No 6.3
[Blaugust Day 11]
From the latest round of Legion interviews:
Q: Will we be seeing an interstitial patch or dungeon after Fury of Hellfire, like how the Ruby Sanctum bridged Wrath and Cataclysm? Basically, how will the event, of the Legion, be introduced to us?
A: Tom Chilton: So, the legion will be introduced to us by an Event that takes place before the expansion launches, it will be the largest invasion of Azeroth we’ve seen. And in addition to that there will be a patch before that, that adds the flying that we are doing for Warlords, so as far as wrapping up Warlords content, there is the patch with flying and the mercenary mode; but then to introduce the next expansion and make that transition we have the Legion Invasion of the world.
In short, I hope you liked Patch 6.2, because that’s basically it.
In the scheme of things, this probably makes the most sense. Sunk Cost Fallacy, and all that. Blizzard clearly doesn’t have any content ready to go, so they would need to take dev time away from the new expansion to whip something up.
The real question is what this is going to look like on the Q3 and Q4 (and Q1 2016) reports. While it elicits the most schadenfreude, it’s not actually that likely WoW’s population is going to continue down the slope until it hits zero. The more likely scenario is that it will drop until it hits a baseline level of congealed gamers for which WoW is more social platform than game. You know, the time capsuleers still playing EQ1 and FFXI and DAoC and, shit, even Ultima Online. It’s always a tiny fraction of the total population, but a “tiny fraction” of WoW is still larger than most other games ever get. It will be interesting to see exactly what that baseline level consists of, regardless.
Posted on August 11, 2015, in WoW and tagged Blaugust, Patch 6.2, Schadenfreude, Sunk Cost Fallacy, Time Capsuleers, Warlords. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
In An Age 
It worries me how much of Legion is not yet decided, if we are to believe the proposed timelines of beta by Christmas, launch in Q1.
Right now it looks like they have the art and story established and some high level gameplay concepts. Considering that work started as soon as WoD shipped and that considerable new resource was onboarded, I would have expected them to have a clear patch roadmap with an understanding of the endgame ‘hooks’ and what it is that everyone will be doing after finishing the levelling experience within 1-3 weeks of launch.
Holding off for a summer’s launch and delivering a WoD’s worth of content (Or less) will be pretty apocalyptic for subscriber numbers. Someone senior failed to understand that it was more content/time that was wanted, not more expansions/time if that meant less content.
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Yeah, some of the blue posts I’ve read concerning the fate of older PvP gear sets make it rather obvious that they haven’t given that sort of thing the slightest bit of thought. Surely the answer is “make it purchasable with gold,” yes? Then why won’t they just say that? Because it hadn’t occurred to them that it would be a problem when they remove Honor Points and PvP gear generally. Like you said, they had the concepts, but none of the practical, front-line design nailed down.
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This has been Blizzard’s modus operandi for a while now, hasn’t it? They are frustratingly unaware of where they are going next and it finally showed in Warlords of Draenor. I feel like they are a ship with no captain, slowly cruising down river.
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Sometimes it feels like Blizzard can see the iceberg but are powerless to avoid it.
Player Housing is a classic example. For years they said they wanted to players to ‘see the world’ rather than be stuck in their private instance. This was in response to requests for a personalised space to customise for ‘fluff’ reasons. See: LOTRO, Wildstar, SWTOR, Rift…
When the policy was overturned, they decided to put ALL of the reasons for going out into the world into the Garrison:
Professions – check
Crafting resources – check
PVP gear – check
Raid gear (!!) – check
Gold generation – check
Pet battles – check
Auction house – check
I was surprised there wasn’t a graveyard in which we could level our Archaeology.
It’s like they knew what would happen but just did it anyway…
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It’s a low drop chance, but each ore cart in the mine can give you fragments and artifacts, so even that.
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They seem to be making a big deal about the pre-release invasion (which I assume will be 7.0, with Legion as 7.0.1 or something). I have trouble picturing that as a “tier” of content, but they are talking about invasion-related content unfolding over “weeks,” which definitely sounds more involved than previous pre-expansion events. I doubt that will really make up for the drought between now and then, though.
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