I don’t care how Blizzard tries to spin it, we all know deep down that they’re splitting it by releasing it at separate times because they want to increase MAU metrics/sub numbers to compensate for their disastrous development over the entirety of this expansion and last.
Blizzard’s excuse of using lore as justification is an insult to our intelligence.
That tinfoil hat is on tight.
Option two is that you take off the tinfoil hat.
Nah, it’s to drag out the World First Race where people are expected to tune into Twitch to watch sweaty no-lifers with billions of gold participate in some weird form of “E-Sports”.
Is it really tinfoil hat? They clearly want to drag out the little content they do have. I’m sure all the protests and PR disaster didn’t help with the content because Blizzard couldn’t keep its hands off their employees.
They’re literally cutting this expansion short again, WoD 2.0.
You. Can. Not. Increase. The. MAU. When. All. Of. The. Activity. Is. Within. THE. SAME. MONTH!
I swear all these mau conspiracy theories sound like the people who used to show up at the gas station where I worked complaining about how cigarettes were just too expensive and didn’t have the same kick they used to forcing said buyer to prioritize cigarettes over having enough gas to get to work.
That’s not really new for this game. Icecrown was split up back when too.
I think you are wrong, it is to make RWF more interesting. Having bosses nobody has gotten to practice or see makes for better viewership. Watching the top players come up with strats on the fly for bosses they don’t really understand is more interesting. Probably drags out the race a bit longer too, which is good for the players in the race. More days with viewership = more money.
You’ve never played this game before, have you?
No.
They’re splitting it because SL has increasingly become a dumpster fire and they are smashing the story into one patch and using the split as a way to tell different story arcs they were originally gonna tell in two separate raid tiers.
Traditional expansion design is 1 introduction raid, then 3 raid tiers. Like in BFA we got Uldir then got BoD, EP, and NWC (plus a mini raid). We got CN, the intro raid, then SoD, and now we’re left with sepulcher. Just like what happened with WoD when they abandoned it.
Splitting the raid is stupid, but you trying to contribute it to some crazy conspiracy to drive MAUs (how does that even make sense?) is also stupid.
The last time they gated the raid was Sunwell in TBC and ICC in wrath. Both gated over month(s) instead of weeks. So back then was it to pump “MAUs” or whatever you are trying to call it now?
They haven’t always done that.
Cata had a large launch raid(s) then only Firelands and Dragonsoul
MoP again had large launch raid(s) with some gating, then only Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar.
That doesn’t excuse SL though for not having a 4th raid tier like BFA and Legion though. Wrath only had 4 tiers because they did the lazy copy/paste Naxx for one and a 1 room 5 boss raid for another.
Yeah I’m sure there are a hundreds of thousands of people who were just gonna log in only this week to clear the raid and not log in again if it were all released today.
They didn’t really track MAUs back then. Old Blizz used sub-count as the primary measure of success. In WoD they stopped that and now acti-blixx uses MAUs and engagement metrics. Will be interesting to see how Micro-blizz measures success.
Ok - how does that explain why this 1 week gate is more evil corporate driven than the months long gates for Sunwell and ICC?
A sub and an Monthly Active User (MAU) is essentially the same thing. Actually, a MAU at least only counts if you actually log into the game that month. A sub counts even if you never touch it as long as you pay.
I’m not even defending the gate, I think it’s stupid. I just think the spin on it as some new evil Blizzard conspiracy is even more stupid.
I can’t believe how many people still don’t or refuse to understand how MAU’s work.
I’m not saying that blizz is locking the last bosses this time for MAUs. I find it unlikely that locking the last couple bosses on normal and heroic for one week would even have a significant impact on MAUs. I think it is more likely to benefit the RWF and the guilds involved in it. I was simply saying the gating of ICC and Sunwell couldn’t have been for MAU reasons because they didn’t care about MAUs back then. Theoretically I guess you could argue it was about sub-count but it seems content creators who raided in that time think it was to try to curb the super hardcore players and keep them from raiding all day every day until the kill was gotten.
It varies a little bit, but it’s pretty much the norm to get three full raid tiers, especially since MoP this is the first time to happen since WoD, and even WoD had an intro raid, but they scrapped the Shat raid which is why they were in a bind by the end of the expansion.
Whichever way you want to slice it the content in SL is pretty obviously cut and the staggered story seems like a way to slap a bandaid on getting the story out the way they wanted to tell it, but in a single patch. There’s really not a lot of good reason for why they’d release it this way if things were going smoothly.
How did you know I was wearing a tinfoil hat?
You’re already in my brain, aren’t you?
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa