Why is fated seasons even a thing no new raids no new no new dungeons it’s just really lazy game design, many will just stop playing old content until the next expansion ?
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I do not enjoy it but I presume there was enough take up that they deem it worth while. It’s a way to recycle the content and put an empty season in without actually having a complete content drought.
I am not a fan. But then I have not enjoyed all the recycling for Mythic plus dungeons etc. Others do enjoy it.
I have read an interesting debate that guilds find it a struggle as some of the raid team will want to carry on and the other half don’t. This leaves some guilds in the situation where the guild stops raiding, those that want to carry on leave to find somewhere that will carry on. Then you’re left having to recruit heavily for the new expansion. I have no idea how widespread that issue is.
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Because the last patch of every expansion always lasts a lot more than usual.
Look at legion for example:
Patch 1: 56 days
Patch 2: 154 days
Patch 3: 154 days
Patch 4: 349 days.
Some expansions have longer patch days, some shorter. But what the ALL have in common, is that last patch. Its significantly longer than the rest.
In practice it means that we sped on average… a year… waiting for the next expansion.
All Blizzard has done is take that last patch and split it into 2 seasons. And they use recycled content because all the “new stuff” you are referring to… yeah… thats the new expansion coming up. Thats where it all is.
So considering this you got 2 alternatives:
(A) NOTHING until WW comes out.
(B) a 3 month long Fated season and play something while you wait.
There is no “new content” option. As I said. Its WW. Thats the “new content”.
Now that you have the proper information. You can take an informed decision and decide if you wanna play the fated season. Or take a break for another 3-4 months until WW (like you used to do). Your choice.
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The first time they did it, it was fine.
It was an experiment that not many developers too part in, but still with a small team they did an experiment and it did “reasonably” well. It had its pluses and minuses, but at least they tried something new.
From what I see this time around, instead of going “ok, we saw what worked and what not, let’s go even wilder now”, it seems they are trying to play it super safe and almost copy paste the first blueprint.
It doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced or have the best systems, but I think it is the perfect chance to go ham. Like give us corruptions 2.0, legendaries for each spec (even the legion ones), anything that will be like “ok go play with that toy and have fun”.
But alas, I think that it will be the same thing like last time or maybe even safer, and unfortunately I do not think many people will stick around for that one.
The difference is of course still that legion had 4 seasons with 4 new raids. Now we get 3 seasons/raids and 1 fated. BFA last season was also long but again we had still 4 raids.
So that isn’t true. We still have the same amount of seasons.
The problem (or not a problem) is that when you make 3 seasons of 5 months and you want an expansion take 2 years, that the last one has to be a longer season.
Overall i did like the last seasons of legion and bfa the most. All the problems with the systems were getting solved. Like in legion we were able to buy the legendaries we wanted and in bfa we got a couple of months in the last season the corruption vendor.
For the record; Emerald dream of course took longer than 56 days. The season was way longer. legion got released in the last week of august and nighthold got released in januari next year. It is just that we got Trial of Valor mini raid in between and i think karazhan. But the season was almost half a year (20th september - 16th januari).
And antorus got released 28th november. BFA release date is 14th august. That isn’t 349 days.
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That is the issue. And the groass misscalculation from everyone: Assuming DF will last for 2 years.
ALL other expansions did last 2 years. And excluding some obvious outliers (SL and WoD… ahem…) they all had 4 raids. BfA in particular lasted for 2 yeas and 2 months. So extra.
However. DF launched in November 28, 2022. WW will launch (or so they say) somewhere in August. Maybe September?
So the duration of Dragonflight will be ~ 6 months give or take shorter than BFA.
So you cant argue for “less content” just from the # of raids they launched.
Therefore, because we got similar patch cadence to Legion, we are actually getting ~ the same amount per unit time. Which is the metric that matters.
What would have been “the 4rth raid”, or Patch 10.4, is now gonna be called “patch 11.0” and they will make you pay 60E for it.
And you could complain about that if you wanna. That # of raids / unit DOLLAR you spend is higher than legion.
And all those things you mention were solved in Legion and BFA last season. Its our case too. We get Dinars. We dont get leggo vendors cause we aint got legos. Or corruptions.
We got tier sets. And THAT problem was solved in S1 with the catalyst. Which is orders of magnitude better than waiting for the last season of the expansion to get it fixed.
Obviously we have to see how long DF takes and when the next expansion releases, indeed 
And BFA only took 2 months extra because they delayed SL release. Shadowlands was also about 2 years. When Legion, BFA, Shadowlands all take about 2 years (i am not going to search for the lengths of expansions before that), you expect the current expac also to take 2 years. But we’ll see.
100% true. We will see.
My info comes from blizzards road-map. And for the moment, they have been spot on with it. So I presume it will continue to be that way.
But I might be wrong. If I am, I will retract. Dont worry.
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I personally don’t know of anyone who is a fan of “fated” seasons. It was successful in SL because people were expecting a content drought, so S4 was a nice surprise alternative to that, but what it isn’t a good alternative to is a fully fledged fourth tier like we used to have in past expansions.
From what I’ve seen it’s a hugely unpopular concept overall but I’m afraid Blizzard will adopt it as the new standard going forward because they’ve learned they can get away with doing less. They have more workforce than ever before but somehow they can’t handle making 4 tiers anymore.
Exactly the problem I am in, we know that if we stop raiding for the expansion, we will lose some of the team, despite the fact that none of us want to play it.
Personally, for me, Fated is the worst thing Blizzard have done in years, not only does it solidify this horrible 3 raids 6-8 dungeons 1 mega dungeon recipe they’ve been charging £50/60/70 for, but it forces me to keep paying and playing when I’d really rather just take a break, because others in the guild want to continue.
The alternative to a fated season is not a new raid and new dungeons, at least not if you want a new expansion in a timely manner. The alternative is 6 more months of Amirdrassil and the current M+ pool.
So a fated season manages to keep things relatively fresh while reducing the time between expansions. If you feel that is not for you, then don’t play! there is nothing wrong with it, the expansion is already finished.
This is entirely because consumers have accepted that and are okay paying £50 once per 2 years and £100 a year for this amount of content.
I would actually much rather have six months of nothing, so I can at least unsub and not feel an obligation to my community to continue to play.
There have been many new single dungeons added with patches and mini 2-3 boss raids in the past.
Accepting that this is a ‘nice thing to tide players over’ is just silly, it’s minimum viable product to keep up the revenue.
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Every successful expansions has had more than 3 tiers. Hell even BfA had 4, or 5 if you’re counting CoS. It has nothing to do with getting the next expansion out. Blizzard has more than enough resources to handle it, they just chose not to because they like money.
The expansion if over, and so are a lot of guilds because half of the roster wants a break and the other wants to play fated raids. Well done.
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At this point I am unsure if there really is anything they can do to keep the game going until the next expansion and I am just playing other forms of WoW and games. I was hoping to do something in this patch but we know how that went.
However, it may be in the works already with the next 3 lined up and 1.5 years instead of 2. I sincerely hope they have real content patches planned out to span the entire expansion and not just “Oh the story is done and now we have a year left to make up things to do until the pre-patch”.
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the alternative is spending almost a year on an expansion’s last patch
i think this way is better
I think the common counter to this is that most of the devs are working on TWW, and implementing these would cost too much development time for too little gain.
I’m genuinely curious, where did this idea that the only alternative to fated is a content drought come from? I see people saying it but it just make zero sense.
To me it seem quite obvious that the alternative to content drought is… well… content. Like we used to have in every pre-Shadowlands expansion except WoD.
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that’s what we’ve been getting since before shadowlands
expansions last patches lasting for more than a year while they work on the next expansion release
5.4 comes to mind lasting for a year and couple of months
We’re not suppose to like it at all. We’re in a era that Blizzard is trying to Change 24 Months cycles into 18 months cycles. it’s more like growing pain.
FALSE.
www .reddit.com/r/wow/comments/ya0g97/with_shadowlands_drawing_to_a_close_heres_an/
Thats a nice chart. And in it, you can clearly see that the last patch of EVERY expansion lasted significantly more than the rest.
You can do the math.
That is where it comes from. From FACTS.
So your choice is (A) keep doing what we were doing until today. Or (B) put a fated season in the last patch of an expansion.
What is your choice?
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