The 11.1.7 patch is coming on the 17th (kind of interesting that the x.1.7 comes on the 17th but I’m sure that’s a happy accident). And it’s bringing a new quest line, the new delve thing, lorewalking, turbulent timeways, and we still have the visions, along with then the duos, and two weeks after that the greedy emissary.
Honestly I don’t even understand the timegating at this point, because there’s so much minicontent anyway, there’s no reason to timegate. We are now experiencing so much content overlap that it’s overwhelming and self-sacrificing for Blizz, because most people now won’t do all of the content, they just don’t have the time.
This is the true issue with their current methodology:
increased content release cadence + timegating = supersaturation
The field’s flooding and the timegating was never really necessary for most of the things they’ve released. Frankly they shouldn’t even be alternating the visions cities either, we should be able to access both Org and SW at the same time, as a choice. That’s the most extreme timegating so far.
I’m a collector and completionist player who runs All The Things. I, and hundreds of thousands of other players who run the same addon daily, disprove this fallacy every single day and have for years.
I’m just not sure why? 11.1.7 is coming out not even two weeks after Duos, and Duos will still be timegated while things like Overcharged Delves will be timegated too.
This means the excuse of ‘not wanting to overwhelm players with things all at once’ that Ion cited was nonsense, because it’s happening anyway.
Granted, I don’t know how hard I’m going to push Duos. It’s not exactly what I thought it was going to be. I may go until the mount and then move right on, unless there’s neat stuff for challenging yourself. (You can apply handicaps instead of receiving buffs)
Bellular made a pretty solid metaphor with Blizzard just spinning more and more and more plates trying to show us a performance of “SEE LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS WE ARE GIVING”
None of it is long term satisfying. Perhaps not even short term satisfying. Diablo has a very similar issue of just “spinning plates” with very little substantantial end game systems that are fun and engaging.
Someone said it well, timegating is the lesser of 2 evils of content drought or being spoon fed. This could be fun but it comes with FOMO cosmetics to collect and add to a vast ever growing collection that is losing it’s value.
Personally, I think we would all enjoy fewer timegated systems because the end game systems are so rewarding, fun, respectful to our time with the right amount of challenge.
When a game can master that, players will flock there. Maybe WoW’s engine and structural architecture can’t allow for better end-game, replayable content
yes they absolutely would, and while the validity of those complaints in the past was laughable…right now we have a dev team that’s consistently putting out 45-60 minutes of content, progression gated to such an extreme that those 45-60 minutes of content are milked out over 4-8 weeks
