Can The Devs Please Just Finally Admit That Shadowlands Had a Patch Cut

Community General Discussion
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Now with the announcement of a season 4, adding some old dungeons to M+ and also allowing the old raids of the expac to scale up and drop relevant gear, (Both of which I think are great changes for a final .5 patch) it absolutely, 100% feels like this patch to expansion bridge is in the place of where a .3 patch would be.

Please feel free to disagree with me, but I think it would just be great to have the Developers explain everything. Instead of saying that two patches is how they intended for SL to play out. And that for the most part, everything went to plan. While I do think a lot of what they are trying in season 4 is really good for the game. Just hearing from Devs that,

“Shadowlands did not play out as anticipated. We condensed the expansion into two patches, and cut out a tier, to better work on the next expansion. We realize that this isnt a good message for a lot of our players and fans, but we wanted to be honest. We are putting all our resources into making 10.0 and amazing expansion. In light of our short comings with Shadowlands, we are introducing a season 4 to Shadowlands. (Insert Season 4 Info) We hope that opening up all of Shadowlands raid content, and making it relevant will help bridge the gap until 10.0. Thank you all for playing, and we are trying to do better.”

It may just be words, but hearing it would put a little sugar on the 2023, possible late Q2, pill that we all have to swallow.

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Well, this has been the case since Draenor. I’m thinking they just get tired of repeating themselves towards the end and know we know, ya know?

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It was the case with WoD. Legion and BfA both had 3 patches. And the expansions before WoD did. And while you are correct in that they would be repeating themselves. It would still be better than the “We planned Shadowlands this way from the start. It was only a 2 patch expansion. We just didnt want to disclose that when selling it, because it would have hurt sales.”

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Right, and when the next expansion comes out and there’s a bugged quest or something, the forums will say:

“Seriosuly? You cut the last expansion short for this!? You STILL couldn’t get it right?”

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Im not quite getting the point you are trying to make. Do you meant that its better to not say anything because the forums will flame no matter what? Or are you saying that they wouldnt say anything because they are afraid of the forums flaming them?

Whadya mean mon?

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If they did then Ion can’t smugly say “Shadowlands went completely according to plan” like hes been doing

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I don’t know if it matters much or not. Every expansions gets cut content.

Wrath was supposed to have a nerubian raid. Tol Borad was originally planned for Wrath.

Cata was supposed to have a throne of the tides water elemental raid tier that got scrapped.

WoD obviously had a lot scrapped.

To me it’s the nature of design work. You try to reach all the goals in the time allotted, but it doesn’t always work out.

There is probably a lot more we will never know about.

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Pretty sure the repeated bait of what they wanted to do and what we got is already hammering those numbers down. :frowning:

Which is why they are sticking to the ‘wait and see!’ lure…to the same effect.

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I always thought they should have done a nerubian or gundrak raid.

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this is how business in gaming works.

we gotta pick through the corporate speak and figure out what they are actually saying between the lines.

business suit people don’t like when people apologize or admit something that may be perceived as negative.

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Really feels more like a way to combat a content drought towards the end of an expac. If it works out well, I expect they’ll continue to do so in the future. I imagine the big bottleneck for content will always be design/art really.

If they can put out a filler patch that just makes everything…relevant again for a bit, it gives stuff to do and fills that gap in a bit.

I’ll have to wait and see how it plays out to render an opinion on it though. As it stands, I’m kind of sitting here going “do the same stuff, for better gear for…what…the next expansion launch and gear reset?”

But we’ll see.

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I think it’s more like two partial patches got merged.

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I’m excited for the bridge expansion

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They cut a patch entirely and still won’t get 10.0 out in 2022. So many players are going to quit en masse if this is all we get until 2023. 90% of this game doesn’t gear up or even care about this bs.

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given the wording, they never said there wasn’t a patch cut. they only said that the story THE STORY was a 3 part act.

a story can have an epilogue or another patch might have been set up for 10.0

not major content planned. no lost raid tier, but a season 4 patch. a .7 patch like at the end of bfa.

so, only really 3 months behind. just too bad those 3 months were front loaded. its like a book that drags on too long in the intro. people don’t stick around for the middle and are exhausted if they do manage to get there.

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Yeah 9.1 and 9.2 got merged and 9.3 got renamed to 9.2

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to be clear, i have no issues with a season 4 in the way that they are describing. :thinking:

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I think 9.2 & 3 were merged. 9.2.5 will hopefully tidy up the side content.

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Regardless of whether or not Shadowlands had a patch cut, the announcement of season 4 heavily implies this might be what future seasons in WoW expansions might look like, even if the expansions themselves don’t have cut content.

For good or ill, they have the wiggle room now to do this little experiment with season 4. So I caution anyone from dismissing it as just “filler” for Shadowlands. This may very well be what the game looks like going forward, so engage with this experiment with that in mind.

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If you look at what we got in 9.1 with flying and the QOL changes like the ripcord basically being pulled along with a mega dungeon those over the last couple of expansions have been x.2 things . Add in 9.1 we didn’t get a small x.1 raid like we did in Legion and BfA but Sanctum which basically was to lead us to the final raid with the jailer would of most likely have been a x.2 raid .

9.1 came out around the same amount of time into the expansion that the last 2 expansions x.2 patches came out .