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.
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.
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 
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.
You ignore the fact that gaming industry has changed from the time WoW came out til today by a lot.
What worked earlier because of lack of information is today not possible. Why you think WoW Classic today is for most boring and unplayable compared to retail? People complain that the content in Classic is boring, back then in Vanilla times when WoW came out it was a mystery to solve. No guides available, no youtube videos, only the players on your realm to help.
Today you have access to so much information which is a problem the devs can’t control because everyone has access to WoWhead and other websites/guides.
Making a AAA-game takes around 3-6 years, depending on the studio. If you think a game that came out during covid was made within 1 year and 11 days (Covid began November 2019, today is 11.11.21), then you are delusional. Those games were in production long before Covid-19.
Smaller games on the other hand, surely.
At no point I said “It can’t work without it”. I only stated facts why time gating makes absolutely sense in online games. Don’t put words in my mouth I didn’t use.
I also didn’t say that the current state of the game is fine the way it is. As I said above in the former comment, I only stated facts why time gating is good for online games.
If you think Wow patches are on the level of games being produced you’re the delutional one. Way to put words in my mouth.
Yeah and the new way is failing. It’s obvious. Hence the latest patch removing all the things you’re claiming that’s needed. You honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. You sound like a Blizzard robot trying to make excuses for them trying to milk their playerbase dry. Instead of producing fun and good content that makes you want to stay subbed you agree with them milking FOMO of your character forever playing catch up.
Imagine sticking up for that behaviour and thinking that’s what an MMO needs.
You’re legit a walking PR machine for them.
The class sets look freaking amazing and unique! Not just a recolour thank god! Great work! Hope it lives up to the expectations!
your character is a contradiction :S unless wait oh i get it ! you are one of them woke folks right?
if you wonder that i mean its the name and the gender, Cows are female no ?
Cool down, man. Just because I don’t think like you doesn’t make me a defender of Blizzard or someone making PR for a game I only joined 2 years ago. Stop projecting your Blizzard image on strangers like me.
Yeah and that shows. You’re telling people who have played for 15 years, Shadowlands timegating systems are needed in Wow. Your posts showed that you’e only played for 2 years. You think Wow losing most of it’s playerbase comes from annoying it’s playerbase with these systems. You think it’s good cause that’s all you’ve seen. Me and many others are telling you that doing a few quests per day and having to log off because there is a road block is making them quit. It’s a terrible system. Legit the worst expansion We’ve ever had.
That video and content shown is not good enough for the time we’ve waited for content. While being poked with a timegate covenent stick.
Seems like I am arguing with a brickwall here.
something something Destiny 2 does it.
They are… I’ll change to female when I get round to it if it makes you happy.
nah im just pointing it out for no reason at all lol, you do you buddie.
Looks amazing gratz to the devs .
In think this expansion might finish in a decent note, they didn’t touch if we might be able to equip two leggos 
I’m so gd sick of seeing broker NPCs, Blizzard really stretched their usefulness to the limit in SL recycling these bland models. Their blandness is symbolic of SL as a whole, they don’t even have faces.
Decent good start and I like it alot.
One thing’s for sure, these devs really want to shove brokers down our throat over and over. I guess they think if we get exposed to brokers enough we’ll finally start to find them interesting. At this point I think the main reason these devs are so obsessed with brokers is because they’re genderless, therefore non-controversial.