That it?

No. That's not it. You can see our line-up of previews here- http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2416209385

We have more to share.

Yes, Firelands is the raid in 4.2, and 7 is the total number of bosses.

We think 7 is our current ideal for number of bosses in a raid. (We launched Cataclysm with two full raids of 4-6 bosses each.) We're also spending a lot of time making the Firelands bosses as awesome as possible - - creating unique models, animations, effects, sounds, etc. etc. Previously a lot of bosses were larger versions of existing models, which was fine, but that tradeoff is made somewhere. We shift to making fewer but more epic boss fights and there's a tradeoff somewhere. We're concentrating our efforts into a smaller number of fights so that each fight is bigger and better, they're still obviously going to be extremely challenging, but once it is on farm you're not having to spend two, three, maybe four nights just to clear it because the raid is so huge.

Our ideal situation would, of course, be to launch as many raids as possible with this current ideal number of around 7 bosses, but that's not something we're ever going to promise. We'd love to be able to produce unlimited amounts of content anywhere, not just raids, for that matter. We think one raid per patch with around 7 bosses is a super solid experience, though, especially with how much effort is going into Firelands. We don't think anyone is going to be disappointed.

On a side note, the whole daily quest thing hasn't sparked much excitement yet, but with the preview going live here in a few hours (and BlizzCast 16) hopefully we can impress how awesome that's going to be, too.

Again, there's a pretty aggressive development cycle for 4.2, so it's not going to be very long before we're on the PTR, and not very long (comparatively) before release.

04/28/2011 03:08 PMPosted by Tacobeef

so it'll be 2 months until the PTR starts

Oh, you're gonna be, like, totally eating hats. You will masticate multiple hats.

04/28/2011 03:12 PMPosted by Bashiok

so it'll be 2 months until the PTR starts

Oh, you're gonna be, like, totally eating hats. You will masticate multiple hats.

Does that count as daily fiber?

I'm sorry but 7 bosses is not ideal for raiders. Did you not learn from TOC? Heck, atleast TOC allowed you to do 10 and 25 mans which totaled 10 bosses for the week.

Sugarcoat it all you want, 7 bosses is still 7. Ulduar had 14 and was amazing. I don't remember anyone complaining about that.

Yeah, I mean that's a tough situation because our feeling is simply that people shouldn't be forced to play the game more than a couple nights a week to keep up on progression. We realize though that some people legitimately like playing every night, and having real reasons to be in the game and playing with raid groups and such. There's obviously things like alts, professions, achievements, PvP, to keep people busy, but it's ultimately something we'd like to get a better handle on. Having content that isn't forcing people to log in every night, but still offering something that's meaningful for those that do. Understand though that by definition those types of things can't lead to player power or else everyone will be back to having to log on every single night to keep pace. Anyway, it's something we very much want to get a better handle on, but it's not something we're going to solve easily.

From what I gather from the preview... The new dailies will create the feeling of being forced to complete them every day with the way the phases and whatnot unfold for each individual character.

no?

Well, someone doing the dailies every day will certainly achieve the rewards faster than someone who doesn't... But there's no comparison between coordinating 10 or 25 people to put all their concentration into the game for many hours a night, multiple nights, and someone choosing to log in and do a few quests by themselves every day.

I think the thing to probably take away from this is that content is not infinite, and so we have to look at everyone who plays the game and try to be smart about where we focus this finite pool of development resources we have.

As someone else very astutely mentioned earlier, Sunwell had 6 bosses, and I remember people being outraged that they were gated to unlock over time to stretch out that content. Firelands has 7 bosses and they aren't gated. We hope people enjoy them as much, and will be able to look back as fondly on it as they do on Sunwell.

04/28/2011 05:31 PMPosted by Lore

is exactly why all the rumors of WoW developers moving over to Titan keep popping up.

No, it's used a lot because it's a convenient excuse for why someone doesn't like something. If it wasn't the B Team phoning it in it would be Activision controlling us, or Tigole hating casuals, or Chilton hating hardcore, or Horde bias, or whatever. They're scapegoats. Which is fine, people need easy excuses and labels to explain things they can't articulate or just don't understand. The great thing is that the posts that contain those types of conclusions rarely, if ever, contain actual productive or useful feedback. We make B Team jokes almost every week. They're ridiculous, we know it's ridiculous, it doesn't matter to what we're doing if people believe it or not. We'll keep doing what we think is right for the game and they can label that as a product of whatever they want.

04/28/2011 05:31 PMPosted by Lore

Looking at WotLK, there were 8 months between Ulduar and ICC (with ToC at about the 5-month mark). We're about a week and a half away from hitting 6 months since Cataclysm released. Even if 4.2 breaks all the records in terms of PTR time, we probably won't see it for AT LEAST another month. That's an incredibly optimistic estimation that I'm basing on the hat-eating comments earlier in the thread. Puts us at 7 months from Cataclysm release to Firelands hitting. Yeah, one month faster than ICC, but it's got 5 fewer bosses and there's no ToC inbetween.

Patch development length isn't based around # of bosses. Patches contain a great many more things than boss encounter design and balance. Certainly they're one part of some patches, but I would argue the patch history timeline proves that boss development time has little bearing on the length of time between patch releases. Which goes back to my point of finite development resources.

Right, I get that. I'm just not seeing what the other stuff is going in that's resulting in what seems to be less content. It just looks like less content, which makes it seem like the finite pool of resources got smaller.

I'm really not trying to point fingers, I'm just trying to express the exasperation that myself and a lot of others are feeling. I've been a loyal supporter of Blizzard for a long time. Hell, I've hung out with you at Blizzcon. It just kinda feels like the push in Cataclysm has been moving away from what made me enjoy playing the game for so long, and I don't understand the reasons why.

I like raiding 4 days a week. Posts in here make it sound like there will not be enough content to sustain that in 4.2, at least for longer than a couple months. That's really all I'm worried about.

Well, I appreciate your continued inquisitiveness, it really makes the back and forth of a conversation that much more inviting. I do like talking to you guys when I'm able.

I think you're right, though. We've trended toward choosing quality over quantity with some of our content creation, and while that isn't usually a bad thing, it's rarely a good thing from a perception point of view. I think that's something we realize but - - and this is sort of a difficult concept to get across sometimes - - is that the game is... really big, and by the laws of physics really big things don't change direction very quickly. Depending on which part of the development team or individual developers you're talking about, they could be working on content we won't even announce until six months later. Maybe longer. That's just the necessity of our development to ensure we're getting patches and expansions out. So these types of evaluations of what direction the game is in and any changes or general philosophy we want to alter, we may begin making a course correction, but we're just not able to hit that new heading until the entire ship finishes turning. It's also not too rare that in the middle of altering our direction, we change our minds.

Anyway, I don't want that to be discouraging because it's not true of all things, but it is generally true of things like planning patch content which takes many, many months of development. And even then, like I said, things can change midway, but that's not always a bad thing.

04/28/2011 06:51 PMPosted by Ajaxis

We are the player base who play the game they design, when have we ever been skeptical and been proved wrong.

Literally every patch. On hundreds of individual changes. #justsaying

04/28/2011 08:30 PMPosted by Ìntent

Given 2.1(which was WoW at it's peak for being worked on), being released in four months with two complete raids, three questing areas/daily sets.

Those instances and daily areas were originally intended to release with Burning Crusade, so yeah, while they were put on hold when we realized they wouldn't be done in time they didn't take too much time to finish off. That's sort of my point, you're thinking patch release to patch release and really there's work being done far in advance (or even at the same time), and content being shifted or even cut as we revise our schedule. Looking back at Cataclysm release, we probably should have held some stuff back, which would have created a situation not too unlike 2.1.

04/28/2011 09:04 PMPosted by Lograr

Stop working on nice, but non-essential UI improvements. It's been relentless recently, and while its nice and all, the actual, you know, gameplay is what people care about, whether they are old players or new ones.

So much this. Like honestly why are they pouring resources into remaking the character panel? The game isn't any more fun or any prettier looking as a result.

As much as we would love for every employee to be a master artist, programmer, modeler, animator, composer, etc. etc. individual people have individual crafts. While potentially hilarious, you wouldn't want the UI designers to be crafting raid bosses.

04/28/2011 10:11 PMPosted by Ophidon

True, except it's just one more boss, not two. :( There are only 6 in Firelands, the 7th boss is the new BH boss.

Incorrect. 6 + Rag.