Would you be ready to sacrifice a major patch and a raid in order to accelerate the coming of the next expansion? I feel like they have enough room to make the story interesting with two years in one expansion. But at the same time I’m usually ready for a new direction sooner than that. What about you? Would you settle for a smaller expansion if it means less time between new content?
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No, I do not think they’re too long.
Nor do I think the game has “content droughts”. There’s far more stuff in WoW than I will ever be able to do, or that most people will be able to do. People just need to look around and do some of the many, many, many, MANY things there are to do in WoW.
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That is the ultimate form of time gating…but players may like it more.
For example, if Shadow Lands released with 4 dungeons, 2 zones and half of the raid on Release but then added 1 dungeon every quarter and 1 zone every 6 months is the same as our current situation but you would get a steady flow of content releases
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What would this even accomplish?
It has never been good, it’ll never be good. It’s just sort of a background thing.
Nah, I’m fine with two years. They fix mistakes that they didn’t listen to in the first place so you always have time to catch up. This, SL, is just annoying, they need to wrap it up.
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I’d like it so that the content was good enough on it’s own merits so that it didn’t even need timegating, or at least, I wish the content was good enough that you didn’t notice the timegating.
I don’t think there’s a way around it. I don’t think there is anything they can do with their current staff.
Some expansions feel longer than others. The boring ones.
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No, I think half the problem is people think they last too long and force blizzard to release barely polished turds. I’d hope with the Microsoft ownership we can get “when it’s ready releases” again.
$60 for the top end expansion pack… what makes you think it that 11.0 wouldn’t just be 10.3 with a $60 price tag?
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If you played WoD and think that, Blizzard should send you a Chrismas card every year.
Merry Christmas “Ideal Customer”
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This right here.
The reality is even if we had an expansion come out (let’s just say in a perfect world where blizzard was a multi-trillion dollar company only dedicated to just wow and nothing else and it had 6,000,000 employees dedicated night and day) every 4 months… I know for a fact that there would be tons of people no life the content each time and still complaining there’s nothing to do.
I think the current cycle is fine. And perhaps the alpha and betas could use a lot more player developer interaction to flesh out everything. No one’s going to be happy with the state of the game until it’s ex post facto.
If anything they’re always needs be enough things for the casual player base that I think makes up the majority. If you allow them to have fun with role playing events questing cosmetics mounts world quests and other fun things that don’t require a huge time commitment or have a really high skill requirement then the game will survive.
All the competitive players they have a million choices for games now. Let them have ESO and Lost ark and final fantasy on the side.
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WoD didn’t have content droughts because it never had much to do in the first place. 
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The story is w/e, it’s what we have to keep us busy for those 2 years that matters. If our timewasters (Torghast, Island expeditions, etc.) are garbage, then yes the expansion will feel like it’s dragging on.
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This, Brewa. Absolutely this.
I mean, I’d love for story to progress faster, to get new content more often, etc…and it’s true I , as many, get bored once my content of interest has been burnt and just wait for future updates.
This said, however, I think the pacing is correct. I mean, its humans making the game, you can only do so much in a limited time, and it wouldnt be profitable either to hire numberless people to constantly keep working on updates so…yah, I don’t complain…too much 
What’s with this “trade something” mentality?
If you’re upgrading, you’re upgrading…
I feel like they’re too short actually. For me at least, life doesn’t enable/facilitate being able to live at the computer all day like I want. And I liked doing a great deal many things recently in legion/bfa, namely azeroth’s champion grind in the latter. I just can’t see how people investing themselves in everything but being time-strapped thinking that they’re “done” once pre-patch ticks. No I am not saying oh okay like don’t move on without the slowest horse or that I would be mythic raiding regularly. Hell I would consider it fortunate to get CE in the last month of a tier.
So I don’t really get the concept of people feeling like they have nothing to do, especially when they don’t invest themselves in a great deal many things.
Which is why personally I would not mind a near 3 year cycle, or a return to a longer final patch. Maybe not as long as the 399 and 392 days respectively we had for 5.4 and 6.2 (not including pre-patch for WoD or legion). But maybe something closer to 330? BfA’s last patch lasted 273 days. And that just felt too short.
That has SO many benefits. As a pug/not-super-serious tank, I find it way too much to learn 10 dungeons at once at launch. So I often end up just taking a long break as its too much. I would far prefer new content every 3 months at a lesser scale.
I took a year off SL and Legion both right after they launched; BfA I hung in, but it was a lot to learn too…
WoW expansions are way too short, 3 years is a better timeline in my opinion. The problem with WoW is how disposable and limited the content design is. If they made content that was fun and rewarding to play, and evolved it in a meaningful way as the expansion progressed, they would have more time to work on making better, more impactful, more informed, more lasting expansions. This constant crushing rush to get things out and played and over with is a major factor in what has been keeping WoW on the decline. If they had a perfect 12 month cadence of “gimmie $40, here’s 2 raids and 4 zones”, WoW would already have been shut down. They need to make more things people want to play more than 3 weeks of.
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The biggest problem, ironically, is Blizzard trying to accelerate expansion cycles.
Every time it means they end up rushing the initial expansion release, meaning the first 2 or so patches consist mostly of catching up and fixing all the broken things with the expansion only reaching fully baked status right as it’s about to end, but then Blizzard is out of time to add more content to that expansion because they’re scrambling trying to build the next one. Wash, rinse, repeat.
They actually need to slow down and plan for expansion lifecycles as they actually happen instead of trying to do the impossible and periodically push out the better part of a new game on a fixed schedule.
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Nah. I don’t mind the 2 year average length of an xpac. I do wish we had legion style patch drops with more dungeons and encounters though.