Just a thought.
To get through all xpacs/patches. 12-14 weeks per phase. Crank up drops. Make all bosses drop 1-2 extra items. Increase Honor/reputation gains by like 10-20%. Just roll through all expacs. 9months to a year per xpac.
20 weeks of 1 raid is a really long time.
My guild started with 3 raid teams. That’s 75 players. We were down to 1 at some point and we had to merge with another guild to revive 2nd raid team.
Do you feel that your guild would retain members longer if the content was released at a faster pace?
As a slight aside, I played on Skyfury which was a fresh start server that launched with Wrath prepatch. Having a full month of prepatch to level and gear in the previous expansion’s content was a super fun experience. I had thought that some sort of accelerated fresh release with lengthened prepatches could be fun, but not sure how it would or should work.
But we’d have to cut H+ then! /s
Anyway, guilds die that’s just the cycle of life.
They deliberately drag everything out for more sub time. The problem is that this padded time is probably not worth it over the unsubs. The game is in a downward spiral and the longer the next phase takes to get here, the worse off we are. Not everyone is going to come back.
P3 better not take this long given that there’s barely anything in it.
That’s basically what it is, as P3 has very little new content of its own. We don’t get a full new raid tier until ICC (P4). This means P3 needs to be short.
wont gearing faster cause more to quit?
next phase is the worst tier in wow’s history. if you think it’s bad now… Oh My.
As a Tauren I know a thing or two about milking, and in my professional opinion that’s what Blizzard is doing here.
it’s the complete opposite
the easier it is to gear then more people will be more inclined to roll alts. alts are the lifeblood of this game, as each character has an end point. alts allow people to remain invested far longer then what normally be possible.
in classic i had 3 60s whom i all raided with, and a bunch of mid 50s that i never got around to finishing. tbc i had 1 70 for 90% of the expansion, because it was so alt unfriendly. i rarely played outside of raid. wotlk i have 4 80s and i raid on 2 of them and arena on all 4
Yep. Tons of people just quit the game and said they’d be back later. Some left the guild. But only a few actually.
Getting gear is exciting. What’s not exciting is killing same boss for 20 weeks straight and still not getting that 1 item to drop.
If patches are shorter, raid won’t get bored. It will keep you on your toes
Interesting!
For me, I was in a guild with two raid groups, and it was very well organized, but going for P1 into P2 was a massive change to time requirements.
Going from being able to raid log for 2 hours/week or so per character for all of P2 raid content to more like 12 hours/character for both 25 and 10m Ulduar progression was just way too much time, and people could no longer justify it to their families.
We need to hurry up so we can get to the 6 months of ICC phase
At least quitting mid ICC phase stings. Lot less because you’ve probably seen everything the expansion has to offer by then.
I guess the sooner we get to “EVERYBODY IS GOING TO CATACLYSM, THERE WILL NOT BE ANY WRATH-FOREVER SERVERS LOL” the sooner I can play DiabloIV.
If P3 is longer than 3 months I never want to hear the word Ulduar again. 9 months of classic Naxx already made it my least favorite raid of all time. Now they’re doing the same thing to Ulduar.
Don’t get why everyone’s in such a hurry to play Classic Retail.
From the start, I’ve said the goal was to have Classic be ‘one expansion behind Retail’. And that would be how they achieve Kotick’s desire for “annual franchises” in WoW; Retail: Year 1, Classic: Year 2, Retail: Year 3, Classic: Year 4, etc. Which gives each project’s expansion two years to exist before getting the next expansion.
i’ve done ulduar 4x a week since launch, 10/25.
this is y they got rid of separate 10/25 gear. it’s too much. raid either not both.
cata > wotlk
because there are those who like something different from you.
I, personally, think Vanilla is a hot broken garbage of a game. I think it’s broken. I think it’s fundamentally flawed. But you may think that Vanilla is the best version of the game.
I love Retail. For many reasons. I nerded the 
out of Shadowlands. I, obviously, didn’t play Vanilla Classic, nor most of the TBC.
I missed most xpacs. For life reasons. I’m super excited to play through absolutely everything. But I also, personally, don’t want to play WoW for next 2 decades. I’d like to have 1 year per xpac tops.
This phase has gone on way too long. I just want to get those last few upgrades in an rng-proof manner and be done with Ulduar.
I would imagine the missing variable is the fact that the vast majority of people are on recurring/pre-paid subs and thus don’t actually unsubscribe
And that’s fine. I think each expansion should get an ‘era’ and a ‘som’. But that’s not going to happen.
However, most playing Classic are probably not looking forward to WoD, BfA, or Shadowlands. So they’ll quit. Once Classic’s overall population slides below whatever threshold the bean counters set as the “minimum profit”. Classic will be shuttered.
They are making Wrath slow because they know whatever comes next could either make or break classic servers. Cata is where everything began to go downhill so…they might make some Wrath Era servers, or delay the next exp as much as they can.