Correlation between time gated content and expansion retention

Community General Discussion
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I did a bit of digging around with the use of time gating and layered complexity, especially with regard to professions and reputations. It seems that any expansion that puts rewards behind deeper and deeper layers of gating also runs into rapid problems with post-launch subscriber retention.

For example, Mists of Pandaria introduced daily profession cooldowns and locked recipes behind rep grinds, and saw a big drop a couple months in. Warlords of Draenor shoved crafting into garrisons and gated recipes behind random discoveries, and lost millions after launch. Legion added profession quests and recipe ranks, and while it held up better thanks to strong overall content, a lot of players still bounced due to complexity. In Dragonflight, the profession overhaul brought deep specialization trees and weekly-locked knowledge points and again, we saw major drop-off after the initial wave. Now in The War Within, it’s even slower and more rigid, with Acuity bottlenecks, limited skill gain, and no room to recover from early mistakes except an “only once ever” profession respec.

I’m not saying people leave because of time gating (this isn’t just “World of Chorecraft”) but it clearly plays a role in making the game feel less fun. I get that balance is needed to keep players from instantly crafting raid gear, but that’s already handled: crafted items fall off fast and rarely hold value in endgame. The real problem is that crafting is no longer something you do for fun or as a stepping stone toward progress. Except for the occasional generic stat buff, crafting at level 80 feels strictly worse than any other form of content (world quests, delves, dungeons, even idle grinding.) People leave when they’re not having fun, and layers upon layers of gating for minor rewards are not fun. Locking major rewards behind literal months of daily chores is also not fun.

So who is this system actually for?

(if you ask if this post is partially bitterness that the DISC belt broke engineering nitro boosts, the answer is only slightly yes)

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It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the longer. It takes you to do something the longer you need to be subscribed to finish it.

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Oh absolutely. The “mobile game” business model. Except with mobile games, they sell the option for instant satisfaction and use real money to sell it. WoW gives you the option for “eventual satisfaction” with your sub, which gives people all month to ask themselves why they are still paying.

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In a lot of cases I think this actually backfires. While theoretically it should be true, it doesn’t account for people getting bored and/or frustrated and just quitting instead of finishing whatever they were trying to do. :upside_down_face:

On the flip side however having too much easy, bite size content can also make some people feel overwhelmed and like they are on a never ending treadmill. The balance must be incredibly hard for developers to achieve between too many and too few dings.

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Bro, that’s been here since vanilla

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Cool. So in your “digging”, how did you account for every other possible explanation that also occurred at the same time as these expansions?

What you are doing, if you haven’t done this, is to selectively pick one thing and try to pin everything onto one single attribute. This is referred to as “cherry picking” where you pick one data-set and then try to expand it beyond what that data can actually tell you.

There’s a more specific fallacy when it comes to doing the stuff you are doing here, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of that fallacy. It is a version of cherry picking data either way so this still works.

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I understand if you didn’t want to read the whole thing so let me pull one sentence out:

"I’m not saying people leave because of time gating (this isn’t just “World of Chorecraft”) but it clearly plays a role in making the game feel less fun. "

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And it if wasn’t that, it would be something else.

Folks leave for all sorts of reasons. One persons awesome is another persons misery. Can’t please them all.

Professions are minor content, wth a minor impact. Sure, undoubtedly, someone has left over professions. The vast majority of them aren’t impacted by it Consider, most folks use of professions, notably high end gear, is through talking with someone who stuck it out and done the work. Less craftmakers, but, again, not a crisis.

People leave because they complete the content. “Did the raid, all done. Did M+, got the mount, all done.”, whatever.

And the vast majority of the content, although not all, gated or not, can be done in a month, maybe two, with the right group and diligence. Getting gear to do content (note, not saying full set of BiS, enough to do content) is not that hard, and does not take that long. Many folks can “finish” the game, the core content of raids and bosses and the campaign, in 2 months. Level a toon, run content, kill the big bad guy on the box, done. Go home, wait for the next big patch.

After a patch, you can do it in less than a month.

So, whatever those gates are, they’re not necessarily working as a retention mechanic.

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Crafting is all I’ve been doing until the next patch.

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Burning Crusade really started the daily log in cycle with daily hubs and heroic dungeons.

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This has been a thing in every expac after Vanilla WoW to some degree. Some expansions have timegated worse then others for sure.

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Yes, there’s truth in every reply here. That’s why I chose the word correlation in the subject line, not causation. I also made a point of saying it’s clearly not the only reason people stop playing. It’s part of a broader shift in design where time played, especially daily and long-term engagement, is rewarded more than skill, creativity, or effort.

I also acknowledge and agree in Vanilla, BC, and Wrath, some profession items were gated, but usually only the most powerful or prestigious ones. That kind of pacing made sense and preserved trade value. What’s different now is that entire profession systems are built around time-locked grinds where even basic gear or upgrades are irrelevant by the time you can make them. It’s not about wanting instant rewards. It’s that crafting used to feel useful and satisfying, and now it often feels like a waste of time unless you commit to a very specific and narrow path from day one.

Blizzard has tested a lot of ideas over the years. Farm plots and pet battles in Pandaria, mission tables in later expansions, and now crafting orders. Some of these worked better than others. But the trend of increasing time gating in professions keeps getting deeper. It rewards players who log in daily to run errands, and it leaves behind players who want to engage more flexibly. That doesn’t mean the system is broken for everyone, but it does make crafting feel less rewarding for a lot of players who used to enjoy it. Many of whom have created threads here and on reddit to say so, while it’s exceedingly difficult to find players taking great joy in time gated materials from daily quests.

tl;dr: Parts of crafting have been gated before, but now the entire profession is gated and the gates don’t open until a player would out-level or out-gear most of the rewards.

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I feel it’s gotten so out of hand that we the players are still playing catch up from 3 expansions ago

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I read the entire thing, but the problem here is in that case… what’s the point of your actual thread? Your intention is made extremely clear and making a single throwaway line to try to cover yourself for the most basic criticism doesn’t do anything.

There is no correlation between “time gated content” and “expansion retention.” Throwing in a single line of “I’m not saying what I’m saying, but I’m simply saying what I’m saying” does nothing but indicate that you are aware of what you are doing and why what you are doing is just done in bad faith.

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My point was to get people talking about what does and doesn’t work for them in the game. If enough players feel strongly enough to move the needle on retention, maybe Blizzard takes notice. Maybe not. But it’s still worth having the conversation.

In that sense, this thread already did what I hoped it would. People are sharing their experiences. Some agree, some don’t, and that’s fine. It also pulled in someone more interested in nitpicking tone and phrasing than engaging with the actual discussion, which says more about them than about the post.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good one.

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DF completely ruined professions and I will never touch them again.

They used to be one of my favorite things to work on.

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Starting off wrong will not help your case lol.
Cata we had alch cds and what not. Profession recipes were tied behind a currency which you got from dailies.
Heck I had to buy my jc specific gems with currency too.

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You’re absolutely right. In an attempt to keep things concise, I simplified something that can definitely be picked apart for partial inaccuracies. So let me clarify what I meant: yes, earlier expansions like Wrath and Cata had cooldowns for high-end crafting materials like Ebonweave, Spellweave, and Moonshroud. These cloths were Bind on Pickup, but the gear you crafted with them was Bind on Equip and could be sold or traded. The key point is that once you had the pattern, you could start producing on cooldown. There were no delays to learn the recipe, and you weren’t locked behind daily rep quests just to participate. Reputations in Wrath could be advanced through dailies, sure, but also through dungeon tabards, turn-ins, and mob grinding. That allowed weekend or focused players to still unlock what they needed on their own time.

Pandaria changed that structure. It introduced daily-only crafting materials like Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source and Imperial Silk that were required not just for rare or cosmetic items, but to unlock recipes and progress core profession paths. And some recipes were locked strictly behind daily quest reputations, with no dungeon tabards, no flexible grinding options, and no catch-up system at launch. That’s the distinction I was aiming to highlight—it wasn’t just that cooldowns or reps existed, it was how deeply time-gating was built into every layer of profession progression.

My bad.

[edit: tl;dr]: Pre-Pandaria, you had access to almost all the profession without daily cooldowns except for select pieces of very high-end gear. Pandaria and beyond required you to use cooldowns to get anything useful out of them.

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But that’s (almost) always been the case.

Consider Vanilla (and kin). There’s no way that a leveling character, while also leveling their profession, could make upgrades for themselves. The recipes a) weren’t that good, and b) the materials (even if they farmed them themselves) were just flat too expensive.

Only at the top end (outside of utility stuff like bags and such), was the “worth it” in any meaningful way. Even once leveled, the AH wasn’t flooded with crafted leveling greens, the world drop BOEs were far more prevalent.

The biggest exception to this was during WoD, where any trivially leveled crafter could make early “fresh max level” gear easily, and cheaply. This was the “max 3 equipped” stuff with random stats. Early on, the iLevel boost was worth it. Later, if you got lucky, the stats roll made it better, AND you could sell it.

In Vanilla I ground out two levels (in my 50s) killing demons for Demonic Runes for Robe of the Void, probably the best caster piece outside of raids in the game – but was BoP using BoP materials that were a low drop rate. I limited myself to 2hr sessions grinding those mats.

in BC, it was the daily shadoweave cooldowns, plus farming water motes to make the Frozen Shadoweave gear – again, a nice, early end game set which only the raids dropped better. Those cooldowns and farming took over a month to get me that set.

The Cata set was nowhere near as arduous to get, but it didn’t last as long (Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder helped a lot with obsoleting that gear).

Right now, in WW, we can craft some pretty nice stuff. You can have CRAFTED some pretty nice stuff. It takes time for the CRAFTER to build up the levels necessary to make the gear. But thats OK, as it takes time to build up the mats.

Professions are not a primary gear path, the current system is a “fill in the blanks” system for those stubborn pieces that won’t drop, while, simultaneously working as a gearing path for casual players. Wait a chunk of the expansion, craft up a full raid set. Not too shabby.

The blue starting gear that crafters can make, very few folks use it. As evidence by it simply doesn’t sell (not well at least), particularly now since it can’t compete with WQ drops and such anyway, they don’t buff the blue gear seasonally, so it has a very short life span.

But, anyway, it has always been hard to craft your own meaningful gear, save for that anomaly during WoD.

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First thank you for a well crafted reply. I cannot argue any of facts and will not try to. I’ll just give you a different perspective.

Ah, so Blizzard wants us to feel that deep sense of “pride and accomplishment” EA taught us when we finally finish a craft? That’s not really what’s frustrating me. I agree that prestige items should take time.

The point isn’t whether fresh-max-level blues are amazing or long-lived. It’s that they used to be available the moment you hit level cap. In Cataclysm, a tailor could ding 85 and immediately craft Emberfire Shoulders with farmed mats and no cooldowns. In Warlords, a similar item like Hexweave Shoulders required days of daily cooldowns and work orders just to make the cloth. Even the “max 3 equipped” crafted items in WoD weren’t actually accessible right away unless you’d already rushed your garrison and stockpiled mats. You couldn’t just ding and make your own starter set.

You used to be able to gear up for pre-heroic dungeons, help a friend or guildmate catch up, or fill a gear gap without grinding world quests, chasing events, or relying on RNG. Now, even basic crafted gear takes days or weeks of waiting. Professions used to feel like something you could enjoy through effort. Something a person with a job and family could enjoy during their weekend play sessions. Now they feel like a sleepy chore with the occasional reward and one that is very difficult to explain to friends who you are trying to bring into the game.