Since we aren’t getting 9.3, the question is whether Blizzard will dump their effort into 9.2 or go all-in on 10.0.
Seeing as they make far more money off expansion releases than they do 2nd patches in dead-on-arrival expansions, will they bother with 9.2 or start investing in 10.0, for an earlier than normal release sometime next year.
One might argue that the story requires a 9.2 and that 9.1 wouldn’t be a fitting conclusion, but no one actually cares about the SL story or cares to see it concluded.
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We are getting a 9.3
You’re not getting a next expansion until early 2023.
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It doesn’t matter if the current team is still in charge. 10.0 won’t be any better than 7.0, 8.0 or 9.0.
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Nothing says we aren’t getting 9.3 yet. We can assume there will be.
9.2 is absolutely happening. Shadowlands is in no way resolved with just 9.1. It’s been confirmed repeatedly we have at least a 9.1.5 and 9.2 coming up. Many of us do care about the story, even if you don’t. Blizz also cares about it. And there’s other plans they’ve talked about doing in SL too.
I think SL will have a normal patch schedule. Even if 9.2 does end up being the final patch we still won’t see 10.0 until early 2023 at the soonest. Or even later. It’s gonna be awhile.
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They can always wrap up the story in the next expansion too. I think we’ll get 9.2 however
9.2 Jan/Feb, Nov 2022 release of next xpac. Very unlikely they break their standard release pattern (there’s a reason they always release xpacs during holiday season/end of Q4) on an expansion that’s already riddled with systemic problems.
Resolving the lore isn’t a priority, this will be similar to wod cuttings. 9.2 at the least won’t be as rushed/plagued by c virus delays, will probably resolve most of the remaining covenant problems.
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Both.
But Blizz cares about money from expac sales too much to miss the holiday deadline of end of 2022. Corporate NEEDS them to get that Christmas/New Year money income which means it’s almost certainly coming out whether it’s ready or not. Hopefully they realize this, realize they cannot catch up this late in the game and as a result make the smart decision of cutting 9.3 and wrapping up the story either with 9.2, a 9.2.5 or the pre-patch and plan 9.2 and what it has in it around that fact.
Because the alternative is they give us a rushed 9.3, and a broken, rushed mess of a new expac and with three bad expacs in a row it will officially be game over for WoW because I bet a lot of people will not even buy it and those who do won’t stick around or give another chance. Sure they’ll have some lifer addicts but by 11.0 if they’ve screwed things up as I mention here they won’t have enough of a playerbase to convince corporate to invest in another full size expac and game will go into maintenance mode.
If the next expansions blows then yes there will be the no lifers as well as the people who genuinely enjoy the game but the returning customers have a huge impact on sales so they really can’t afford a bad expansion
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The next expansion is looking to be in the Dragon Isles. How cool would that be?
If you’re not enjoying the game over YEARS
Why are you still playing?
Are you that hopelessly addicted?
That’s pretty sad
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Who said we’re not getting a 9.3?
Blizzard specifically said that Shadowlands would ‘not’ be another WoD, which I’ll remind folks, only got 2 major content patches (although we can argue if what got added in 6.1 was ‘major’ lol). If Blizzard wants to keep their word on Shadowlands not being another WoD, then it needs to have more than 2 major content patches, which would imply the planned existence of 9.3.
That got a good laugh from me bruh. lol
This thread is bait, confirmed
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You got a source on that or just trying to spread rumors?
Overall it would better for shadowlands to be a 3 year expansion at this point. 2023 10.0
we are getting a 9.2 but weather thats to set up 9.3 or 10.0 is the debate.
i would assume they might want all the time they can get to make 10.0 a game that could go 7 months with no update and still be Good, not that it would be planned to go 7 months but rather it could do so successfully.
and if that happened to be a goal then they may have a 9.3 mainly to buy the 10.0 team more time. but if we get a 9.3 i fully expect us to obtain game breaking power only rivaled by corruption in comparison.
You more than likely will. Blizzard tried a risky move like this with WoD and it is one that the playerbase is mixed on. They’re glad Legion was a decent expansion but also think it was really bad of Blizzard to just let players and the game basically rot for over a year before saying something.
I think if Blizzard were going to do this, the die is already cast on their part and it would be a matter of 10.0 actually being good. However to address what someone below your post stated, it is current Blizzard doing this. Unless they have a come to Jesus moment and realize that these dumb gimmicks to keep people playing rather than making a game people just enjoy playing and letting that run its course they’re screwed.
It’s kind of like Groundhog Day the movie except for a video game. No matter what Blizzard does to influence the day differently, they’re going to see the same result until they learn the underlying lesson and can finally wake up to a new sunrise. That underlying lesson is that they need to think of the players before they think of the revenue and shareholders. It’s such a simple solution too because if the game is actually designed around players as it was pre Activision, they’ll speak highly of it once again instead of speaking highly about WoW within WoW centric forums (reddit, these forums, etc) and the shareholders will see returns from that. Horse before cart, not cart before horse.
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Unless blizzard starts making some real progress toward getting back on a 2 year expansion schedule, either there won’t be a 9.3, or the expansion will go longer than 3 years. And right now they’re way behind schedule.
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I think it’ll be the latter of these. I am welcome to being wrong of course. The reason I say that is because this will mark the second expansion where they said they were going back to their roots of what made the game good, promising a ton of changes ranging from gameplay to developer interaction then ended up just not footing any of that and abandoning the project 4 months in.
What Blizzard needs to start doing, and I think more people are kind of beginning to see it with TBC and it worked well for FFXIV when they also did it is the following:
Release an expansion with a majority of the actual content updates in close to finished states to allow more time for proper tuning. Spend the time you’re not spending to make up the entire raid from scratch because now you need it to focus on other neglected facets of the game. TBC launched as a full expansion for the most part. They only added Black Temple, Zul’Aman, and Sunwell into the game after release and Black Temple was mostly done but they were balancing it properly. 2.1 (BT patch) launched before any guilds were clearing tier 5. As a result a lot of the subsequent updating to the game was more of the side activities. Things like daily quest hubs, adding new systems to the game or experimenting (like their first attempt at making WoW have its own voice chat in 2.2).
It’s the same for XIV when they completely remade the game with ARR. They released ARR and were immediately working on the next expansion to make up lost time while also having a pretty cohesive story being written that was already in the 4.0 era of writing and how it would play out when 2.0 was being released. Proper roadmapping. If you want an easier analogy. One squirrel spends the summer gathering nuts they come across for winter and stockpiles. The other squirrel just runs around and does nothing until winter is a week out and is like “Crap, I need food, gotta rush to find nuts!” Blizzard is the second squirrel here.
The problem Blizzard is currently facing is they release a 10% done expansion that clearly hasn’t had its ambitious systems tested, then when it is tested by players they just clap their hands over their ears and screech about not being able to hear you and to just trust the plan, it’ll work itself out. Then spend more time micromanaging the problems arising from it than developing more content. I guarantee you a lot of the hold up on 9.2 is them having to spitball about how they’re going to tweak covenants and fine tune their abilities to be more in balance with each other like they promised as opposed to what we actually got where if you weren’t X covenant you were significantly worse off on a lot of specs. I.E Paladin where if you weren’t Kyrian you may as well have just uninstalled the game with how disadvantaged you were and no amount of “Well, something is better than nothing though!” brainlet tier logic is ever going to make something like that acceptable in an MMO.
Now that I think on it, it kind of leads me into the other issue. Blizzard makes a system that takes up so much of their resources that nobody asked for or even remotely wants. They haven’t figured out yet it isn’t the fact the system exists that people are mad, it’s the principle of why it exists. People want to play the game to play the game, they do not want to feel punished because they dared to not play it for a month. Then Blizzard says “Well it won’t really impact your gameplay.” Which while usually a blatant lie, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say it actually doesn’t impact you. . . Then why the &^%! is it given so much attention over content?
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