1983

MMO Champion now reporting the filing for The Dark Below was a hoax. :(

1984

Unsurprised.

1985

Personally I think part of it is that Dragons and minotaurs(aka Tauren), goblins, elves, dwarves, orcs and undead are all standard fantasy fare and people are pretty comfortable with them as a concept. The further away from that standard you get, the more that some people cannot make the jump. For me, the blue aliens and walrus-people, pushed me to the edge of what I could comfortably relate to, but the pandas went well past it - particularly since i couldnt tell if it was a direction they wanted to go in to tell their story versus a direction they wanted to go in to increase market share in asia.

Yes, there are plenty of things also in the blizzard world that aren’t standard fantasy fare(particularly the popular culture jokes), but I almost always just avoid or ignore those because they tend to be very localized(like references to paris hilton or tetris). That’s impossible to do with an entire expansion.

I think most everyone has a line, and no one’s right or wrong being on either side of it, it’s all personal preference. But ask yourself, if the next expansion was called Bieberia, and featured a race of beavers called beibers that were all youthful teens that all dreamed of becoming pop singers - would you be into it, or would it cross your line?

1986

One of players on my server had a guild called “Beliebers” and advertised in trade for members who were fans. She was universally mocked.

1987

This is true. Even when they incorporated Norse mythos in WOTLK and Egyptian in Cata, they were localized as well.

I just read what Blizz released about the Timeless Isle and it is actually intriguing enough to possibly take a look. I’ll be a year off WoW in Oct and I’m really trying hard not to resub.

Looks like they are introducing some GW2 concepts. Open ended questing, group tagging (even different factions), and timed events. They fact they introduce it with the phrase “Take Your Time” makes me think this is intended to hold everyone (non-raiders mostly) over for a very long time until the next XP.

1988

If it hadn’t been for the Pandaren already having been introduced in Warcraft 3, I think this expansion would’ve irked me as well. Instead, it was like Outland in the sense of “hey, you know this is an area/people we’ve had before in our previous Warcraft games, now we’re making an expansion around them!”

1989

I would bet they are testing new tech for the expansion, and the entire questing experience will be built that way. Ghostcrawler has said multiple times that you should be happy to see a person from your faction in the questing area, and never feeling as if you are competing for spawns. So yes it’s quite clear that the design team admires GW2’s model.

1990

I never had a problem with the Pandrens, mainly because I had played Warcraft 3 extensively. But Warcraft 3 is, what, 9+ years old now? A lot of newer WoW players may have never played Warcraft 3, much less known about the history around Pandarens. To those folks it probably seems like a cutesy example of the carebaring of WoW.

Mostly for me it was just that I didn’t feel like I was ever accomplishing anything. Doing a full clear in LFR only to have my guild wiping on the 3rd boss in a raid instance was frustrating. I don’t mind wiping, but it’s so hard to keep people motivated when they are seeing more content with PUGs than they are with the guild runs. And in LFR you are pulling the same wardrobe look, the same weapons, the same content, just all lower level. Wiping for weeks to get a +3% stat boost on items that look identical is what ultimately lead to our guild losing members to the point of having to switch from 25-man to 10-man runs.

When I wasn’t raiding, I was grinding dailies for rep. I didn’t mind it for the first couple/few months. After that though, holy crap, I couldn’t get motivated to keep that up. I played the pet battles, but after getting a solid team of level 25’s and doing the elemental dailies until I had all the pet drops, I again ran out of stuff to do. I just ran out of game to play. It wasn’t a matter of running out of end-game to do; I had a couple of pieces of gear I still needed. It was that I didn’t have anything to do when I wasn’t raiding. And no way to improve my character except for hoping for drops from the few bosses we were dropping consistently.

1991

I will be very, very surprised if they get rid of the questing model that’s been WoW’s bread and butter since day 1. Two things that are very common to see in people coming from WoW to GW2 are complaints about 1) not knowing what to do in a zone and 2) not having enough XP to go to the next zone after having done all the heart “quests”. WoW trains you hard to:

! -> kill/collect/loot stuff -> ? -> repeat

Take that out, and you’ll see no end of complaints from the bulk of WoW players. That said, they do seem to like tinkering with the model in set areas as part of the mid-expansion patches. See: Barrens conflict, Timeless Isle, Isle of Thunder, etc.).

So 5.4 is currently “scheduled” to hit on 8/27. While I’m sure everyone has been there since 5.3 hit is getting tired of Throne of Thunder, this makes for some interesting speculation regarding the next expansion release. While I think it’s somewhat rumored that there will be a 5.5 patch with some content, I believe it’s been confirmed that there will be no additional raids after 5.4. That means we’re likely in for another Dragon Soul-like march, meaning a long, long stretch between the last raid and the next expansion. The alternative is that Blizz is much further along on the next expansion than we all anticipate, but that seems unlikely given that we’re about at the same point we were pre-MoP (no expansion announced yet, likely going to happen at BlizzCon). They’ve still got to announce the expansion, run an alpha and a beta, market, etc. While I suppose they could do all that much faster than they did with MoP…this is Blizzard we’re talking about. Speed isn’t exactly their thing.

1992

You say that Gedd, but from MMO’s summary of today’s dev interview;

Timeless Isle can serve as a foundation for the way that the developers approach creating re-playable content in the future.

So…go figure.

1993

I think what I said was in-line with the interview. Re-playable content is probably just a different way of saying the content currently served by daily quests. There was a huge amount of fatigue and pushback related to daily quests this expansion because they were such a big part of the content once you reached max level. There was very little way, if any, to get the reputations you needed without them. And the first few patches added big daily quest areas along with reputations. It’s not surprising that Blizz is looking for a way to give players an alternative to dailies.

I would also not be surprised, if this tech works out (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t), if the GW2-like event system was the primary means for grinding reputations in 6.0. However, I would not expect it to replace the traditional questing model in the leveling process. That said, they may find some way to throw a few minor events into the mix while doing traditional quests during leveling to make the world feel a little more dynamic.

1994

I think the huge scope of new reputations (all tied to dailies) is what really burned people out. Before you had a choice of mixing dailies and dungeon runs for faction rep. Now it’s like singing “16 tons.” And not only are there a ton of reps to start with, but then they add new ones for the patches, like the one on Thunder Isle.

I kind of wanted to see what the Anglers had to offer, for instance. For months, though, all my online time was consumed with the tedium of getting “important” (gear-providing) reputations meant I never got there. By the time I was done with gearing-factional stuff I just didn’t want to daily any more.

1995

That was only a problem at the initial expansion release. They quickly realized their mistake. The other reps were optional.

Not to dismiss it, certainly. It sucked bigtime. Enormous design mistake.

1996

New Siege of Orgrimmar trailer is out. Say what you want about Pandaria, Bilzz does great trailers.

I like the fact that they went with Garrosh as the final foozle for the Expansion. Instead of yet another universe threatening all powerful bad guy, you actually have to kill the leader of another/your own faction.

1998

Good ol Garrosh, the jackass orc everyone loves to hate because he totally deserves it.

The faction rep and its gating effects at the start of MOP was not pleasant. Im burned out enough that I barely touched it, though after leveling two characters it was easy to know what quest lines to do to max your rep before the required dailies. When they added in the revered bonus to your account that helped. The initial factions don’t matter much at all now unless you want mounts or crafting receipes. I’ve completely ignored the thunder isle rep dailies.

1999

I’m not wild about it, personally. Not wild about the fact that they singled out the Horde faction leader as the big bad (I understand the current Alliance leader is also a bit of an asshole, but oh look, he’s not the ultimate raid boss of the expansion!), not wild about the continued stupid-plot of forcing the two basically heroic factions into pointless feuding, and frankly I just don’t find any of it nearly as interesting and compelling as Arthas or Deathwing.

2000

I wasn’t trying to say they would completely revamp the tried and true model, simply that they are going to be testing new tech to update the model to be as friendly as GW2 is with regard to having other players around. (At a minimum as that’s what they have been going on about as recognizing is a problem.)

Yes, it is interesting. They have been saying they want to get content out faster, but this final stretch has always been the biggest problem. It could potentially even be longer than Dragon Soul if they want to release the expansion in the holiday season of 2014. Dragon Soul was released in late November 2011 and Mists of Pandaria was released 10 months later in September 2012. Icecrown Citadel (patch 3.3, the last WotLK patch) was released in early December 2009, and the Cataclysm expansion in late November 2010. Which was about a month longer than Dragon Soul to Mists.

2001

This was in a recent interview with Tom Chilton at MMO Champion:

Looking at the interviews that have been done so far, Ghostcrawler mentioned there will likely be a Patch 5.5 in some form, obviously with no raid content. Cory mentioned that there is only a regular pre-expansion event patch planned. Is there a patch beyond the regular pre-expansion events planned?
Tom Chilton: We definitely expect there to be some content between now and an expansion. Whether it is called Patch 5.9 or something else we aren’t entirely settled on. The number could be different, but we definitely expect to have an event between now and then.

So it sounds like there will be additional content beyond the pre-expansion patch. I guess it would still be a problem though if there’s no additional raid content from now until holiday 2014… And I really don’t expect to see it coming any sooner than that despite their promises for quicker releases.

2002

Yeah, they will definitely add something to the game between now and then, but it won’t be a multi-boss raid. Unfortunately subscribers tend to drop pretty quickly once the current raid content is in place too long. There are no numbers that I know of, but anecdotally everyone I know spends the bulk of their time in game raiding (whether LFR, normal, or heroic). When the raid content starts getting stale, people start getting restless, no matter how many daily hubs (or their new alternate format), dungeons, or PvP maps they add.

Icecrown Citadel (patch 3.3, the last WotLK patch) was released in early December 2009, and the Cataclysm expansion in late November 2010.

Technically we did get Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5, which was released in June 2010. It wasn’t a full raid tier, but at least it was something for raiders to throw themselves at for a few months. I was always amazed that they didn’t do something similar for the folks raiding Dragon Soul for 10 months. Maybe they’ll do a one-off raid again between SoO and the next expansion.

2003

I wish Blizzard could encourage open world PvP somehow. They’ve tried in the past with spots that offer rewards for players fighting for control of things but they’ve never been embraced by the players.