So here's a thought in a different direction: I started up my account again and started playing, and it's pretty obvious that Northrend is a fair bit larger than Outland in terms of single-player non-instanced content. If you look at the number of quests required to get the Loremaster achievements, it's 50% higher for Northrend than Outland. It makes me wonder to what extent some content was left incomplete or cut (Azjol-Nerub, Crystalsong) not because of time constraints, but simply because the leveling experience started to just take too long. I think TBC had about the right amount of non-instanced content.... 60 hours, let's say. If Northrend is up to 90, though, people will start complaining. If they had a couple more zones, than it simply would've been higher. Look at the reaction when Blizzard implemented a leveling pace in beta meant to pace the content - ie. people shouldn't be hitting 77 in Grizzly Hills and 80 in Zul'Drak, they should be hitting 77 in Sholazar / Zul'Drak and then 80 in Storm Peaks / Icecrown. But people found this to be too slow, and thus a more moderate approach was taken.

So in a way WotLK might have suffered from overabundance - the leveling experience already had a ton of content and adding more might have generated complaints unless it were max-level content, which can easily be put off into the content cycle. Azjol-Nerub was originally going to be a 74-76 zone, I believe, but if it were added then we'd just have even more people hitting 80 in Zul'Drak. So why not cut it?

imo there's probably a fair amount of "fat" that could have been cut in WotLK to accommodate these zones at release. Less so than the other content - WotLK did a great job with tying most of the stuff into a developing story - but I don't think we needed stuff like:

- We could've just had a million rather than a billion Vykrul villages in Howling Fjord.
- Most of the Geyser Springs area in Borean Tundra was superfluous, except for the mechagnome stuff.
- The northern Dragonblight quests (kill harpies, kill worms, etc.) quests could've been cut.
- ZD and GH could've been merged together and a bunch of their content could've been shed. Neither the worgen not the drakkari plots really go anywhere, and the latter definitely didn't need 100 quests to do well.
- A couple of the bases in Icecrown weren't really necessary.

Combine these things and you'd easily have 100 quests cut, and room for another zone. Alternatively, more areas could be designated for only one faction, thus driving the quest total for any player down without lowering the total amount of content across factions.

My main suggestion, though, would be for Blizzard to just create more TBC-sized expansions on a faster time schedule. Because there is a point of "too much" that Northrend pushes, I think.

(Note: I do consider this a "lore and storyline issue", I think, because what content makes it in or is selected out is very much tied to how it affects the story.)

So... You don't like lore and want to cut out content?
And to be honest, the leveling-curve for me was kind of perfect as I was leveling with a friend - starting in HF, shipping to dragonblight, grizzly hills, zul'drak, sholazar, stormpike - after completing all that zones (including quest-achievement), a few instances, several dailies AND a few quests in Icecrown I got 80.
Remember: Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord were meant to be choices to start, there was no cross-quest from one zone to the other.

So I think there is not really too much of content - it's a great portion of content. If you hit 80, either continue questing or just skip the rest, though the choice for all lore-whores should be clear

I don't think achievements would have made it worse. They could have actually fixed them. Look how often people are raiding faction leaders now to get a mount. Make the rewards based on achievements instead of normal loot. That way you don't have to be grouped to get credit for killing the world boss, just have participated. Don't even give them normal loot. A good way to do this I think is to give some sort of achievement award for killing a bunch of them (ie, there is a world boss in each northrend zone) to drive interest in raiding them. On top reward anybody participating in the fight something like a single heroic token. Hell, even both sides could fight the same boss and get credit for it, although unlikely.

The respawn rate should be a LOT faster than once per week then, which is my big problem with the world bosses. But actually you and I seem to want the same thing, we just name it differently.

Well, undoubtedly more content is good. Having three zones left to do is better than two or one or none. But it's about looking at the opportunity cost:

a) At least one of the zones you had left - Sholazar - was clearly not meant to be a max-level zone. It was obviously Blizzard's original intent that players would hit 80 in Storm Peaks or Icecrown. Whether or not this intent being subverted is a good thing is debatable, but I take it as a sign that something's gone wrong that could be improved upon.

b) The extra max-level zones exist at the expense of effort on other content, present and future. Maybe Ulduar would've been available at release if you gave up Sholazar as your extra "I'm bored" zone to visit. Or maybe Blizzard would've been one zone ahead on the timetable for a future expansion.

It is, like you said, fat instead of meat. I would like to see Blizzard stick to a 60-hour leveling estimate, maybe tack on an extra 10 hours of max-level content, and hit all the lore and plot landmarks they have in mind. It should've been pretty clear that this limit would be exceeded, though, when they ended up planning 50% more quests than what Outland had. Which leads me to believe that they just dreamed up the zones with a ton of content (with Azjol-Nerub and Crystalsong, you'd probably be getting close to 100% more than TBC), implemented what they could, and cut the rest when time constraints became more binding and they realized they probably had too much stuff anyways. It was probably a mistake to develop without a hard limit on content in mind.

I can't say I agree with your sentiments about the leveling content.

WotLK has a lot more quests then TBC, that is certainly true. However most of the quests in TBC involve killing loads and loads of mobs. A good example are the nesingwary quests. In Nagrand you had to kill 30 clefthoofs/talbuks/birds, in sholazar you only have to kill 15. Also there are loads of quick quests where you have to grab a few items/kill a single named mob. For me this balanced out the increased amount of quests, so in the end 70-80 didnt seem to take longer then 60-70 did.

Also, in TBC I dinged 70 in BEM (as did most of my guild) so I had two full zones left then as well. Only difference is that I like storm peaks and icecrown, where netherstorm questing was just meh.

I enjoyed the levelling a lot. We decided not to start raiding before January just to have time for everyone to relax and do all the quests without having in mind that "I should be 80 asap". It's kind of sad thing tha levelling content was rushed by most players and the ones that care about the lore were forced into this as well. I actually enjoy levelling (but only once, I don't have any alts) and I would love more content for quests.

I have no idea how long it took me to get to 80 in playing time, but I was 80 upon doing 5-10 ZD quests on one char, and with some quests left in GH on another char (although both have done the Arena in ZD previously and both were fully rested as I was away at the start of LK).

If I only had 10 hours of solo play left after hitting 80, I'd have already quit WOW. Because else there's only dailies (Hodir is sooooo boring), raiding (pretty fast done), hanging around somewhere, heroics, pvp or leveling an alt. Don't forget, the majority of people isn't raiding. Many don't like pvp at all. Etc.

What do *you* do after hitting 80?

Like this, I have many hours before me, where I can see new areas, explore stuff, get to see new lore/completion of old lore and do some quests when I'm not raiding. I'll admit that having ZD, SB, SP, IC still open is a bit much, but I do like having something to do when I come too late for a raid or just on a weekend.

Since hitting 80, I've grinded Argent Crusade, Kirin Tor, Argent Dawn, Wyrmrest Accord, farmed heroics(basically all of them) until I had enough badges for acceptable gear. I ran heroics until I was quite exhausted with them, and now I'm running heroic raids. But, that's what most if not everyone is doing. In my spare time, since I have a bunch of quests to finish still, I've decided to do all the quests in the zones I hadn't already finished.

Oh, and I'm trying to figure out what to make with my last three points to 450 engineering as well.

This discussion is starting to drift away from the plot and more into design, but I think one important point people are fogetting is that by having a wealth of extra non-leveling content it allows you to skip over quests you are not interested in doing. If you not interested in any more troll plots then simply skip that content and move on. It might not leave you with as many post-80 quests, but it makes the game more enjoyable for people who want to do it.

With the implementation of Borean Tundra/ Howling Fjord I am certain this is what Blizzard had in mind. Honestly though, I am not sure how many people play like that, at least on their first play through. People will either do both zones because they want to experience the story or because it is the quickest way to get to 80 (and leaves the most content to make money with at the end). The only time I think people would realistically skip content is when leveling an alt.

Are you really saying that having that extra 20 hours of leveling content is going to make the difference in keeping you around for the next 18+ months?

Kinda. The main reason for why there are two starter zones isn't because Blizzard loves nonlinearity (which isn't bad as long as it doesn't lead to plot issues), but because they didn't want a single Hellfire Peninsula-style chokepoint on expansion content. The fact that you can completely skip the starter zone you did is arguably one of the biggest problems pacing-wise. This would largely be a design issue, though - as Douglas points out, the relatively flat rate of exp progression from 70 to 80 means that doing all the early content will put you way ahead on the latter content... this could've been avoided by making the exp curve steeper such that doing both HF and BT wouldn't put you far ahead because Dragonblight would drown the two out in exp value.

In any case, I don't like the idea of having a "do 5 out of 8 zones to hit the cap" expansion framework. I'd rather see a "do 5 out of 6 zones with just as much plot, and then we'll have the expansion out that much sooner" framework. That's all I'm saying (or in TBC's case, "do 8 out of 10 smaller zones to hit the cap.") And it's particularly problematic because I see WotLK as originally being "do 5 out of 10 zones to hit the cap", but then the devs realized that that was too much optional stuff so rather than trimming the fat out of the 10 zones, they just lopped off two of them and whatever associated lore that was going to be in them.

I mean, honest question here: Why do you think that Crystalsong Forest was never finished? It was just sitting there on beta for months. It was populated, the terrain is pretty much done. It isn't like the flying mount content in TBC that could be put off as "endgame", Crystalsong was clearly supposed to be pre-Storm Peaks / Icecrown leveling content. So why would the devs leave it like it is, other than because they realized that they didn't need to finish yet another leveling zone?