We are technically getting more “content” than ever but I don’t think that’s the case when you actually take a look at the content that’s being delivered.
Everything that was added in 10.0.5 and 10.0.7 is side content for alts and catchup, Trading post is something you take a look at once a month and maybe get something, Storm event was fun once and then made horrible by the boss’ hp, Forbidden Reach was cool for one day and then it lost all of its appeal because of awful rare design and their bullet spongy nature (like most rares in DF), and the tower doesn’t really have anything interesting worth grinding the keys for.
I used to be a person who played lots of alts but BFA and SL did their best to make me unlearn that habit, and I no longer do because I can’t be bothered pushing keys and going through pug hell on more characters, and I just don’t have as much time to play WoW for 5/6+ hours a day anymore.
That being the case, none of Dragonflight’s mini-patches have brought any actual main-relevant content so far, and we’re back to Shadowland’s horrible main patch cadence of getting a named patch every 6 months. Now I can easily drop the game and unsub to wait for 10.1, but every time I do that I lose the desire to resub for the remainder of the xpac.
How is it that they STILL can’t match Legion’s frequency of meaningful content updates with a team that’s twice the size? By this time, Legion already brought in Karazhan, so 2 new dungeons, 2 new raids in ToV and NH, and Chromie’s death scenario with probably more stuff that I’m forgetting, and 7.2 wasn’t that far off either. In DF we didn’t get any endgame content with one bland and boring 8-boss raid since launch.
It’s pretty bizarre hearing influencers go on about the roadmap and patches coming out constantly when they aren’t really bringing in anything except for alt catch-up and a random selection of cosmetics that refreshes once a month.
Dragonflight removed power grinds which means that you’re left with the barebones WoW content, which then means that you need MORE content to make up for it, but that’s not happening even though their team is bigger than ever by a sizeable margin.
Well the seasons need to spread out, because not everybody is a sweaty gamer like you and I and get the content finished in a few weeks.
Which is why a lot of us either like to play alts or take a break from the game during the downtime.
The cadence suits players who don’t have as much time to commit (people with jobs, families and lives etc, you know, normal people), but still want to achieve all the goals (KSH etc) spread over a longer period of time.
There’s clearly a faction of posters here and for them the best version of wow is the one where there is nothing to do in the game, so they can log in and have nothing to do, declare they have done everything there is to do (which is nothing) and then log out with a hearty sense of accomplishment. and more power to you i guess, this expansion is totally for you.
Agree with every single thing you wrote OP.
It is just an objective fact that DF has very little content compared to Legion and BFA. Worst part is some of the Dragonflight content like the dungeons are so poorly designed that many of us are happy Blizzard are recycling old dungeons, because the alternative (playing exclusively DF dungeons in m+) is worse.
Oh yeah it feels like there is some kind of gaslighting campaign going on, it is genuinely bizarre. Especially because many even try the, uhm, akthually, not having content is good, because it means I play other games more.
I think I mentioned in this very post that I don’t have the time to play the game for 5+ hours a day like I used to back in college or high school, because I do have a job and I also started late in mid-January and swapped mains. It still doesn’t change the fact that you need like 2 months to achieve all except the highest-end goals such as CE or 3k Rio rating.
Of course, it may take someone 1 month to do what I did in these 2-3 months, and someone else can do it in 6, but longer=better doesn’t apply here because you can then stretch that goalpost to whatever you want. We can do 1 season of content for a full year so every single player can take their time by clearing one dungeon a week.
The argument then is how long is long enough, which is definitely subjective but I think that 6 months is too much, and I know that many people agree because they were railing on Shadowlands for that exact reason 2 years ago. I don’t dispute that DF is a better expansion but patches 0.5 and 0.7 might as well not exist if you’re not playing 2+ alts at a time, so what did we gain here?
Also bear in mind that all the stuff I mentioned in Legion was still season 1 stuff, they just expanded it with 2 new dungeons and 2 new raids.
This is very true as I’m actively dreading every high key I get from DF dungeons lol. The tuning is worse, there are more obnoxious mechanics that pop off every second (disregarding the fact that they added more mechanics to CoS and HoV which just proves they’re ramping up the challenge despite higher key scaling), and timers are much worse (they also shortened HoV timer to try and match the new awful ones).
Also absolutely this, and it boggles my mind. I’ve seen like 20 comments in the last few days about 10.0.7 and how it’s great that all its content is useless and they don’t have to do it. Like what, what are you paying them for then lol.
WoW players are incapable of objectively judging any part of the game in good faith without being directly affected by the overall sentiment of the expansion. BFA - BAD, therefore, everything in BFA is bad, even though it had a ton of good stuff. DF - GOOD, so everything they do is great now because we’ve gotten rid of the dreaded chores and we can all proceed to not play the game.
Again, that’s you. That doesn’t necessarily mean someone else can do it so quickly.
And whats to say someone else didn’t start in late February?
Whilst I think a 4 months Season giving 3 seasons a year would be comfortable for the player that plays 12 months a year. You also have to consider the resulting quality of the content if pace of content was rushed out like that.
And also, you have to consider the people who do want to play their alts. Just because you don’t want to have one or play one, doesn’t mean other people don’t want to.
I’m currently preparing my alts, and making sure I am able to have at least the normal VoI transmog across all of them. And this 10.0.7 patch has made it that much easier todo.
Again, the content is there. If you just want to play your main, then that’s on you. Alts are fun to have, they don’t take long to make either.
I am playing only 1 character and I am quite happy that I don’t have to play WoW all the time. You know there are other games out there too? Not just WoW.
Had a great weekend in Diablo IV Beta. Played some Destiny 2, walked my dogs, doing some Art in Blender, etc.
And even if I get totally bored while playing WoW, I still can do Roleplay on my Realm.
I think the patch cadence is just right at the moment.
Ugh… as much as I loathed the idea of old dungeons first, they made me appreciate a simpler time when you didn’t have to move every 2 seconds because of bad on the floor, or halt casting because that boss does an interrupt shout for the 4th time in a minute.
Of the dungeon pool for S1, I just love SBG way more than any current expansion dungeon. Court of Stars is fairly simple as well, minus the minigame to find the dreadlord.
Much of my alt play is doing a single key weekly, and a couple WQs to gear them up
But the gameplay of these melees (I only have my priests and my shammy left for casters, all of them in heal specs) are a refreshment to play. Being in the middle of a grand melee and wreaking havoc is quite satisfying.
I don’t play it too much either. I’m more hung up finishing Fallout 4 (if… you can ever finish it, as it never really ends and has some good replay value of sorts) and I have a couple more other games too that I liked but didn’t have the time for.
I think Blizzard’s approach for Dragonflight patches is to use major patches to dictate new Seasons and new gameplay content. And then the minor patches are for catch-up mechanics, story, and gimmicks.
There’s 6-7 months between the Seasons, and in-between that there’s catch-ups, story, and fluff to bridge the gap.
I think the weakness of the content structure is that it relies on people either playing alts if they want to play a lot, or people playing very little if they only play their main.
In the case of relying on people playing alts it’s problematic because there’s no real incentive to play alts. There’s no Class Order Halls. There’s no separate faction campaigns. There’s no Covenants. There’s nothing. You just replay the exact same game experience, only the character is different. That’s not ideal in an MMORPG that the scope of the game experience is so narrow.
In the case of people only playing their mains, it’s quite a gamble to assume that these people are satisfied with very little to do on the assumption that they’re happy to not play WoW very much.
That just doesn’t pass the smell test. It is not ideal for any game – let alone a Live Service game – to lack longevity in its core gameplay experience. That’s where people get bored, become detached, and quit.
The upcoming Timewalking event does seem like an effort to inject more longevity into the Season.
Hopefully this is something Blizzard are more aware of for the next Season.
If they want people to rely on alts, then they have to create an incentive to play them.
And if they want mains to play through a 6-7 month long Season, then there has to be relevant content that can last that long.
The concern is of course that right now the Season is 6-7 months long and it runs off of the base product experience consisting of the whole of The Dragon Isles. Upcoming Seasons will only rely on a single new zone.
The cadence is too fast. The last patch came with broken talents, broken dungeon, broken ring balance, broken class balance, bugged events, etc. If anything it needed more time in the hoven.
So, if it’s not enough for you play an alt, otherwise play some other game. It’s not all about you. You don’t have to just play WoW.
little content??? log in my pala had to do grreat hunt, feast, wrathion keep thing, storm invasions, world boss, m15, lfr last 2. …i got tired after 1 m+ and 2 boss lfr. no thx. tiireed. TOO MUCH To do
Legion had the longest development time of any expansion by far, approximately 4 years. Starting development before MoP even released. You could make the argument it even had 5 years of dev time if you count the extra time Blizzard got from abandoning WoD early.
By Blizzards own admission. Legion could have released when WoD did. But they choose WoD to better align with the movie. But the movie got delayed and WoD ran into a ton of issues and well, the rest is history.
Furthermore, a lot of the post launch content Legion got was already done, or practically done, during the beta. But were withheld for months to pad out the patches. The moment they run out of stuff we got 7.2. One of the weakest major patches in recent history.
Dragonflight on the other hand, has the shortest development time of any expansion. If past alpha/beta cycles are anything to go by. The Pre-patch for Dragonflight should have gone live this month, or early next month. But waiting this long to get out of the Shadowlands would have killed WoW, so Blizzard had to rush Dragonflight out the door. Hence all the bugs, unfinished classes, very poor raid/dungeon tuning, etc.
Basically, Blizzard are still playing catch up due to the disaster that was Shadowlands.
Idk if alts even help anything. My server went back to dead 2 days after the patch came out. Now I can go to Forbidden Reach and have all the rares up. I mean I know outland isn’t the most populous of servers but even korthia lasted longer than this patch has.
I found the Onyx annulet to be 100% main relevant.
I also liked the extra story content we got.
It is imho a big mistake to have WoW be your only videogame to play. It is better to take dips into WoW when you feel like it and then go back to other games
One thing that I havnt seen mentioned for this topic is the constant reuse of open world zones for dungeons. Brakenhide hollow, Nokhud Offensive, Ruby life pools … all copy and paste areas from original zones. I know this is nothing new as it was a siilar situation in shadowlands but it seems very lazy… “Let’s just take a big cut out of an major zone and turn it into a dungeon because we can’t be bothered to make anything new”.
I’m also a player who focus in 1 main char.
But after i achiev my goals (2.7k rating , raid 2 boss Mythic) i see an oportunity to farm old content for achievs mogs mounts etc until the new season.
I know most ppl have many alts so i understand the game need to focus on them more.
It becomes specially obnoxious when Blizzard only has 8 dungeons and so much is re-used. I am a huge fan of re-using assets like they do in the Dark Souls genre. The problem is when they re-use assets and create less content, then it starts feeling awful.
Spot on, they’re playing to very different audiences here and truly satisfying only a small portion of the player base I feel, the others are just not dissatisfied enough to actively complain about it. IMO 6-7 months is far too long, and I don’t see why it’s necessary when they used to be able to do more with fewer people.
The base Dragonflight just doesn’t have much to it, which means that future patches will sting even more if they’re all spread around 6 months from each other. I prefer having a content drought in the final patch when the game is at its most fun, because that’s when alts make the most sense and you can easily reach the point of being “done” with a character.
I play like 2 hours a day and no, there’s not enough content in the game.
Was that a good argument during WoD and Shadowlands, do you think the game can thrive on having no content and telling people to go play other games? I play a lot of stuff aside from WoW, it doesn’t change the fact that the game is barren.
The ring shouldn’t have been made in the first place, they’re going back to nightmarish tasks of trying to balance temporary borrowed power which will always feel rushed and incomplete, all the while not adding anything to the game.
Then why was Shadowlands sacrificed akin to WoD, and why did it have awful content cadence if the next expansion didn’t benefit for it. Giving people less than before and charging the same (or more in the case of DF box price) is a tough sell, especially when you’re boasting about having a dev team that’s twice as big as Legion.
