The raiding game has not been casualised, it has been streamlined. That's very nearly the opposite. On the other hand, your comment about farming is spot on. It's not just that there is less of a jump between Tiers these days, but each boss kill yields almost double the amount of loot in real terms. Two tier tokens between 25 people is very different from two non-tokenised Tier pieces between 40.

With all due respect, you are yet another person who's missing the point here. It's not about whether they should bring out Sunwell sooner, it's about whether they should have released BT later. Since you haven't set foot in BT yet, this has no direct effect on your group.

The indirect effects are however huge. Just suppose that Hyjal and BT had been opened in August rather than in 2.1. The top guilds would only now be taking down the first couple of bosses in Hyjal and attuning to BT. That means that someone jumping ship from your guild would only "gain" two or three bosses rather than a whole tier of progression. Your own progress in SSC and TK wouldn't be affected. Yes, the front runners would have had to wait and farm content from ~May through August, but they'd now be pushing on into new frontiers. They could clear that, wait another couple of months and then see Sunwell. As it stands, they've been farming content since June, with no real prospect of more before Christmas.

That said, I don't think it's a large issue. The numbers of people "completing" the raid game before Sunwell comes out are still quite likely to be tiny. Even if we assume everyone now working on Vashj will kill Illidan before Sunwell (which is a pretty huge assumption!), that still looks to be considerably less than killed C'Thun. Even the guild cannibalism talked about above largely only affects the top 3-4% of the raid game. The attunement issue creates the problem in one way, but (selfishly from my point of view) at least limits it to the upper echelons. The top groups really aren't interested in poaching from mine, which suits me fine.

Why exactly should a player who comes back to the game not be able to play the new expansion? It makes way more sense to me for a company to release expansions that can draw former players back in and to design the game such that a new player can actually play a massively multiplayer game with the long-time players. If TBC required people to complete Naxx to be able to hit outlands, it would have had a fraction of its actual sales, and Blizzard would lack monthly fees from a large host of people who resubbed when the expansion came out.

The major selling point of WOW is that an ordinary person can actually play it and not just the people on this board who think that playing a video game 30 hours a week is lightweight. Rendering it inaccessible would ruin a large chunk of what gives it popularity.

EQ is a game that at its peak had less than a tenth of the players of WOW. Even you ditched it but still play WOW;f it's so much better, why aren't you playing it? And on the business side, why should the wildly successful game emulate a game that never even had that many players?

I think this is the key point you've missed here, you're assuming that people are logging on.

If my guild raids Wednesday & Thursday, that means I'll be on those nights, I'll come on for some Arena at some point, and come on for some social time / farming / misc. activities. The rest of the time I'll be playing a different game / outside / uni work.

I'd much rather have my free time 'free' to do as I choose, rather than be forced to log on to WoW to raid, because in order to enjoy WoW, I need to raid, even though sometimes you 'really' don't want to. It's the same argument that came up with the initial TBC implementation of consumables, where in order to raid properly, you were forced to farm for hours just to have the consumables.

I'm all for content, but 6 days a week or hardcore content is not where it's at, because it forces the more average guilds to run what is essentially a full-time raid schedule, with free time being spent farming consumables / gold to cover raiding expenses.

Maybe you honestly would prefer an EQ style model, but I don't see how anyone could possibly enjoy a continual 20hr+ a week commitment to one activity within one game, to the detriment of almost every other aspect of one's life. I have guild members that are hardcore as such, and they never really seem to gain enjoyment from the game, it's just an addiction.

I'm saying, you shouldnt be able to quit for 6 months, come back, play 3 weeks and be within 85% quality gear of someone who was raiding top-end content for that same 6 months. Expansions should be expansions to previous content, not completely new game experiences.


EQ in its peak didn't have access to the same resource pool as WoW does, its pretty much the only thing agreed on by both sides of the fence. I'd also advise against taking any company touting its "active* account numbers" without seeing what that asterisk stands for (you know, non-active accounts canceled through any means besides the end-user. Oh, and lets not forget the number of bots currently active, which could NEVER grossly inflate totals, especially when their accounts are banned, yet still count as 'active')

As to why I dont play, I dont play because of the pool of people I spent the last many years of my life playing with... about 30% are on the same WoW server as I am, 65% no longer play MMO's of any kind (including quitting Wow), and 5% still play EQ (on 7 different servers now), meaning to stay in contact with people... I play WoW.

WoW is as popular as it is because it has no competition, and a target audience that is currently growing at a tremendous rate (Richard Garriot explains it better than I could, and while I lack links, I'd suggest you read some of his articles on the growth of the MMO market both stateside, in europe, and in Asia, especially China and Korea as it relates to business in the last few years for foreign companies). Thats another big chunk of the current MMO market that for all intents and purposes, is only recently starting to exist in the quantity it does.


Widely successful games, that have already copied a large number of key features (yes, virginia, there IS a lot of content reuse in gaming, and, horror of horrors, its in the MMO market as well) should copy the, you know, successful and oft-clamored for aspects of her gamers because... it makes sense to. Actually, Blizzard should be doing it BETTER than it was previously.

EQ will be maligned for many reasons, but the majority of players leaving in its major decline period left because of SoE customer service (or rather, the complete and utter lack of it) and not because of content. Truthfully. There was a huge project put together to figure out the reasons why. Its a reason anything tied to SoE will never, and its pretty certain that never actually means more than a couple weeks in this case, be as popular as the game itself deserves to be. (See Vanguard, which actually cleaned itself up from its beta catastrophe... and proceeded to lose more people from being bought out from sony than they kept by overhauling a large part of the game).

I'm not arguing EQ was better than WoW. For my tastes, I would probably say it was. I'm not the kind of person you market current games to (especially ones touted as being easier than the others on the market. cough.wow.cough), I'm the kind that makes you re-examine skillpoint systems in Beta (I remember the day we became limited to 2 tradeskills... I had over 8k SP's to spend on mount skills) and question just how sane your player base really is.

Designing around my thoughts is only going to appeal to a small number of people, I'll be the first to admit to it ("Don't "just play". Win." isnt something many people feel at home taking as a personal motto), but that number of people is well represented in those who are, right now, trying to stay awake long enough for 2.3 to come out.


I'd be lying if I said fear of that addiction flaring back up was not one of the reasons I am not playing actively right now. But in the peak of my raiding days, I was taking 19 hours of classes, had a girlfriend and worked 20 hours a week. I was getting a whole 7 hours of sleep every other day, but I did it :| (I then had a rather horrid breakdown that about killed me, but hey, it lasted for a couple years)

edit - as far as working, I made more $ selling plat than I ever did "working". Sadly, I was outsourced to China.

Regardless of player base though, if you are going to compare content, you are talking about two different worlds. Having one game where all content is instanced and another where all content is completely contested is so radically different that I think comparing content release models between WoW and EQ is perilous.

Imagine if only one guild tops per server could be farming any instance at a given time (horde or alliance), which would be the case in a non-instanced game. Your audience would be so stratified it would be a totally different game.

Hmm maybe I didn't get my point across quite as clearly as I would have liked. I think that when Blizzard releases content in stages, it sets an artificial progression level that is great if you're keeping up, and disheartening if you're falling behind. In TBC, even though BT came out a bit later, it still felt like all the raid content was there at once. There was no Blizzard defined rate at which we should be doing stuff. Some guilds raced through, and are sitting twiddling their thumbs now, and others are taking their sweet time. Before, if I couldn't commit to the time/energy to raid at a pretty serious level, I was going to (well, I did) miss out on content. In TBC, I don't have that feeling.

We're not talking about direct effects here, it's pretty much a psychological discussion on the effects of raiding, downtimes and a sense of feasibility. And while, yes, this release schedule is pretty demoralizing to the top-end guilds, I'd argue that to guilds of my level, it's far less disheartening than the Vanilla WoW style.

I believe it is the opposite. When the release of content is better spread out the casual guilds will have more time to catch up to the top guilds before the next raid instance is released. If both can start at the same instance around the same time it gives the casual players a sense of accomplishment that they are keeping up with the top guilds of their server, even if its only for a week or two. Without decent farming time in between the release of instances the casual guilds will not be capable of going into the next one because unlike the top guilds they do need a certain amount of farmed gear to beat content. When all the content is available at once casual guilds will quickly fall behind because they tend to have less raid hours available but more gear needed.

I know there are two answers above me along the same lines but i would like to add more of the same. The experience from my server is the total opposite of what you state. In vanilla WoW there were plenty of guilds who when TBC hit had downed Rag and Nef, killed bosses up to Sartura/Huhuran in AQ40 and done Anub, Raz, Noth, Heigan and GWF (after the nerf). They felt much more part of the pace even though they did not kill the defining bosses in AQ40, nor in Naxx. And Blizzard did not need to create attunements to BWL, AQ40 or Naxx that linearized progression since the pacing did that for them.

That nurtured the casual raiding guild. In TBC these guilds have struggled enormously due to the psychology of being so far behind AND the linearization of content (and going 40->10->25 with the smaller margin of error in smaller raids). A different pacing would help these guilds alot.

This might be a bit different from the original topic but I do not think this deserves a new thread. What you said there is part of the reason why casual guilds ar struggling so much. The end bosses of instances are always those that take most time to learn, that is fine but in old days when a new instance was released you could skip that endboss and just go on to the new instance. In TBC to progress to the next level of instance you have to clear the endboss of 2 different instances. This was Blizzards way of preventing casual guilds from jumping into BT right away. But if the content was paced better like I stated in my earlier post would these attunements be needed? Casual guilds would be able to enter the BT/Hyjal together with the top guilds but still spend untill the next instance release to even clear it fully (if they manage to clear it at all). As I see it the encounters themselves need to form a block for the casual guilds. Take Mother Shaz for example, the shadow resistance required for that fight will take a casual guild a long time to collect. This is a better artifical block then attunements as it still allows these guilds to raid this content but the design and difficulty will be enough to slow the casual guilds down long enough untill the next instance is released.

Some pacing mechanism like new instance every 4 months would probably be better option, but even that doesn't remove serious problems that less talented guilds have to deal with. If Blizzard would release new instance every 4 months, they could also nerf each previous instance a little bit more to help less talented guild or the guilds who just started raiding. Most talented guilds would still keep their advantage but even guilds with very untalented players could experience the content. Less talented guilds might be 2 instances behind the best of the best but they wouldn't be 4 or 5 like they are now.

Current model that WoW use would suggest that Sunwell will be designed to be difficult even for those guilds who have farmed BT and Hyjal for months. While some suggest that just gear advantage is not that bad, I belive gear advantage combined with very talented players is going to be total hell for less talented guilds. They can't even gear up more in order to gain some advantage. This can be seen even early TBC raid encounters like Gruul, Magtheridon or Hydross. Full or nearly full epics geared dps classes just can't do their job good enough while really talented and informed players can do it in mostly blue gear.

I'm not against creating content that would challenge even the best players but it should be more optional then it's now. I know very little about how ZA time trial work but in theory that sounds like step in right direction. As someone who likes to do singleplayer speedruns, I know it's totally separate thing to complite a game or complite game as fast as possible or under certain rules. I'd like to see Blizzard do more something like this and reward the best players with selectable unique items, a bit similar like they do with arena point system. It would be great to see month's top 10 fastest instance clears on main WoW web page. It would also create healthy PvE guild competition outside world first kills.

Agreed. The ZulAman speedrun concept got so much potential for future raid instances if Blizzard just use it properly.

Maybe Blizz should go the same way with raid instances ass they did with Arena seasons. When season 3 gear comes out (in a staggered release even), it will be made substantially easier to get S1 items (Honor points).

Same way, whenever a new instance was released they could go back and make some real nerfs to raid instances 2 tiers over (throw in a minute or 2 on enrage timers, little less health on bosses and whatever).
They are already doing this somewhat, but its not obvious when and how those nerfs are coming now. With a more exact system, people would know what to expect and when they would be able to see the the raid content.

In the end it would be sad if the difficulty bar was lowered for the top raiders, because Blizz wanted to have more of their customers see all the content (which makes sense from a business point of view). Gving easier access to old raid instances AFTER the high end has been through them, is a far better way to go for that imo.

Time trials and stuff like that can of course fulfill the same purpose to some degree, but its hardly universal enough to be used for all raid content.

Would really be great to see what Blizz devs think of the release pace themselves, but given the usual amount of information it might be too much to wish for. Telling people they want to spread out the release of content might not be a good selling point, even if it benefits those people.

I can only really see mutual benefits from a staggered release schedule.

I don't think that how content is paced is the question itself, the question is how to keep the top end guilds reasonably occupied and interested, while at least trying to avoid negative effects such as guild hopping killing lower end guilds. Pacing is part of that, but just to say one way is better than the other isn't quite that simple if that is the only thing changed.

I don't think that pre-TBC really serves as a completely fair comparison. Every single raid instance apart from Naxx would've been cleared in 1-2 weeks had they not been bugged to shit, and especially if guilds had the knowledge of the game we do now. Had BT been just released, a whole lot of guilds would be fully kitted in T5 and prepared mentally for an intense learning period, and I'd argue there'd be a whole lot more guilds which would've cleared BT in a couple weeks' time than just Nihilum.

The question is, how do you challenge people anymore? Can you create something as novel as 4H anymore that'll take almost a month to figure out, with people having practically full knowledge of the game and who expect to need to raid stack? How do you create gear checks when people will make them raid stacking checks instead?

I'd argue that it isn't even possible anymore to create content that by its difficulty alone keeps the top end guilds occupied for long periods of time. What becomes the deciding factor is the amount of content, especially the amount of content required to beat in order to reach the last bosses you need to learn.

This is, imho, why Naxx succeeded in keeping high end guilds busy. Having to spend as much as 3-4 days(back when oneshotting stuff was not at all guaranteed) clearing to the content you're learning lenghtens the learning periods alot for most guilds. Obviously, not even that is enough to hold back the very top - for that something like 4H is necessary, but I'm doubtful it's possible to do something no one can expect anymore.

Releasing multiple tiers of content at the same time accomplishes this in a sense; there is enough content that it takes an average high end guild months to clear, even if no single instance is that long, because they have no time for breaks and attrition / weariness becomes a problem, especially so now due to having to had endure the crap that was raiding pre-2.1 and attunement issues.

Release content with intervals though, and if instances are the length of BT/Hyjal, I'd say you're guaranteed to have not only Nihilum et al, but also the guilds that now killed Illidan in Aug/Sept blowing through them in just 2-3 weeks, as guilds have plenty of time to gear up and prepare mentally and structurally for a new learning period.

If switching to periodic raid content additions, it would then imho be crucial to make instances not the length of Hyjal or BT, but at least the length of both combined. This will most likely not stop the top end unless done artificially in the style of Frozen Runes, but it should keep your average high end guild busy for a while. It would then most likely make the end of the tier too hard for most less than high end guilds, but nerfing the previous tier as a new one is released would remedy that.

In other words, if the aim is to keep high end guilds occupied, do not only learn from what worked with old instances - learn what didn't. Every raid instance in the game, if released in their current state, bugfree and with guilds having a couple months of farming behind them, has been too short apart from Naxxramas. That's why it worked, and that's what should be copied for future instances.

Why not? What would be an acceptable percentage to you? 70%? 30%?

So, in one breath you are mentioning how MMO's including WoW lift content from other sources, and in the next you are saying how BC is a "completely new game experience" and this is a bad thing.

I can't believe you seriously dove head first into the tired old "EQ vs. WoW" crap. Let's get back on topic.



I've been watching this thread since it started and thinking about it quite a bit, and I think in the end it would have served the players better to pace out the releasing of content. I agree with the idea that the "I Win the Game" feeling which was never there for Magtheridon, Vashj and Kael is more important to the raiding experience than was previously realized. In hindsight this is self evident.

Likewise it seems a universal story that the T5 instances are being abandoned as quickly as possible. Gripes with design and atmosphere not withstanding, SSC & TK could have had more life in them simply by holding off BT.


Here's a question I haven't seen though; would the boredom attrition be as bad if those players who are farming T6 didn't know Sunwell was down the road? I.e., knowing that it is not "The End" of BC, is it less fun to farm it and trot around in the gear? Did the announcement of Sunwell kind of take the wind out of your sails?

Ergo, should the announcement of Sunwell waited until it was closer to being ready?

If you don't raid then it doesn't matter at what pace content is released, and if you haven't beaten Kz you obviously aren't raiding.

They already do this. Every raid instance ever has been nerfed from it's original incarnation when the bleeding edge guilds were progressing through it. Look at Gruul and Magtheridon for perfect examples. And in addition to direct nerfs there's also the nerfing influence of better itemization/talents, and new forms of gear progression (S2 arena weapons for example).

I agree with this. My first guild fell apart partly because of the stresses induced by still being in Karazhan when we were aware of this vast swathe of raiding still to come.

I rerolled and joined a new guild, which is now learning Vashj. The fact that we're progressing is helpful, but knowing that the instant we kill Vashj we're going to have to start working on Al'ar, Solarian and Kael'Thas, and the instant they're done we have to start thinking about Hyjal - it is pretty frantic.

Don't forget that Blizzard originally had a system in place to ensure that people spent at least a little time on Vashj - she only used to drop a few pieces of Vial Water. Now she drops enough for everyone in the raid, meaning you could (in theory) kill her once and never go back.

I think the pacing problems come from many things, but the main points would be:

* Releasing two instances at once. This splits your design and testing effort to the detriment of both instances. And, for players, it's viscerally hard to treat SSC and TK as one instance even if, intellectually, they're supposed to be. That contributes to the sense that you're behind.

* Poor gear tuning. It's ludicrious that my Frozen Shadowweave Boots are unlikely ever to be replaced, considering I crafted them the second I dinged 350 tailoring. As item budgets get bigger, it becomes harder to tune gear correctly. Crafted stuff is simply too good, and tier progression is weird. I shouldn't be hit-capped in Kara/Gruul/SSC gear, but I am, easily.

* The instances were poorly tuned, as well. At first they were too hard for the majority, now it seems like they're too easy. You shouldn't be able to jump straight into Hyjal having killed Vashj and KT once or twice and expect to get very far.

My opinion is that Blizzard spent too long front-loading goodies into TBC, meaning there wasn't enough time to balance them. Gear was overpowered, instances were shoddy and untuned, and this huge splodge of basically unfinished content arrived very quickly. I'd have preferred to see them stagger it - ship with Kara, Gruul and Mag, release SSC four months later, TK two months after that, Hyjal two months after that, BT two months after Hyjal and Sunwell two months after BT.

That would give them fourteen months of relatively evenly-spaced content, and help them to ensure that the content arrived neither too hard nor too easy to give consistent, regular progression.

There is some talk going on about good ways of keeping people out of content besides pacing and I think the common problem of most suggested alternatives (like attunements, hard bosses, resistance or otherwise very gear/consumeable dependant fights) is how it not only stops the hardcore but just as much or even more the less professional casuals. And this is horrible. Ultimately you want to make things a little harder for hardcore players and a little easier for casuals to allow them to catch up.

The perfect type of cockblock will stop only(!) the hardcore crowd while generously letting the casuals pass to prevent a huge progression gap with all the negative results from it as we saw in TBC. These are the type of roadbloacks that make the left graph in the OP more look like the right graph to lessen phenomens like "brain drain" and burnout.

The only roadblocks I have found working this way are the ones that get nerved over time or simply pacing the content, as the casuals who are not there yet won't be slowed down unlike the hardcores who are "done", go into farm mode and wait for the next instance allowing the more casual guilds to catch up (maybe not quite gear wise but at least progression wise). In most cases I find pacing a lot smarter than nerving as the latter will always be unfair and bad for some people's morale (hey I did all the attunement for nothing?).

Some overtuned bosses late in instances for the hardcore crowd can be fun in times, though. Just make sure they are nerved once the casuals catch up and the gap will become closer. Buffs can also get the job done but obviously can't be the solution every time.

Well of course that brings us back to the fact that t4 raid content wasn't properly distributed with Gruul and Mag being the only tier 4 25-man content. The ideal pacing, in my view, would've been:

January 2007, t4 content: Gruul's Lair, SSC + Karazhan (as a parallel 10-man with equivalent loot but not parts of the t4 set -- give Maulgar/Gruul the gloves/helm or whatever and put the other three t4 pieces in SSC)

~April-May 2007, t5 content: Magtheridon's Lair (tuned for t5), TK

~Aug-Sept 2007, t6/t5 content: Black Temple, Mount Hyjal + Zul'Aman (tier 5 10-man)

~Jan-Feb 2008: Sunwell

I think the problem in the end though doesn't lie with the pacing of the content, but with the lack of content moreso. If you come to think about it, guilds that were around through the start of tbc raiding in a hardcore manner (5+ days) should be finished or almost finished with all raid content by mid summer if it was well polished and and well tuned. The only thing that kept early tbc raiding slow was untuned fights like gruul, mag, vashj, al'ar, kael etc. Of course one would argue that there's always going to be bugs and further tuning required in most instances, but I firmly believe the lack of testing and tuning in tbc encounters was more obvious and dominating than ever before. They were rushed out and some of it didn't make any sense (45 minute trash, TONS of trash, bosses like vashj/mag v1.0).

TBC came out late january and the rapid boss killing only started after 2.1, which was late may. Until then more guilds (again, guilds spending time on raiding) were cockblocked either at gruul first, mag after that and vashj later on or hydross/leo depending on how skilled/hardcore they were. When those cockblocks were lifted, guilds of that caliber passed through 1 and a half tier of a raiding in 2 months or so. So I am suspecting that really tbc content wouldn't have lasted more than 4-5 months if it was actually well polished. So in reality there was content that should last a somewhat hardcore guild 4-5 months for an (at least) 12-14 month expansion. This is just not enough content and doesn't have to do much with how they paced it. Either way unless they kept cockblocking the content it would have ended much sooner than the next one was available. Even if we add sunwell, I doubt any guild that started at late may when encouters were fixed and raids more or even to 4 days a week for about 4-5 hours wouldn't be able to get all content down in 8-9 months before WOTLK released. I think that kind of guild is also the benchmark to design content around. More than 4 days like a lot of guilds do (including mine) shouldn't be needed in my opinion to tackle all bosses if your players do reasonably well. The problem is that even that guild will propably find itself lacking anything to do soon and until sunwell is released.

I am amazed that people ignore the lack of content or seek to deal with it in ways totally contrary to a player's interest, such as cockblocking mechanisms that were unfun, like behemoth instances that you need 2 days to clear them before you reach the relevant end bosses, attunements that take forever, reclears of farmed instances for ages or staggering release of readily available instances.

Would it keep me more busy if I had to clear all ssc/tk bosses before I could reach kael? Sure, it would mean clearing to kael would take the double time. Was clearing 13 bosses to reach KT or clearing all those trash and bosses before C'thun keeping you more busy? Sure it did, it was also terribly annoying and unfun since you didn't care shit for them. I still remember guilds inventing all kind of ways to skip them as fast as possible. That is obviously not an acceptable solution though, it's an artificial cockblock dragging down the quality of your gameplay experience. Small instances are an improvement over huge instances. It was never fun to clear a huge instance to reach the one endboss you needed after spending ages on stupid mediocre fights you had on farm for ages.

Attunements aren't fun either. First of all they are a huge problem for recruitment. So instead of spending your time bashing your head against the boss, you were spending your time bashing your head doing SH for the 20th time for the 20th trialist. That was crap honestly, because you no longer needed badges or heroic drops, you just had to suffer through it. Just another example of artificial cockblock. It would take more time for people to clear content yes until they had a capable attuned roster, but at the cost of doing something totally unfun again.

Farming instances was never fun either. A lot of people advocate that in the old days the gear checks were steep enough that you needed to farm the previous instance for a while. So, why was that good? Right, it wasn't, it was a major pain in the arse. I didn't like the 20th repetition of molten core or the 20th clear to c'thun. It was unfun as well and it had to go. And I am glad I don't have to farm instances until forever now. Doing something 4-5 times after you kill it may have been better, but the old model where most guilds cleared molten core from its release until naxxramas' release (for over a year I believe) was flawed.

In short, it amazes me that when players are faced with a problem which mostly is created from solving all the above issues/problems with the raiding game that made it unfun, they seek to solve the new problem by reinstating the old mechanisms that they were annoyed by so much!

Staggering release of instances doesn't achieve much either in my opinion (in an informal manner is what I mean ofcourse). I understand that there's a demographic of guilds to who the old model of staggered releases was preferable, it's the guilds who could catch up with the top ones before the new content was released. The top end guilds always faced the problem of sitting on their arses for months, the low end faced huge amounts of content they would never finish in time propably while there was an upper middle tier of guilds which managed to just catch up in time. But is that a sizeable demographic to work around? It sure created a colourful discussion at ej because this is exactly where this population can be found en masse, but as wowjutsu and other sites suggest it's really a small amount of people in general. For the rest, the problem they have remains as it always has been, lack of content for some, too much content for others.

The only real problem with frontloading in my opinion isn't the break period, but the reverse, the 'burn through the content' period and that's even more worrying in my eyes and some people have mentioned it. Back when we started tbc it looked like we had a mountain of content to climb and the result was that our raiding schedule sometime around vashj/kael became a lot more intense gradually, because we were afraid we wouldn't get to see everything. I think that if blizzard keeps the same design and pacing next expansion, we will just reduce raiding days in the future again to make for a more relaxed, smooth and 'human' experience. Other people may want to be competitive, but I believe most of the wow raiding playerbase not in the top100 or so doesn't really care if they are guild #140 or guild #320 and are fine with just completing content irrelevant of the time they do it. Most of the guild hopping I have noticed happens mostly between guilds of the same servers. As I am a recruitment officer for my guild, I have noticed that the vast majority of the apps we get are from guilds in our server which are below us in progress and want to be with the top guys in the community they are in, instead of x-realm transfers who just want to be with someone doing the content. Most of our x-realm apps apart from those whose guild imploded are mostly from people stuck in very early raiding bosses like the typical lurker/vr guilds.

Anyway, all in all, I believe the problem doesn't lie so much with the pacing. Perhaps bt could have been released a month later, but that is not the problem. Unlike the op, I do think the problem is the quantity of the content released instead of the pacing. I think there should be 2 more 25 man's above BT and not only 1 and everything should have been done faster. We should not in any way accept blizzard to revive alot of the flawed and unfun mechanisms they used to artificially slow progress, but instead our pressure should be more towards simply expanding their team so more content can come out and when it comes out it's as much bugfree as possible. I don't understand why we should consider the quantity of the content a stable parameter that cannot be altered. Guilds who are raiding for 5-7 days a week out of choice (and not a bit out of will to finish the content by pushing themselves like us with quite some grumbling from members) should not be left without anything to do from august-sunwell whenever that is. These people don't want a break anyway.

Well, it's a mmorpg, a large part of "fun" is actually there because you "suffered" to get it. Nothing new here, this paradigm can be found in all other mmorpg since 15 years.
If you only want fresh content, fun content, no farm, then so be it, but you won't play this game more than 2 months per year because content always takes much more time to be created than to be consumed.

This isn't a realistic position. Yeah, we'd all like "more content" but it also has to be polished and I'm going to assume that Blizzard isn't intentionally slowing down their design just to torture the players. You can't just add another 25% to your team and get 25% more polished end product -- it doesn't work that way, and scaling up brings costs in quality and efficiency. It's not realistic to say "Blizzard needs to give us more content" because we have to assume they're giving us what they can. But it is, I think, realistic to suggest that the content they do create be spaced out differently.

I definitely disagree with this. A Naxxramas-style instance is perfect - the majority of bosses accessible pretty much for anyone, but if you want to kill the end boss, you'll have to be efficient with clearing there. It provides an incentive to improve on clearing speeds and refine tactics even on bosses already cleared, making farming raids smoother also. It makes the end prize all the sweeter in my opinion at least. Obviously, it would suck if the end boss dropped the attunement piece for the next instance though, that should not be the case.

Sure, if it was realistic to have double the amount of content in smaller instances I wouldn't mind that either, but that doesn't seem possible and as long as the aim is to basically slow down high end guilds, larger instances accomplish just that without any need for more content.

I know it's not linear in the sense that x% more employess is x% more content, but I do believe that assuming their distribution of resources and personnel as well as their potential for expansion has reached its peak or is done in the best way possible is only a hypothesis for us outsiders which may or may not be correct. I am pretty sure that they have mentioned a lot of times that producing 25/40 man instances is very counterproductive for them vs designing arenas or dailies for example in the sense of content provided/content used so I am quite unsure if their stalling of further 25 man content release isn't somewhat deliberate or at least if it hasn't been given the proper attention. And it's not about hiring more designers which is more tricky, but a bigger q&a department never really hurts. Honestly, that's just speculation at this point but I am pretty sure that when most companies are faced with demand of their product they most usually find ways to increase their productivity and meet that demand.

If you want a more realistic approach though, I would say that the one thing they could have done to a much bigger extent is allowing more access to their tbc raids for testing. A big part of this problem is propably a byproduct of the initial instances being mistuned/outright bugged, since noone had propably actually done them apart from gruul who ended up quite different from live as I understand. The pace would have been entirely different if vashj/kael were finished by early/late april by the top end guilds before BT was released and I am sure that retuning so many of those encounters to cater for the consumable changes etc wasn't the best use of their time. Allowing raid guilds instant 70's so they could test the encounters for the tbc beta which was taking a huge time anyway wouldn't have been such a bad idea yet they chose not to. SSC and Mag were there iirc, but noone ever got to see them because they couldn't gather a raid with the known results when guilds finally reached them on live.

As for larger instances, they don't really slow down guilds that much. They just bore them more. Don't take naxxramas as an example, as naxxramas was both fun and challenging and the trash:bosses ratio was a lot more balanced. Also trash were fun, gargoyles being the prime example. And noone really got to really 'farm it' for too long, nihilum finished it at september and by november most guilds were packing for expansion. Remember though that when gear checks and farming are required they are required for the middle tier instances as well, and do you really want to farm the morogrims of this game for a long time? You can only refine morogrim and al'ar and solarian so much before they are just a snoozefest and they can't be made any more challenging as their simplistic nature is there exactly so they can be defeated by catch up guilds. And even if I actually never completed it, I am quite sure I remember a lot of bitching from guilds that clearing to sapphiron each week was uninteresting and took too long.