mmorchive

October 1st, 2007 elitistjerks.com

Praetorian:

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?

It appears there will be roughly 10 months between the release of Black Temple and the release of Sunwell, the next instance in progression.