After a fairly upbeat period of initial t6 farming ("Yay, we beat the game!" "Yay, we've got so much free time now!" etc.) I've noticed that on our end, interest and general enthusiasm about the game are at an ebb among many of my guildmates. Perhaps full 2.3 patchnotes will help change this, but for raid guilds who have already "beaten the game," 2.2 was a fairly lackluster patch. For people who PvP a lot, the arena season has dragged on for too long already, with anyone who cares at all about arenas as something other than a way to get a quick weapon long ago having assembled a full Gladiator set, and many people waiting for the upcoming class changes to breathe some fresh life into the same old matchups.

But thinking back, from a raid perspective, despite the wealth of raid content (albeit initially untuned) that we had upon release, we're now looking at, by far, the longest ever gap in raid progression that the game has seen.

Some dates for reference:

• Late April 2005: Ragnaros is defeated for the first time by Ascent
• July 2005: BWL is released.
• September 2005: Nefarian is defeated for the first time by Drama; Zul'Gurub is released.
• November 2005: Ahn'Qiraj hits the PTRs
• January 2006: Ahn'Qiraj events; first guilds get into Ahn'Qiraj
• February 2006: Most servers get into Ahn'Qiraj and are quickly stumped by C'Thun/Ouro
• April 2006: After retuning, C'Thun and Ouro are defeated.
• May 2006: E3, Naxx is unveiled; Naxx hits the PTR
• Late June 2006: Naxx hits the live servers
• September 2006: Kel'Thuzad is defeated by Nihilum
• October-December 2006: TBC beta is in full swing, with an outpouring of information about the new expansion
• January 2007: TBC goes live.
• May 2007: Kael'Thas still undefeated, no one has yet seen Hyjal, and BT is released.
• June 2007: Illidan and Archimonde are defeated by Nihilum
• July 2007: The rest of the world catches up, and dozens of guilds worldwide begin to defeat all known raid content.
• October 2007: No new raid content on the live servers or the PTR. Zul'Aman expected on the PTR soon, no ETA for its release. Very little concrete information regarding further 25-man progression (we know Sunwell in 2.4, but little else), and certainly no ETA for that content.

Before now, the "next big thing" was either live or at least on the PTR within two months of the very first guilds in the world finishing existing content. As of now, we're looking at 2.3 coming out five months since Illidan first died, and it seems quite unlikely at this point that the Sunwell is going to be on the live servers until early 2008 (given that it's October and 2.3 isn't even on the PTR yet, and a patch the size of 2.3 surely will require significant PTR time).

A couple of questions for discussion:

1) Are other 5/5+9/9 t6 guilds experiencing this sort of malaise at this point? How about less-progressed guilds? How about people that don't raid, but focus more on PvP? If so, how are you dealing with it?

2) Would it have been better to have spaced out the raid content, even if it meant having less available right away, in order to avoid the large gap that has resulted? (For example, imagine t5 retuning in May as happened with 2.1, but no BT/Hyjal until July/August.)

***Clarification for people just now reading this: I am not in any way proposing or asking whether Sunwell should be released sooner. That's unrealistic. Sunwell will be done when it's done, and it'll be on the live servers when it's ready, tested, and tuned. That will take however long it will take. I'm not asking for new content sooner and denying existing guilds a chance to "catch up." Rather, looking at the timeline between January 2007 when TBC released, and whatever date Sunwell goes live, I am asking whether spacing out the exact same content -- t4, t5, t6 -- differently might not have ultimately been more satisfying for the players in the long run. In short: Did t6 content come out too soon for our own good?

Edit #2: Attached are a couple of very clear graphs taken from this post later in the thread: http://elitistjerks.com/495839-post175.html
The red line represents the Nihilums of the world, the blue line a typical strong progression guild, and the dotted line is the baseline average/mediocre raiding guild. Focus on the differences between the two models -- in particular the size of the gaps between the various lines at different points in time, and the amount of "flatlining" for each of the groups.

For the less progressed guild (2Vashj kills, hopefully Solarian tonight and then poking Kael) I'm not experiencing the same problem, though I certianly understand the position. The Arena season has dragged on altogether too long, but since we have a raft of raiding left to us, and a potential flurry of new stuff if we can get kael, interest for us is probably at it's highest all expac.

Didn't Tigole say that 2.3 was going to hit the ptr tomorrow? or at least ZA?

2.3 PTR is expected within a week or so. He didn't give a date, but every indication is that 2.3 is PTR-ready, and 2.2.2 is going live tomorrow, so it'll be "soon."

Well, along that there's one question that could be asked to hardcore guilds :

Is it easier to muster your forces
-6monthes in a row, then rest for 4 monthes until new content (i.e. release a big bunch of instances together, than wait ages for the next content to be released, which is the current situation)
-2 monthes, then rest for 2 monthes until new content is released, rince and repeat (i.e. spread the releases more smoothly over time)

Less than 4% of people are into Hyjal according to WowJutsu. Personally I'm glad there is a gap as otherwise we'd be in a similar situation to Naxxramas where the majority of the raiding population doesn't get to see a significant amount of the content. It sucks for those who've completed everything though I imagine. Unless Blizzard change something there are always going to be problems for some people.

Arena seasons are far too long. I understand the desire to try to limit the distribution of drakes, but the pace at which class balance changes are preformed and gear upgrades are released is abysmal.

I'd argue the latter would be better. We started out with 4-5 months of more content than we could fit in a given week, which certainly burned some people out. And now we have what looks like it's going to be ~6 months of farming, except that farming doesn't even last that long. We're already having t6 set pieces go for offclass use, and in another 4-6 weeks we'll pretty much be running BT just for Illidan drops and a couple of particular things people might need from other bosses. It's a bit of a grim prospect to think of stopping 25-man raiding entirely potentially a month or two (or more) before there's anything else for us to raid.

A much easier and more sustainable schedule is to have ~2 months of fairly intensive progression, 3-4 months of farming, and then repeat.

I suppose in theory (mind you I'm speaking as someone who is not a leading edge raider by any stretch of the imagination) it could be that Blizzard is giving the larger population more time to get through existing content than they have with their rapid-fire release schedules in the past.

Very few people ever saw the end of Naxx before TBC obsoleted it; it could be their release scheduling strategy has changed for raid content, such that you'll see 2.3 with Zul'Aman, then a gap, then 2.4 will come out with Sunwell Plateau, then a long period before the expansion to give the non-leading-edge people a chance to churn through that content before they drop WotLK on us.

After all, you have to figure that some cost-benefit analysis was done on all the designer/artist/tester/programmer time they spent building Naxx compared to the number of players that saw it and the amount of playtime they got out of subscribers for it and someone noticed that they got a heck of a lot less out of it than they have out of other raid content. Heck, I'm pretty sure that's half the reason they're bringing it back in the expansion.

In the end it might cost them a handful (or two handfuls) of leading edge raiders, but it is likely that it makes more sense from a budget standpoint to avoid situations like the Naxx one.

Disclaimer: This is all speculation of course and it could just be that they're running late on everything.

Well my suggested schedule above, and the way things used to work, actually would've narrowed this gap. Instead of having Illidan downed by Nihilum in the first week of June as some guilds set foot into SSC for the first time post-2.1, you could've had 2 months of just t5 content. If Hyjal/BT open in early August, now instead of just five or six guilds racing through BT and competing against each other, you have dozens of guilds that have been farming Kael/Vashj and gearing up for the new zones. Narrower gap.

By frontloading as much of the content as they did, Blizzard created this huge gap between the best raiders and the average raiders, but also punished the best raiders with a huge delay until the next content comes out.

I'm not saying that Sunwell should be out tomorrow. It wouldn't make sense to release t7 content when only 3-4% are seriously involved in t6 content. If we assume that Sunwell was going to come out January 2008 (to pick a random date) regardless, then wouldn't it make more sense to spread out the t4-->t5-->t6-->t7 progression over the full year rather than giving us t4-->t6 in May and then having a 6-7 month wait?

Doesn't this thread already exist?
Pacing the Release of Raid Content

It's the same argument that's been had in many threads now. Releasing all the content at once means that the front runners zerg through it and then get a drought. Meanwhile the medium-runners get overwhelmed by the feeling that they'll never catch up, and the non-raiders also get to complain about Blizzard seemingly catering to the bleeding edge by shovelling new content at them.

What is there to say other than "let's all hope they do it differently next time"?

In fact, most of the same arguments were raised about the time it was announced that BT would be in patch 2.1 - and as I recall, you were on the other side then ;-)

It wasn't until about a month before TBC came out that vodka stopped running BWL and AQ. A bunch of us even did MC pick ups to get those amazing/rare items like ToEP and Wild Growth Spaulders. We ran Naxxramas and enjoyed it up until the very end. Today I find myself and the guild as a whole only wanting to raid Hyjal and Black Temple, with many people openly willing to sit simply because killing Gurtogg for the 20th time isn't all that fun.

Had BT/Hyjal been delayed we would have farmed SSC/TK a lot more, instead of dropping them almost immediately upon entering BT/Hyjal. The biggest problem I see with SSC and TK is that they lack the items like Rejuvinating Gem, Drake Fang Talisman, Eye Stalk Waist Cord, and Cloak of Clarity that made returning to BWL and AQ so rewarding. There are very few items from SSC and TK that are the best in the game.

I don't necessarily mind the fact that all the content was released at once. It saved us from having to farm items from SSC and TK that would rapidly be replaced in Hyjal and Black Temple. For me this is a welcomed break.

I have to agree that the overall release model from vanilla had many more positives going for it than the current model. I think a big part is that leaders of middle tier guilds finishing SSC and looking forward, see almost an overwhelming amount of stuff ahead to clear through, and the near impossibility of progressing while still actually farming some of your older beaten content. In vanilla, you were never really THAT far behind the best of the best, to take my own example, we stalled out on Gothik in Naxx, a mere three bosses from the end of the zone. Right now, most groups look at 3 entire zones between themselves and the 'we beat the game' crowd.

The other aspect I briefly noted, but it bears repeating- Farming content. There is no content that is farmed like it was in Vanilla. Most groups, if they are progression minded, will kill Vashj 6-7? times, before dropping the instance entirely. Spacing the release of the next zone gives you a nice breather to stop needing to learn for a bit, a chance to actually see every drop in the zone, maybe even more than one of said drops (Bah Lightfathom Scepter.)

I realize it is possible to progress much faster in the expansion 25 man model, simply due to ease of scheduling, recruiting, etc. But, like the poster above me noted, I think it is far easier to have the shorter cycles of work a bit, relax and farm a bit/pvp, then back to working on progression. It avoids burnout, avoids prolonged periods of malaise, etc.


edit: damn fast moving thread here.

Seems so, for me atleast there's not much point to log in if we aren't doing a raid, and I know quite alot of people think the same way, I don't need to do more daily quests as I have enough gold to last quite a while, people really don't want to pvp much anymore either thanks to the long season, so you can't really log on for that either, and if people aren't logging on they are doing something else, which can easily drag them away from WoW. It's all abit "meh" to be honest. I would love for some more (read alot more) outdoor bosses to be added into the game, both in outlands and Azeroth, atleast then it would be worth it to log on every now and then to see if they are up, some of the best times in this game were when we were fighting alliance for Azurego, I would often waste a whole evening just fighting alliance at these bosses


I would prefer it if they released one instance at a time like pre-tbc, but these instances would need alot more bosses, currently instances with 4-6 bosses just aren't enough, im not sure why they went from the 12 or so bosses in Naxx to instances with half that, it's really quite boring. During the break between instances, add something simple like outdoor bosses to keep guilds busy, it really can't be that hard to make one or two bosses and put them somewhere outside, can it?

Admittedly, our guild is slightly behind other guilds in end-game progression at the moment (working on RoS tonight), however I can see this issue coming down the line. A few Illidan kills under the belt, maybe some Zul'Aman, then we'll be waiting for the Sunwell. Currently, however, and for the past few months, we've had plenty of content to tackle.

I do agree that the instances should be more evenly spaced. I don't think anyone would have had any problems farming KT and Vashj (and Hyjal) for a month before BT was released. That would have made for a much more steady progression. As it was, from what I read at least, most guilds downed KT and spent hardly any time "farming" T5.

I remember a thread from awhile back on these forums discussing how situation surrounding the gear that was required for Naxx (T2+ AQ) wasn't very comparable to BT/Hyjal. That is to say that a guild entering Naxx, when it was released, needed to have geared in BWL and AQ if they wanted to have a shot at downing Patch, etc. However, in TBC, when BT was released and cleared, Nihilum and the following guilds could have only possibly killed Kael and Vashj a few times and had to have been wearing mostly T4, crafted, or the equivalent gear. Yet, they were able to down Illidan being so far "undergeared".

I think the tuning of the difficulty of BT/Hyjal might have added to the relatively quicker clears. Also, as was mentioned in that same thread, sites like wowwiki and bosskillers didn't really exist at that time, and the strats weren't readily available, at least at the rate they are today (days or even hours after a kill, instructional videos included).

I think this one is easier initially, but has a big drawback down the road -- the saying that "an idle mind is the devil's playground" certainly applies here. People lose interest, find another game, decide they don't want to do the same thing for 3+ months while waiting for the next big thing to come out. Some people are just going to fall into that camp, and although I'm not one of them (I can always find something new to do, alts and whatnot) I can certainly see that viewpoint.

Most guilds have somewhat of a fluid dynamic to them -- unless you're an extremely rare guild, there's some turnover going on. A large gap like this just serves to accelerate it. If you think about it, is this really any different than the untuned raid content situation back in Feb/March? Back then, 95% of the raiding content was, in essence, not even in existance to 95% of the guilds out there. The game basically ended after Maulgar, and that was the driving force between more than just a few guilds breaking up, players quitting, and so forth.

I think it would have been much better if they had spaced the raid content out much like Gurgthock outlined pre-TBC content releases. There was always something new on the horizon, after a short farming session in the previous content. The problem was that you were able to do 2 zones concurrently (SSC/TK, Hyjal/BT) and that really narrowed down the time that content got devoured.

hmm you bring up a good point. All the old preTBC instances had "that item" that made people want to run it again. it was unique enough to want to get it even with higher end instances with better loot. TBC doesn't have a lot of that, you kill shit a couple of times then you move on. Not sure if it was a good or bad thing, but one thing I do know is that preTBC most people QQ'ed about how instances were implemented. They changed it and now we QQ again.

One additional thing - my recollection is that Blizzard got a lot of screaming about the lack of raid content early on in the original release, especially with the gap between the releases of Molten Core/Onyxia, and BWL. It seems likely to me that the decision to frontload a lot of raid content in the expansion was informed by that early criticism.

Maybe next time they will get it "just right"?

But it's not really slower, is it? It was faster, up until now. BT was released six weeks before your guild, which is top 100 in the US, killed Kael. If BT had been released in August, such that you downed Kael in July, spent 2-3 weeks getting everyone attuned and farming t5 stuff a bit, and then had the next thing become available, you'd still be in the same place as you are now, at the same time. Perhaps you'd even have Illidan down already.

Again, I'm not for a moment suggesting that Sunwell should be out right now to cater to the small handful of us, but rather that consistent pacing may be even more important than the exact pace chosen.

As a raid leader of a less progressed guild i find the break calming. The huge backlog of raiding that came with TBC was a morale breaker for a lot of people since there was no foresee-able end to full time raiding. Now that Illidan appears to be a cap and one that we are only a few months off (Vashj down working on KT) our raiders are much more motivated, we can begin to taste the cap and we are less overwhelmed by how far we have to go.

I think the previous model is better for semi-hardcore guilds as well, it gives attainable goals and reduces the backlog of content that makes players feel as if they are insurmountably behind.

1.) Yes. I pretty much only log on to raid now adays, and Hyjal and the first bosses of BT have become more of a chore than anything for me. I'm not sure how the rest of the guild feels, but we've had some members kicked without recent days because they just didn't log on. I still have fun, but we have far less raid time put into t6 than you guys and other faster guilds, so it's hard to say for sure now.

2.) I don't think that would have done anything for us, as we pretty much just entered SSC as 2.1 was released and went into and finished BT/Hyjal from late July -> early September. I imagine the path we took is what would have resulted for most guilds if the content was released as you described, and as a result we do have less time in t6 than other guilds, but the burnout factor is on the horizon.

Although our situation was just from being late to form as a guild than anything, I think. I agree that constant pacing is probably a better thing. Progressing through content and figuring out bosses is the most fun part of the game, in my opinion. With more spaced out content, you can get that in small chucks followed by small chucks of farming, which can be far less boring.

I agree that a constant pacing is better, but we all know how difficult that can be in the software world and especially the gaming industry.

I see this more as a complete failure on Blizzard's part in regards to content at all. Since the release of the expansion we have had one content patch (I don't consider voice chat content), we have seen one dungeon tier which was supposed to be released with the expansion itself. Zero 5Man updates, zero 10man updates. For a 10 man raiding guild the stagnation you talk about is short by comparison. I also don't feel the stagnation is all that unreasonable on the high end. 25 Man raiders have been the only ones to get new content (unless you count the daily grind quests).

I think the overall model is broken. Moving back to a classic release model would help, but spanning it across all tiers would be ideal. Imagine if Coilfang reservoir had two 5 mans (with normal an heroic versions and rewards), Steamvaults as a 10man, and SSC as a 25man at release. Then TK is released with Mechanar, and Bot as 5mans, Arcatraz as a 10man, and The Eye as a 25man. Of course these are just examples, but it keeps players doing new content and having something to look forward to.