Dragonflight release date

I see a lot of drama about people complaining of a holiday release date for dragonflight. In order to avoid this to some extent, do you think that dragonflight will release in November? The same time shadowlands did? I highly doubt it would get pushed to 2023 and also they wouldn’t want the race to world first to happen around Christmas time.

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Didn’t stop SL.

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According to a very credible leak, we are looking at a Nov 28 release and an Oct 25 pre-patch. This aligns with the understanding that Blizzard typically takes a holiday break in December. So they will either launch earlier with time to address bugs before the break, or push the launch to after the break. As we have seen Blizzard committed to a Q4 release, the leak’s dates fit expectations.

This would give us 4 cycles of fated raids:

Nathria: 8/2, 8/23, 9/13, 10/4
SOD: 8/9, 8/30, 9/20, 10/11
SFO: 8/16, 9/6, 9/27, 10/18

The pre-launch event would happen the following week.

Where things get fuzzy is the go-live. 4 weeks is Nov 22, which is right before Thanksgiving. So it makes sense that Blizzard would push Dragonflight out a week with a Monday global launch of 11/28.

So far, everything is lining up for 10/25 pre-launch event and 11/28 DF release.

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I’ve been saying this since the announced DF is releasing this year .

They released SL in late November and I’m pretty sure everyone was fine. It’s a game ya’ll

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A tiny bit concerning that we’re what … only 3 months away and I still have no idea what the actual gameplay of Dragonflight is.

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Nov 28 is a monday so more like the 29th. Tuesdays are typically release days. Its Thanksgiving week in the US , so makes sense for them to release it when people have time off, however Im more worried about staff being on hand to fix stuff.

With the international release, it falls on a monday for the US.

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You fly around on dragons and stuff. Oh, you also can play as one. That’s about it.

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RWF isn’t a Blizzard function. It’s completely player-driven.
And with many of the devs working from home now, needing to tune/balance the raid wouldn’t be such a daunting task over the holidays, or need to interrupt their plans as much as if they needed to be at Blizz HQ to handle any problems.

Remember, RWF for Castle Nathria ended just before Christmas.

I don’t expect anything great at release. If DF does release in Nov, at least I’ll be able to experience the launch. December is completely blocked out as far as PTO goes, so even though I think it’s too soon, I’m kind of ok w a November release.

The expansion was delayed and people were flipping desks.

Either way: it’s hard to give a rough timeline on the expansion release when we don’t even have an open beta yet. Two months to crunch out an expansion is less time than most major patches stay on the PTR… not going to happen imho.

I think the concern is mostly around the WF races/raid open times, etc.

I think the actual release date is a little less important. Only really an issue would be if xpac launches, and then say raids don’t open for like 8 weeks, leaving folks with nothing to do.

So for example, an early december release date is not an issue, if they push raid/arena season from opening until first/second week of January. The question is… is that too long of a window with “nothing to do” (since you can cap in a few days).

To be fair, SL was delayed.

IIRC, the original date was supposed to be in late Sept/early Oct?

Edit: Original date was Oct 26

They weren’t actually flipping desks, they complained for a while and then they were fine.

I find it super funny that people will raise hell over Blizzard catering to the “1%” but are now concerned about the release date because it might have a negative effect on the world first race lmao.