Speed Versus Quality.

I have a ponderance about this....

     Saturday night and Sunday both went well.  (Yes, I'm combining this blurb this week)  Both nights we raided.  I had saved from the previous week so  it was all council fight both nights.  We still haven't downed the fight, but we are on the way there.  Now if everyone would watch the strategy for this upcoming week to help out.....

     This week I want to discuss one thing that occurred to me the other day.  Do you think that Blizzard's more quickly released content had effected the quality of the game?  Hear me out here.  I know I have often said that I think the more quickly released content has had a negative effect on the game itself.  It ramps up expectations and now content that would have been fine for a six month span until the next big patch is being hailed as old with in two months.  That is not what I'm discussing here though.  I want to look at quality.

    First of all, let's go to the first expansion to accomplish this.  Mists of Pandaria was fantastic all the way through.  We had scenerios, lot's of endgame content, and the story felt like it had a direction that our characters mattered in.  The big patches were release, Landfall, Throne of Thunder, Escalation, and Siege of Ogrimmar. That is four big patches in what was a great expansion.  However, let's be honest here.  Before Pandaria launched we had a year of Dragon Soul in which Blizzard had time to work on this content.  I honestly don't know how much was done before hand, but I feel a lot more prep time was given for everything we experienced.  That being said, look at the last couple of patches.  Escalation had a couple of scenarios. Siege had a raid and the Timeless Isle.  While siege was big, Timeless Isle I would argue is just reskinned content with a theme that could be explored and experienced within a couple of hours.  Yes there are rewards for sticking in and working there longer, but overall, there was no reason to hang out there unless you needed some gear or had time to kill.

      Now we are in Draenor, and I think it has been less successful.  The leveling game was fantastic, but after that there is little compelling reason to leave the garrison.  Yes there was in game content, with dungeons, weekly garrison quests, etc... but to me it never felt necessary.  I had out geared heroic dungeons in two or three weeks and never looked back.  Garrison quests took a couple hours a week, and then done.  There was no reason to go out and farm since my garrison gave me adequate amounts of ore and herbs.  I've never been a part of PVP so I haven't experienced the Ashran mess.  But by all accounts I've heard it's a mess.  The raiding has been good, but that is a small part of anyone's week for the most part.  Tanaan Jungle has been fun, but once again it was basically in game at launch, and they have just had to populate it with npcs.  We walked through a large part of it in the opening cinematic, so we know at least a large part of it was finished.

     So what happened?  I suspect that without as much time to develop content that we are getting the abridged version of things.  The story lines are there, but they aren't the great bits of unfolding we saw in Landfall, or Throne of Thunder.  Instead we get little bits that last about an hour a week if we are lucky.  To me it just feels like not as much time as been spent on keeping people engrossed.  And yes before you say it, I know they have added Mythic dungeons.  Which, once again I have no reason to run because in a week of grinding in Tanaan they had no gear for me.  I do like the timewalker dungeons, but those are once every three weeks for a weekend?  On top of that, both those and Mythic can all be chalked up to re-skinned content.

    So my question is, will this be what we are looking forward to in Legion? Is everything going to be short, condensed and abrupt?  Is the content feeling like this because of the speed of releasing content, or is there something else behind it.  I have to believe the speed is part of it.  I have no evidence other then my suspicions, but if there is another reason I'm not seeing it.  Blizzard has stated they have the largest group of people working on World of Warcraft then they ever have, so it can't be manpower.

     The other problem is that if speed of release is the issue here, there is no good cure.  I've often been told that you can't do something for a customer, unless you expect to be able to do it every time.  Because once you've done something once, it becomes that customer's expectation they will get it again.  You think flyinggate was bad, see what happens if Blizzard goes back and says they are spending more time on content, rather then releasing it quickly.

But that's my opinion, what's yours?

Lag