With the announcement of Phase 2 recently, as well as the early release of Dire maul in Phase “1.5”, I wanted to take some time to discuss content releases in general, give my opinion, and hear from others on their expectations of content releases as it pertains to WoW Classic overall.
The first topic of discussion that I believe should be addressed is understanding what drives said releases, and I have broken this down to 3 areas: Playerbase, Market and Dev time.
Player base:
With every decision Blizzard makes to either speed up, delay, or release on time, different components of the player base will be effected in different ways. For those of us who find ourselves in a very different situation than when Vanilla was released, now burdened with more responsibilities such as careers, families, etc, when content is released ahead of schedule, it can often times only add to feelings of being left behind, or that the task in front of you is overwhelming. If you’re just beginning to approach level 60, or not even, and still somewhere in the level 30-40 area, hearing that the “end game” is no longer the end game, and the goal post has shifted sooner than expected, this can be an extremely disheartening announcement.
People can counter with “well, you’re still free to go into MC, no one is stopping you”. When people offer these types of counter arguments, they are failing to ask themselves one simple question: “Why do people spend the time to group up with 39 other people and raid MC each week?” The answer is the loot. Right now the primary objective of most if not all players to to get the best gear they possibly can on their character, and in order to do so the best use of their time is to raid MC/Ony each week in most cases. Thus, the interest of the player base at large is to find groups for MC/ONY, and raid there. When BWL/AQ/NAXX Release, the objective of getting the best gear will still be what people are striving for, but they will no longer see MC as the best use of their time, and will instead spend that time raiding this higher tier content. Those who are far behind, and have not yet gotten to raid MC, if enough phases pass before they hit 60, they will effectively never get the chance to raid MC consistently. They miss out on the experience. Additionally, if you reach 60 at a point when your guild has AQ40 on farm, you’re just going to go with them there, as they will be able to absorb some level of weak players being carried by the stronger. In effect, you don’t even need to touch MC content as you will be carried through later tier content by your guild/pugs. You will go from Pre-BiS (or not even), to AQ/Naxx gear as a result of being the weak link in a very strong chain. There will be very little incentive to spend your already limited time farming tier 1 gear, when you can jump straight to tier 2.
On the flip side, there are those who have the ability to spend countless hours on the game, and have essentially “beaten” it at this point. They have every BiS item they possibly can get from MC/Ony, and the only thing left for these players is to farm mats in anticipation for phase 2. The true issue here is the difficulty of the released content is too low, allowing people with enough time (not skill) to burn through it. These players quickly lose interest, and their subscriptions lapse, or are canceled until new content is announced that draws them back in. Blizzard is actively watching this occur, and provides a slow trickle of new content to keep them interested and their subs active. This is the most likely driving force behind the early release of DM, and the earlier than expected release of phase 2 in some people’s opinion. This force is directly related to the next area, which is the market.
Market:
As previously mentioned, Blizzard is keenly aware of the activity of its subscription base. Seeing a surge in subs upon release, and then the subsequent dropping off over time clearly signals to Blizzard they need to keep the interest in Classic high. They accomplish this through content releases. To be clear, boredom with Classic is a real issue for some, and it’s something that needs to be addressed. In retail, they attempt to address this by creating repayable, randomly generated instances that are “always different”. This filler content usually is high ineffective as the quality of the content is low. By the very fact that it is not distinct makes it uninteresting to many. What Blizzard can do is release distinct content that people have been looking forward to. Enter PvP. PvP is, for many, what defines WoW in any iteration. Lacking it means WoW is an incomplete game for a huge swathe of the player base. By introducing this phase, Blizzard is in many ways making their game whole for many players. The PvE content being released in Ph 2., while individually each dragon can yield some powerful items, is not as vast as the PvE releases of later phases. Phase 2 does little to progress PvE content in Classic, but gives birth to PvP for the first time. It will be no surprise that as a result of Phase 2’s release, we may very well see the return of queue times, etc at the onset. Inevitably, interest will wane with time, but it’s clear that announcing and then releasing new content is a tool in Blizzard’s arsenal to continue to profitability of the game.
Dev Time:
Taking a moment to view content releases from the perspective of the Devs can be helpful in this one way: “Once you have finished the development work for the next phase, do you simply shelf it and wait for some arbitrary release date set by marketing teams? Or do you release content as it is completed, and then move onto working the next phase?” Likely the Blizzard Dev team is tiered, with simultaneous work occurring on different phases. But this is can be a dangerous metric for releasing content, as the content for Classic has already been made some 14 years ago. The dev time when the roadmap is laid out for you will be much reduced compared to a more traditional environment where you’re making an entirely new game, not redeploying an old one. This factor may account for some of the acceleration in the release schedule.
Conclusions:
Overall, phase 2 is releasing 84 days after launch. Dire Maul/Phase 1.5 released early on October 15, which was 50 days after launch. For those who are complaining phase 2 has been released too early, let’s explore the numbers and the merit behind that complaint. In their minds, the phase 2 release is the first data point they have in setting a precedent going forward. Going off of the time line for phase 2, the entire 6 phases of WoW Classic will be released by December of 2020/ January of 2021. So this game, this experience that people have been looking forward to for some 13+ odd years, will be over and complete within 16.8 or so months. By the end of 2020, Naxx will be released, and we can only assume Blizzard’s next step will be to release some remake of BC, taking another step in repeating the same history that made Retail WoW the game it is today, a bloated, confused relic that a large majority have abandoned for a game released 15 years ago.
I am excited at the announcement of Phase 2, as PvP is something I think is a required aspect of WoW, if not the more gratifying and challenging content compared to PvE. What Blizzard needs to ensure they do is learn the lessons of Vanilla. If their plan is to simply go down the same road they did all those years ago, they will end up right where they started. To some, that may be profitable enough. My opinion is that they should be tuning the content in the current road map to ensure it is more difficult than it was in Vanilla. The player base has so many more tools, so much more information, and has in general become “better” at the game than they were a decade ago. Releasing the same content without increasing the difficulty to correct for the player base “inflation” that has occurred over the last decade is not the correct way forward. Make the game harder, slow down the content releases, make the rewards more difficult to achieve, but more rewarding when achieved. If the difficulty of clearing PvE content was more similar to the difficulty of achieving rank 11-12 in PvP, WoW would be a longer lasting and more gratifying game.
Just my 2 cents. Thanks.