Shadowlands: Watch the Eternity’s End Developer Preview

When? in tbc?..last like 3 expansions thry are adding every patch like 50+ mounts…

You can look at skirmish as to how things will end up that way. Facing meta comps might not be something you’d face all the time, you’re still at the disadvantage of RNG every single game. While I understand that sitting in LFG for ages is demotivating, SoloQ will also bring back alot of frustration.

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I think it was in WoD if my memory serves me correct.

i hope they go snail speed… it would ruin my immersion if they didnt

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It will bring different frustrations yes, but at least everyone will be able to get in whenever they want.

People are use to RNG anyway and games with competitive PVP mode solo queue build around the RNG. Any long term WoW player is more than used to RNG, we’re literally breathing in and out RNG every moment we do something in game.

Narratively, the Eternity’s End raid tells two stories, one after the other. Our current plan for the release of the raid looks like this:

  • During the first week of the release of Eternity’s End, the raid will not be open.
  • Beginning with the second week, the raid will open for Normal and Heroic difficulties, and the first eight bosses will be available in those difficulties.
    • It will not be possible to fight the final bosses on any difficulty during week two.
    • This is intended to provide a moment to tell the story in a way that accounts for the passage of time between the events of the eighth encounter and the subsequent encounters.
  • Beginning with the weekly reset of week three, all bosses will be available on Normal, Heroic, and Mythic difficulties.
    • This will also be the opening of the first wing of the raid on Raid Finder difficulty.
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That I agree with. Sitting in LFG for ages while not being able to do anything else is the most frustrating thing ever for me.

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so whats the point in having the different difficulties released at different times … ive never understood why you do that.
Is there any reason i have to wait a month after mythic is opened before i can lfr?

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I can only apologise for that tbh, i don’t deny that… the life i lived and the way i been abused and kicked the curb at every turn and misunderstood… it leads to being the way i am.

i don’t hide form it i harness it there is good in seeing the negative to everything…

the world needs people like me to run at a functional level.

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Because why have guilds?

I would say considering the general dissatisfaction with the game, they really needed to impress with a reveal. It’s not as if they’re on schedule either is it.

The very fact that’s it’s just another mini-zone is an indication it’s just going to be World of Zereth Mortis. Other suggestions are yet another convoluted progression system, just looking at that new window in that one shot suggests so.

It certainly doesn’t look like anything different at all. No, it doesn’t need to be something like cross-faction gameplay or an entire world revamp.

Yes, ultimately I will have to wait to make true judgements, but right now I am seeing a pattern in Blizzard’s output.

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I appreciate you posting stuff like this, it gives players a better understanding than simply seeing a glossy video which tells you very little (other than what the formula setup of what is normally released.)

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Are you sure of that? That would cull some ppl.

Mini-zone as they always are because of the limited resources in a mere content patch. It just seems like a waste of resources when they could flesh out the vanilla expansion zones and keep more of the continent relevant.

With every major patch the world stays small and just moves to the next zone.

Anyway I’m unimpressed with this reveal and I’m going to watch Robin of Sherwood. I want to some real down-to-earth fantasy.

That’s kind a Genesis 3-ripoff

Hey ho, so with this we say goodbye to The Maw and Korthia.

More gear and rep grinding, same old but in a ‘new’ environment which looks like a cut and paste of BfA environments with maybe a dash of Ahn’qiraj and disney.

All the puzzles and that fancy stuff will be quickly solved by clever people and posted on Wowhead so nothing new there.

Destiny 2 works the same way with their seasonal model. WoW has also a seasonal model. That is how it works in Online Games that follow a seasonal model. That is nothing new to this game or Destiny 2 from Bungie.

Time gating is very reasonable and actually good for players health, despite their annoyed mindset.

Example Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1phy6TpgXk

It prevents “no-lifing” a game which would cause massive influence on your IRL social life, habits and body health, such as muscle degeneration and gaining weight of not moving much when you play hours upon hours in the “no-lifing” state. It prevents players from wasting time in an unreasonable manner and goes against video game addiction effects.

It is effective, but annoying for those addicted to that game, because sometimes the best thing you can do is prevent access to the addiction and its progress.

If you would be able to play every day for 18h without limitations and only sleep 6h, you would live completely delusional in your own “action-bubble”. You would ignore your IRL friends, family and duties. That’s why Blizzard has account settings for limiting gametime per day on children accounts for parents. That’s one of the reasons why games like WoW have time-gating.

Another reason is that players working alot IRL would feel the need to “keeping up” to be on good gear for raids, etc. to be still able to play with friends without feeling “left behind”.

Comment: To add an experience from my gaming career… In Destiny 1, when the Vault of Glass (first raid) came out, I gathered players to try out the raid since I never played a “raid” before in any game. It was a totally new concept to me. Anyways, we made a bit of progress despite being underlevel. However, when we said “ye, let us continue this tomorrow”, I got a surprise the next day. All of them continued without me and a friend because we didn’t had the “Gjallahorn” (to that time, the strongest exotic weapon in the game of Vanilla D1). And in the following weeks they also had no interest in taking me and my friend with me, leading to the point where we made a new raid group for weekly attempts. When “The Dark below” (first DLC) came out, the same in that Raid. “You don’t have that light level? Sorry man, I like you, but we can’t take you with us”. And that is something that just hurts the casual player and players with bad gearing luck.

On the other side it makes developing games easier for the devs, since the demand for new content kicks in much slower than without time gating.

Imagine for a second you have a 200-personell dev team to develope a game. You publish your 1.0 of your online game, it has no time gates, people enjoy blowing thru the content. A few weeks later, perhaps 2 months the majority of your players “demand” new content to be created. But you need another 4 months to polish it and make it suitable for a AAA-game. You have to deal with bills, different worker shifts, moving internal meeting dates around to make it fit for everyone to attend, have good progress in workflow and deal with “setbacks” caused by workers mistakes, etc. And til that happened People became unhappy, canceled their sub and turned their backs on the game, because they expect too much to be executed in too short time.

Now imagine you do have time gates, preventing people to blow thru the content and also play less in a week which is more suited for a “healthy lifestyle” (I myself spend too much time in front of my PC, but that is bc I also play other games). People have to wait for the next content of the current update to become available, effectively making it able for them to plan their time with friends, organize their raids and deal with other duties in real life like watching the kids, bringing the car to repair, etc. And when it goes live people can play it with the same chances. No “I have to play it like a job otherwise I can’t raid in mythic day 1” because the game is simply not made for that and it is not the goal. That also means people don’t blow thru the content within 2 months and demand more content in a content drought that would be unpreventable without time gating to push back the moment people demand new stuff with closed ranks.

And for Blizzard that means they have more time to develope the game and organize their approach.

This year is only so long because Covid-19 came along and basically shock the entire gaming industry in their work flow.

Imagine it like a river dam that suddenly breaks and washes away all infrastructure. Streets, buildings and other infrastructure is suddenly gone and needs to be either repaired or completely made from scratch. And that takes time.

Wanna know something interesting? I finished my education while CovidH-Prime-Time. My school for media design took it 3 Months to establish a simple thing like online classes because they first had to get licenses and accounts for the video-platform and create school-accounts for every single student and such. 3 Months, for something simple as a video lifestream. And why? Because schools have to protect their own server systems and data from hackers. Network security takes time. Network access for external PCs takes time. Creating an “On-demand” network for all workers at home takes time. Schooling your personell takes time…

Now imagine how high the costs and the time required for an industry giant like Blizzard it is to create home work spaces for all their workers (which are around 10.000 workers worldwide in 196 different countries with different laws for employment and overall laws), including software, tech, payments, meeting costs, PR, organisation and more. Also for reference, the average monthly salary for a Game designer is between 3000€ and 3450€ (around 3800-4000$ per month). Now calculate that up for example 200 game designers in one game studio section (for example for WoW). Would be around 645.000€ for the salary alone per month. That’s a lot of money.

It is a bureaucratic nightmare, in easy words.

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The whole video to me felt like something that would be posted to the patreon of some indie game studio, was reused assets with a more dull colour pallet. been on the fence about wow for a while now but i think this video might just be the final nail in the coffin for me.

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And that is totally ok imo. If you don’t feel that much connected to the game anymore, it is better for you and your mental health to take a step back and consider not turning back. Try new games, find something better. Perhaps keep an eye on WoW for the future to come back after 1-2 years.

Do what you like, don’t feel forced to play :slight_smile:

Your novel is all well and good but Wow had plenty of expansions without timegating like we’re seeing now. Reread my post. We’re being made to do 3 dailys to unlock stuff our characters need to be useful in groups or small dribbles of content. You denying the fact that the game didn’t have timegate systems like we’re seeing in this expansion.

Also the good old covid excuse, When people have produced full blown games during it.

Me and many other players as you see on the forum have played plenty of Wow content without the timegating we have seen in Shadowlands and had more fun, Yet according to you that an MMO can’t function without it. Yet there is lots of them out there that do including Wow. Using Destiny as a refrence point for your hot take speaks for itself.

If you think having to log off with nothing to do after 3-4 dailys is good for the game then I don’t think you speak for most of the playerbase.