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Q u o t e:
The actual internal development pace has changed very little over time. If anything, content is developed more quickly now than it was when the game began.

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No offense intended, but that argument doesn' t make much sense at all. Either you completed the content or not... Unless you're saying you had a lot of partially created content that was abandoned that you went back to. Even so, what do you call Naxx? Obviously you had to re-tune it and do a lot of work to change it for Wrath, but it certainly falls under the category of "partially completed" content. Given your argument, you'd think Wrath would have come out significantly faster after TBC than TBC did after Vanilla.

The timeline really is quite interesting in my opinion. If you're working at the same or faster rate, and you have the same or more people working on it, I would expect roughly the same amount of content to be released. A side note here is the amount of content in each patch. My feeling was that while 1.x was much faster and more consistent, 2.x has more in each significant patch. I.E. one patch for MH/BT vs. releasing BWL/A'Q at different times. Personally, I prefer the spreading the content out method.

One interesting issue that's missing though is there seem to bit quite a bit more mechanical and behind the scenes changes going on these days than there were in 1.x patches. I don't have anything quantitative to prove that, but it's just how it feels to me, having played since beta.

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Q u o t e:
This isn't really true at all. There are separate development teams fully staffed for each project.

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Sure, but is the WoW content design/creation team the same size as it was? Not saying it's not, just plain curious.

Expansions are a stealthy way to make people pay exorbitant amounts of money for your content patches. That way, they pay a monthly fee AND have to buy the 40$ expansion at the store for each account. If they don't bundle all the content they can into these packs, people would realize that they could release the same amount of content in smaller patches every 45-60 days or so.

Maybe I'm still bitter about the mage nerf to a class defining ability. But yeah there's the greedy business model exposed.

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Q u o t e:
Expansions are a stealthy way to make people pay exorbitant amounts of money for your content patches. That way, they pay a monthly fee AND have to buy the 40$ expansion at the store for each account. If they don't bundle all the content they can into these packs, people would realize that they could release the same amount of content in smaller patches every 45-60 days or so.

Maybe I'm still bitter about the mage nerf to a class defining ability. But yeah there's the greedy business model exposed.

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You try downloading the expansion? It's more than a bit larger than patches.

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Q u o t e:
Thank you for the insight Zarhym.

Either way its win/win. Faster content patches are a Good Thing. D3/SC2 coming out faster is also a Good Thing.

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It also seems that people have forgotten that Blizzard is also working on a new "next-gen" MMORPG. Maybe they're using people from the WoW team to help provide advice from experienced employees to help make this next gen MMO worth buying. (Which may be why we've seen an increased gap of time between patches over the years.)

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Q u o t e:


God another whine about challenge.

Here's an idea, unplug your keyboard and mouse from the back of your PC, then clear the 25 man content, there's a challenge for you

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Get a clue.

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Q u o t e:

No offense intended, but that argument doesn' t make much sense at all. Either you completed the content or not... Unless you're saying you had a lot of partially created content that was abandoned that you went back to. Even so, what do you call Naxx? Obviously you had to re-tune it and do a lot of work to change it for Wrath, but it certainly falls under the category of "partially completed" content. Given your argument, you'd think Wrath would have come out significantly faster after TBC than TBC did after Vanilla.

The timeline really is quite interesting in my opinion. If you're working at the same or faster rate, and you have the same or more people working on it, I would expect roughly the same amount of content to be released. A side note here is the amount of content in each patch. My feeling was that while 1.x was much faster and more consistent, 2.x has more in each significant patch. I.E. one patch for MH/BT vs. releasing BWL/A'Q at different times. Personally, I prefer the spreading the content out method.

One interesting issue that's missing though is there seem to bit quite a bit more mechanical and behind the scenes changes going on these days than there were in 1.x patches. I don't have anything quantitative to prove that, but it's just how it feels to me, having played since beta.


Sure, but is the WoW content design/creation team the same size as it was? Not saying it's not, just plain curious.

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Yeh but take into account the new in-game mechanics of phasing and vehicles. Those 2 changes alone, which i'm pretty sure wouldn't have been in the original content code or game engine, could take a dev team 12 months to write and mesh in with the existing engine.

The fact is the game is infinately more complicated now than when first written. I'd hazard to say that even the coding language used has undergone at least 3 upgrades in the past 4 years, with each upgrade bringing it's own unique problems ( and benefits) to the team.

No one codes in cobol any more :-)

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Q u o t e:
Expansions are a stealthy way to make people pay exorbitant amounts of money for your content patches. That way, they pay a monthly fee AND have to buy the 40$ expansion at the store for each account. If they don't bundle all the content they can into these packs, people would realize that they could release the same amount of content in smaller patches every 45-60 days or so.

Maybe I'm still bitter about the mage nerf to a class defining ability. But yeah there's the greedy business model exposed.

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Lol + we dont get another free 30 days every Xpand like vanilla Wow

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Q u o t e:
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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Probably the most thoughtful post in this thread.

Classic WoW was terribly one dimensional. You had very few options to do with both your character and what you could do at end-game. Instances may have been more epic and drawn out, but when you stepped out of those instances there wasn't a whole lot to do other than farm, either XP on an alt, rankings for pvp or stuff to sell on the AH because dailies didn't exist. You usually only had one accepted raid worthy spec and PVP was often even more of a joke than it is now.

Balancing every aspect of the game around one spec of every class is much easier than balancing the game around 3 different specs for almost every one of the 10 classes available. I'm sure all the prot paladins, shadow priests, balance druids, elemental shamans, warlocks in general (Surely people remember how 'great' warlocks were in pve pre 2.0? :p), etc etc etc would want to go back to that.

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Q u o t e:

I'm not sure Naxxramas relates to this conversation. We're speaking specifically about time between patches. Expansions are an entirely different animal.

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Ah we may have gotten a bit off topic.

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Q u o t e:

Art assets take quite a bit of time. If dungeon and model art for something like Dire Maul is mostly completed long before the patch is slated to go live, it's going to take a lot less time to prepare that dungeon. Ulduar's been virtually built from the ground up since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of new art is being fed into this dungeon.

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Then spend less time on art. Lets face it, nobody is playing this game for its modern graphics. It really wouldn't be significantly less fun if we were killing GC's hunter pet untextured cubes. ;)

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Q u o t e:

I don't have actual numbers, but I'd very comfortably argue that the WoW development team is bigger than it was when the game first released.

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However, it's still incomplete without my presence.

As a mascot or something.

Also, nice sig.

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Q u o t e:
A lot the of 1.X content was already partially developed by the time the original game shipped. When a patch was released in that era, development on the next patch was already under way. This isn't to say we're making it up as we go now. We have clear outlines and development schedules. Ever since the release of The Burning Crusade though, the next patch to come out is more or less developed from scratch. The actual internal development pace has changed very little over time. If anything, content is developed more quickly now than it was when the game began.

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Zarhym, doesn’t that somewhat contradict statements made by developers (Jeff Kaplan I believe it was) where it was said that they’re always “working two patches in advance”? Your statement seems to imply that only one patch is worked on at a time. Does working two patches in advance mean that they’re actually working on one while someone has a “cool idea” on paper for the other patch or does working on two patches at once mean that there’s actually designing and coding going on for two at the one time?

I’m absolutely mystified personally by how long it takes Blizzard to release new content for WoW. The game is as big as it’s ever been and development feels the slowest it has ever been. With the game hosting 11 million + subscribers, content (for whatever reason you can justify) is coming out at a slower pace than back when 500,000 subscribers was a big deal. That doesn’t make commercial sense to me at all; more players should equal more development resources for faster content. 11 million people should have more options than they know what to do with, not subjecting people who almost burned out farming Illidan for a year before Sunwell to farm instances that they did at 60. Brining Naxx back was “cool” in principle, but it should not have been 15 of the 17 bosses you offered us.

Honestly, I think that you are inadvertently forcing people into a state of malaise and eventual retirement from the game when, quite simply, they don’t need to. It might be all exciting for you sitting at Blizzard’s head office working “two patches in advance” (if that’s even the case) but your player base don’t have the same luxury. We’ve been bored waiting before and I can tell you that two months after completing all heroic content (3 drakes included) I’m bored again, we clear all content in one night and I the last thing I’d ever want to do is spend months on the hope of something new to do. That’s just my feedback though - take from it what you will.

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Q u o t e:


Zarhym, doesn’t that somewhat contradict statements made by developers (Jeff Kaplan I believe it was) where it was said that they’re always “working two patches in advance”? Your statement seems to imply that only one patch is worked on at a time. Does working two patches in advance mean that they’re actually working on one while someone has a “cool idea” on paper for the other patch or does working on two patches at once mean that there’s actually designing and coding going on for two at the one time?

Personally, I’m absolutely mystified by how long it takes Blizzard to release new content for WoW. The game is as big as it’s ever been and development feels the slowest it has ever been. With the game hosting 11 million + subscribers, content (for whatever reason you can justify) is coming out at a slower pace than back when 500,000 subscribers was a big deal. That doesn’t make commercial sense to me at all; more players should equal more development resources for faster content. 11 million people should have more options than they know what to do with, not subjecting people who almost burned out farming Illidan for a year before Sunwell to farm instances that they did at 60. Brining Naxx back was “cool” in principle, but it should not have been 15 of the 17 bosses you offered us.

Honestly, I think that you are inadvertently forcing people into a state of malaise and eventual retirement from the game when, quite simply, they don’t need to. It might be all exciting for you sitting at Blizzard’s head office working “two patches in advance” (if that’s even the case) but your player base don’t have the same luxury. We’ve been bored waiting before and I can tell you that two months after completing all heroic content (3 drakes included) I’m bored again, we clear all content in one night and I the last thing I’d ever want to do is spend months on the hope of something new to do. That’s just my feedback though - take from it what you will.

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Bingo, and a 6 month lag till more content is unsatisfactory.

I wonder why, when reading through this thread, I get this recurring visual image of Jim Carrey bent over, flapping his butt cheeks with his hands as he talks?

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Q u o t e:
A lot the of 1.X content was already partially developed by the time the original game shipped. When a patch was released in that era, development on the next patch was already under way. This isn't to say we're making it up as we go now. We have clear outlines and development schedules. Ever since the release of The Burning Crusade though, the next patch to come out is more or less developed from scratch. The actual internal development pace has changed very little over time. If anything, content is developed more quickly now than it was when the game began.


This isn't really true at all. There are separate development teams fully staffed for each project.

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That doesn't make sense. Are there less people developing new content for WoW now than 2004? If yes then this makes sense, except the game should still be growning development wise, not shrinking... Originally someone at blizzard (curse me for not saving the article/chat session/transcript) stated there was an initial goal of one expansion per year? Thing should be getting faster, not slower!

not trolling, just stating! And yes, I know how software development cycles work!

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Q u o t e:


Zarhym, doesn’t that somewhat contradict statements made by developers (Jeff Kaplan I believe it was) where it was said that they’re always “working two patches in advance”? Your statement seems to imply that only one patch is worked on at a time. Does working two patches in advance mean that they’re actually working on one while someone has a “cool idea” on paper for the other patch or does working on two patches at once mean that there’s actually designing and coding going on for two at the one time?

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I think you're missing the vital difference between patches in the technical sense and content patches.

Two different terms there.

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Q u o t e:


Zarhym, doesn’t that somewhat contradict statements made by developers (Jeff Kaplan I believe it was) where it was said that they’re always “working two patches in advance”? Your statement seems to imply that only one patch is worked on at a time. Does working two patches in advance mean that they’re actually working on one while someone has a “cool idea” on paper for the other patch or does working on two patches at once mean that there’s actually designing and coding going on for two at the one time?
That’s just my feedback though - take from it what you will.

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Whatever you might think, Zarhym doesn't control the development team, and im not attacking you just saying that im sure they are trying their best.