the quality of the content being released. But this was back when Content patches for WoW(Vanilla) were 60 days(2 months).

Since BC, that has increased to 4 months to a year. That is ridiculous in itself.

If the trend were to continue(and I highly doubt it would), should we also accept that there will be a content patch every 8 months to 2 years? When is it time to say that there is something wrong.


Or should we just simply say, Well we should be happy with what we get. At least we get content patches at all. Forget the fact that all MMOs do it. You should be happy to get ANYTHING at all.

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Q u o t e:
having most of their dev team working on a new expac really slows down the rate you can crank out raids.

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Keep in mind that BC was being worked on DURING Vanilla WoW. Yet they were able to release content at their standard average of 60 days. If this were true then Content in Vanilla wow would have slowed down significantly(4 months significant).

It did not. It continued at the average rate.

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Q u o t e:


Keep in mind that BC was being worked on DURING Vanilla WoW. Yet they were able to release content at their standard average of 60 days. If this were true then Content in Vanilla wow would have slowed down significantly(4 months significant).

It did not. It continued at the average rate.

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Keep in mind they are currently working on the next expac (and have been since a bit before LK was released), even though LK hasn't been released that long. ;)

The first lot of those are minor dungeons and the world dragons.

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Q u o t e:


Keep in mind they are currently working on the next expac (and have been since a bit before LK was released), even though LK hasn't been released that long. ;)

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This has what to do with what?

They were working on BC during Vanilla WoW as well and were releasing content every 60 days.


Never the less, not many people know this but(Its mentioned on the Wrath CE DVD I believe), they put a dev team together for expansions.

That means there are people who are working on Expansions and ONLY expansions. They are usually dissolved back into the company when the expansion is released or move on to other things.

The Classic average is a bit wonky as they released things that were in progress, but not ready for the initial release of WoW. I recall many people feeling the released too much in classic, and that Naxx should have been in BC.

You aren't even looking at the substance of the patches, giving Mara the same content weight as Black Temple. This makes using the word "comprehensive in your title misleading at best, a bold faced lie at worst

As the game evolves so does the rate at which content comes out in a way meant to better match the average pace of the community.