You can’t have 11.1 and the actual content (progression content) release on the same day. It’s never worked like that. 11.1 broke a ton of addons, and this week, if nothing else, is a buffer of mercy to give lagging addon authors time to fix things. Having the season actually start with tons of broken addons would be a terrible experience for a lot of people.
Maybe you don’t use addons or don’t think they matter? Good for you, but this game was built on addons and people have been using them for 20 years. I’m not just talking about addons that some people use as a crutch, but also simple addons that completely change their bars and UI, where it’s like playing a totally different game if those addons stop working. They do matter.
I think that where Blizzard messed up was the pacing. 11.1 should not have introduced any content at all (on the same day). 11.1 should have been released weeks ago as a silent prepatch update. The Campaign opening up (and some Season 1 features, like upgrading S1 gear, shutting down) should not have been tied to 11.1, as I think that’s really the root of the issue here. It gives the feeling that part of the Season started, but part of it didn’t, and it was done in a very unintuitive way.
OK, I’ll bite. Which games would that be? Single player? FPS?
Hard disagree, I think they need to release the story slower and add more stuff to do in between the weeks. I wish we had Delves and a new Torghast/Mage tower for mounts/mogs, and new secret detective events, and more archivist quests, and bring back archeology and farming like in MoP. They keep creating all these neat time sinks and never carry them over and then slop together a patch that is kill rares and do 2 events over and over and over until your mind melts. There is nothing wrong with iterating on stuff from the past, why they don’t do that is beyond me.
They’re time gating less than in the past, we finish it next week, that’s not even enough to call “timegating for subscriptions”
So the developers can only put out a finite amount of content over time. Some players will burn through the content much quicker than the developers can release it. So to avoid time gating their needs to be a system in place to prevent players catching up to the end of released content. The only way I know they achieved this in the past was with the AQ grind. Where while you were still time constrained, it wasnt a hard gate, you could speed it up.
Would you be happy with insanely long grinds for those pushing ahead of the slower paced players? What do you see as the solution to time gating?
Monster Hunter world, wilds, Baldur’s gate 3, doom eternal, StarCraft, Diablo 2 and 3, Satisfactory, Elden Ring, the witness, outer wilds, resident evil, Star Wars the old republic, fable, the list goes on and on. Did I really need to type this out? I’ve never seen time gating for a story in games before until WoW recently, too obsessed with people all being at the same point.
Time gating gives me something to look forward to.
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Thanks captain obvious. You know what would be better than that? No time gating 
Sooo, aside from SWTOR, everything else is a single player game. Don’t you think that makes a difference?
And BTW, with SWTOR, for the last decade it has been more Solo centric than an actual MMO. Most of Fallen Empire Storyline onwards was in fact ONLY capable in Solo mode. Grouping up was actively discouraged so much that it was practically impossible.
I named how many co-op games in that list? Plus an MMO that has brilliant solo gameplay… and guess what! The wow story is solo gameplay too! Why is it time gated!? There’s no reason for it at all. The “MMO” argument is like Stockholm syndrome. Once you step out of the genre and see other games offer it way better than WoW you wonder why people accept all these awful decisions.
I mean, the opposite usually has people soak up all the content, then complain there’s nothing to do because they no-lifed everything, so they stop playing until next patch; looks bad for the numbers.
I’m sorry but there is a difference between an MMO and a FPS, regardless of how co-op it is.
It’s even worse. None of those games have time gating, and none of those have a subscription. We are literally paying to play for a certain amount of time, and they are gating things behind time. They have all sorts of financial reasons to do this, and none of it is actually good for the end user.
People are saying well nobody cares about the story…fine then don’t time gate it, if no one cares then why timegate.
It’s just a bunch of sneaky corporate crap to milk us folks. keep you on longer and stretch out content as long as possible to maximize ROI on produced product. They are so focused on that…that they don’t push for the best product.
Time gating is not as good as no time gating. There are plenty of ways to deal with people falling behind, which they already do. Time gating is about maximizing profit per hour spent making content. That is it.
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Don’t disagree that it’s purely a managerial decision to timegate, nothing to do with story
They timegate to FORCE people to play in stages. To FORCE people to not rush ahead. This is not a secret. This is not a diabolical plot. This is a straight out decision.
They have given the reasons for it. And we KNOW that if they don’t do it this way, we will have bozos running the whole storyline in an hour and then come straight to the forums to complain that there is no content left.
IF you think this is “milking” it, then unsub until however many months it will be before the story is finished and then play then. IF you then complain that you want to do other things in the meantime then why does it matter?
IF there was more stuff to do that actually felt like it mattered I would be fine, but it is never anywhere near that. It is just like always do the main, then grind like crazy on repetitive super boring stuff. That is the real issue.
I wouldn’t complain about time gating the main story if they had a lot of other things to do. The other stuff has to be as interesting though. Right now the story is pretty weak across the board, but the in between side quests are just grinding. it’s all super low quality filler.
Tie that into the weird nothing in between seasons thing for pvp and all sorts of things and it just sucks. They should do better, and…I still think your ideas of needing time gating makes no sense.
They need to make more content period for these patches, and not do weekly drops of tiny bits. I guess it’s more about time gating content AND not putting out so much that it doesn’t feel bad.
Completely disagree. They time gate to stretch out subscriptions. They use catch up mechanics to help with people going to far ahead.
It’s just to keep subscriptions. I don’t buy that they care about people rushing ahead for any reason except people running out of things to do and having too long a wait for more content and unsubbing.
Likely will unsub after my next and maybe come back for 11.2, but none of that changes the arguments. I would rather not unsub, and have them stop this practice.
Some time gating isn’t that bad…they went way to far, especially starting in legion past the original patch and it just never came back to sane. Let us do the whole thing then stop.
I just find it funny that people think it is for anything but milking money.
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Glad someone has some common sense. The devs don’t care at all if we burn through the content in a day because they shouldn’t! They made the game and give it to us to play. Fromsoft doesn’t care when Elden ring final cutscene is on YouTube day of release. They don’t! Their work is done, it’s our turn to play it how we want.
If people are complaining there’s no content after a 3 hour story and all the “content” is behind every week grinds hoping for a drop or currency and rep grinds that are time gated then it’s not content, it’s barely a game at that point.
Games are at their best when the reward is achievable every day if you have the skill, not luck or time, straight up skill.
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I think they should un time gate it or at least very much lower it. Let us play the whole way through everything at the easiest level day one if we want to. Just time gate via grind on gear and ability to get through higher levels (like normal, heroic, or mythic stuff). Then at some points in the system decrease the grind a bit to let people catch up , or time gate the number of times you can RErun things.
Don’t time gate first time through. Time gate grind for higher tiers and min maxing, but don’t go over do it.
I know time-gating is normal for WoW, but I thought we were told that Story Mode for the raid would be available in the first week. It really kills the momentum of the current campaign to have to stop in the middle and wait a week between 11.1 launch and the start of Season 2, then stop at the end and wait a whole additional week just to see the ending.
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