The Glade 4.0

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/241 ... on-Preview

Looks like it will be the last raid of the expansion pack. Probably the last major patch, too. I haven't played for a few months, but this is kinda...I don't like it. I felt there was a lot more room in this expansion. 3 major content patches and only 2 new raids is incredibly lame. Fewer free updates is never a good sign for an MMO, in my opinion.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Maybe they are going to go the SoE EQ way of things, and start releasing expansions every 6-10 months?

Well, they are bleeding subscriptions at the moment. They've lost about a million subscribers since Cataclysm hit. WoW will still be around for a while yet...but I have to imagine they will continue to decline if they do stop giving out free updates like they have in the past and make people start paying for more expansions on a shorter development cycle.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Pretty sure they had already said months ago that they would be releasing expansions faster. It's a bit of a juggling act between time, expansions, and free content, but as it is now in Cataclysm it's not a good thing.

Compare it to WotLK and it works out pretty similarly, though for different reasons. Starting content in Cata was way better and immensely more worthwhile. Very few guilds were stomping through all the content in T11 as opposed to almost any raiding guild stomping through all of Naxx early on. Firelands is a good raid, but does not stand up to Ulduar (though Ulduar has probably been the best raid instance ever, so...) ToC is going to have no equivalent, apparently... though some people seemed like they'd have preferred ToC not be released! :p Now it will be 4.3 and Deathwing raid released in around approximately the same time into the expansion that ICC was... except instead of ICC being cleared for a full friggin year we will have an expansion sooner.

Blizzard's faster-paced expansion plan was supposed to be accompanied by faster-released content, but I'm not sure that's a viable strategy to begin with. Assuming devs can come up with decent content really really fast, there's an overall pacing that needs to be maintained, IMO. If the majority of players aren't killing the end bosses of a tier on normal difficulty by the time the next tier is released, then that tier was probably released too fast.

Burning Crusade had its content timing issues, too. Maybe something like WotLK would be best, except in place of ICC we had some other interim raid, with ICC released 6 months after.

...but ultimately I'm not really sure how much is too much to ask for. I feel a little bit like a spoiled greedy Internet person if I make demands of X hours of free content per expansion. You can probably approach it scientifically by looking at what have been overall trends in the industry, but that would take a crazy amount of research to do it right. Probably best to just guesstimate from the past as it was intended, rather than how it ended up... cause for all the nostalgia of WoW Past and all the panic/glee over how WoW Present is crashing and burning, I don't think we want the full year of just Tier6 or just Tier10 again. Whether cutting that full year into half a year for an earlier expansion release is any better or worse can be discussed, but content release schedules have proven disappointing through every expansion.

I really like the idea of the transmogrifier, but it infuriates me that I held onto items in my bank because it took literal months to acquire some of those pieces. And then Blizzard kept shoving more crap down our throats that took up tons of real estate, keeping some of those older sets just couldn't be justified. So, deleted they were.

Now, they come around with this saying "Yeah, if you already have the item...."

And you know Blizzard, this would have also been avoided if you'd given us **** houses/apartments with display cases. Something that pretty much every MMO does... except you.

I have a pair of ogre jumblies you can promptly lick, Blizzard.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

It would be nice, if they are gonna do this, to just allow people to pick from a huge list of items in game. The fact that they need to actually "own" the item makes no sense, since most older players have long deleted lots of items due to space constraints. And tbh, there is no way I'm going back to re-collect a lot of old stuff. Some of which can't be obtained anyways.

If they were smart, they would have installed a system where equipment didn't take up space anyways. It could be learned like glyphs, and remember for all time. Pick what you want to use from the list, click equip. Especially tabards.

And to be honest, this should be back burner stuff anyways until they update some other chit like increasing the size of the backpack. It's a crying shame that our backpack is the same damn size it was launch day.