Expansions need to happen faster

Q u o t e:
I know you are concerned about quality. We all are. You can do both, get expansions out faster and have quality. A year and 1/2 or more for each expansion is slow. 10 levels and the dungeons that went with them can be ingested in 1/2 that time. Faster by most.

Here we are almost a year after the last expansion, and you haven't even announced beta, or even firmed up one of the major parts of it, the Death Knight. That tells me for quality sake, it needs another 6 months of work at least.

World of Warcraft isn't a wine. It's an MMO. Content is king. Get it out there.



ps. i love this game, but I haven't seen the subscription numbers jump in awhile. That worries me.

I guess we could argue whether or not they "need" to happen faster, but in the end, they are going to happen as fast or as slow as we feel we need to do them.

We don't like rushing things out the door. We want to make sure that when we release an expansion it has enough crunchy goodness that everyone has something to sink their teeth into (so to speak). We also have a whole company filled with people that have great ideas that we think players would enjoy, but unfortunately we also don't have all the time (or resources) in the world to do it all. So, we are going to do what we can to pick out the very best, most fun and most 'bang for the buck' bits and put them into our expansions wherever we can. If that means things happen a little slower, so be it.

Many people might argue with you on just how far we are along with things based on what they saw at BlizzCon. Does that mean we have a date to give you on beta or release yet? No, not yet. We will do our best though to get you more information to intrigue you as soon as we're able, but not before we're ready to do it. ;) Hopefully, in the end, it will be well worth the wait.

Q u o t e:


TBC blows original WoW out of the water in all things except lore (sorry Blizz you got a little lazy with your story telling with TBC).

I've enjoyed TBC myself and believe we made great forward progress. We intend to keep progressing in a positive way and hope that you'll find the story in Northrend to be intriguing and worthwhile. ;)

Q u o t e:
Between 7/1/2008 and 11/1/2008 works best for me.

Thank you!

I'll make sure to pass the word along that you have a particular time frame in mind that works best for you. ;p

Q u o t e:


Maybe you shouldn't have made the claim you would release an xpack once a year. You're pretty good at talking out of your ass bud

I believe you are referring to a comment that was made by our EVP of Product Development, Frank Pearce , in which he said we would like to release one a year. But, we've also made clear that while we would like to do that, we don't plan to rush anything for the sake of releasing one a year. We didn't make a claim but tried to answer a question that was posed to us about how we would like to approach the release of further expansions.

Reaching that timeline isn't as important as releasing something we feel lives up to the standard of excellence that Blizzard Entertainment is known for.

Q u o t e:


That's a pretty good PR spin you put on that sir... However, that's not what your top management said when asked in interview... nice try though.

Regards,
Thargaull

I'm not a "sir" and I'm just trying to help clarify our thoughts for you. ;) You can choose not to believe me if you wish, but we're going to keep on going and stick with quality first.