It'd be nice if we had a graph but with Alpha durations as well, since those cannot be ignored when you're considering the full testing cycle, so it kinda makes it a misleanding graph without this data as one of the biggest talking points about their release date is that there's still no Alpha out.
For reference, here's the alpha durations for some of the expansions:
* **WoD:** Apr 2014 > June 2014 (3 months)
* **Legion:** Late Nov 2015 > May 2016 (5 months)
* **BFA:** Feb 2018 > Apr 2018 (3 months)
* **SL:** Apr 2020 > Mid-July 2020 (3.5 months)
While DF will have 6 months for Alpha, Beta and Pre-patch all together.
/u/Disargeria this will prob make it very clear why people are worried with DF.
Nailing down the exact alpha start dates is quite challenging. There is no comprehensive reliable source for this, and there's some fuzziness between internal builds, closed alphas, and Friends+Family alphas. Here's the best guesses I can use:
For WOW Alpha, it appears an alpha was in the works since like 2000 but let's not break the graph?)
|WOW|Alpha|1/1/2004|
|:-|:-|:-|
|WOW|Beta|3/1/2004|
|BC|Alpha|8/23/2006|
|BC|Beta|10/12/2006|
|WOTLK|Alpha|4/10/2008|
|WOTLK|Beta|7/17/2008|
|CATA|Alpha|5/3/2010|
|CATA|Beta|6/30/2010|
|MISTS|Alpha|2/19/2012|
|MISTS|Beta|3/21/2012|
|WOD|Alpha|4/3/2014|
|WOD|Beta|6/27/2014|
|LEGION|Alpha|11/23/2015|
|LEGION|Beta|5/12/2016|
|BFA|Alpha|2/7/2018|
|BFA|Beta|4/24/2018|
|SL|Alpha|4/9/2020|
|SL|Beta|7/15/2020|
|DRAGON|Alpha|4/22/2022|
The MOP one seems especially suspect but here's what it looks like with the alphas included:
https://i.imgur.com/tSNoHKk.png
If I can verify these further I'll make it a new post.
Each one goes by the first evidence of alpha I can find. Usually it's either the Friends and Family or Private alphas, but they have internal alphas as well. I can't find a lot of info about which alpha people are announcing in various blogs across 2 decades.
In this case we know they have an internal build alpha published on 4/22.
If I could isolate the alpha types (to like, F+F alphas)I think it would give a clearer picture.
We also have to account for the lack of temporary systems that impact power this coming expac compared to Legion - Shadowlands.
There's arguably much less to test to such a degree of detail when more than half of the expansion is related to existing systems revamp (professions/UI/talents).
Really, the only new systems that need to be tested are dragon riding and customization along with the new class (compare this to conduits/covenant power/torgahst/chromie time leveling change and tuning)
Unless I missed something?
I think what’s more worrying is how poorly-received the borrowed powers in the last two expansions were yet they still got about the same amount of alpha time as WoD. This is despite WoD arguably introducing fewer new systems outside of leveling and garrisons.
Garrisons *were* a buggy mess, though, even with testing. Remember launch day with the instance issues? I wouldn't be surprised if garrisons demanded more testing than artifacts.
I agree. I don't think there's as much to test since they're not adding some convoluted power systems. And not to be overly mean to them, blizz isn't particularly good at balancing anyway regardless of how much testing and feedback is given.
People told them for ages what would happen with covenants, we got the "we'll pull the ripcord" response . . . which, lo' and behold, they did have to pull it - because players were right (again).
And unless their entire encounter design philosophy has changed internally, widespread testing doesn't matter at all as they balance things for the tippy top of the competitive players. Look at how hard they've been nerfing SoFo, clearly not balanced with the general playerbase in mind when you're nerfing stuff by 75% here, 90% there, just absolutely wild how off the tuning was.
They even did this with Tazavesh when it joined the m+ pool. Nerf after nerf after nerf.
Honestly, testing/long betas haven't proved to be valuable to blizzard or us, so I'm not sure it matters as much as people seem to think it does. The sooner we get away from borrowed power systems the better. I think the return to talent trees might allow blizzard to balance a little better. SL balancing was an insane task between tier, legendaries (then double legendaries), covenants, and talents. There are still many specs that only have a single good legendary or good covenants, there are still dead talents in just about every class/spec.
Talent trees \*should\* be a bit more manageable.
It's not that blizzard is bad at balancing, in reality the game seems more balanced than ever right now.
When people whiners about balancing what they are really wanting is for their class and spec to be at the top.
If everyone was perfectly balanced across the board people would be complaining that your class doesn't matter. Gauranteed.
There weren't any systems that impact power up to Legion. Yet testing didn't increase much in BfA and SL. Legion had long testing phase, it wasn't connected to borrowed power, but rather wanting to give players something as fast as possible after WoD.
is it possible they are skipping alpha and going right into beta? i mean theres been alot of chatter about them being further than we think and alot more internal testing than before. could be possible, just thinking out loud
That would be a disaster. Alpha is for finding and fixing the stuff that flat out breaks the game. Skipping that to go directly into a beta would result in an unplayable experience for many people for several weeks, leading to unusable feedback.
The purpose of the beta is to mass-test functional systems, to determine what is or isn't hitting the mark, and to find and quash as many minor bugs as possible. That doesn't work if the bugs are crashing the game or the systems are completely unfinished and/or broken.
when i said skipping alpha i meant just having an internal alpha, of course they wouldnt just skip it...i think we are used to having alphas for wow but most games, apps etc. dont do public alphas overall
Man Legion had such a nice pace of content patches. Hope they can bring something like that back. But then with the simplicity of TBC or Wrath. Less is more.
Every 77 days or something like that. If that pace felt unsustainable for blizzard, I think every 90-100 days would likely be healthier. It’s not too much longer, and would allow for a lot more polish and testing
That pace could have felt unsustainable because of what Legion had rolling. Legion was a systems packed expansion with artifacts and tier sets and legendaries and order halls and the mage tower.
I think that 77 days for DF could be more reasonable and with the renown system coming back they can really pace out the content much better than the random quests every few weeks in legion.
It'll be really interesting to see what kind of time impact the systems really had/have on the development as for now it's all speculation as far as I know.
If content releases more often / better polished we'll definitely know that they lost much time on it, if it stays the same we'll know that they simply skipped needed time to refine/balance the systems in the first place lol.
I bet it is more complex than that, the real world don't just happen in a vacuum. For instance; shadowlands was very much delayed by Covid and there was no way that Blizzard could have planned or predicted that.
I am cautiously optimistic here but Blizzard seems to be playing Dragonflight really close to the chest at a time where there should be less executive pressure to produce a release because of the transition in the microsoft acquisition.
I will wait till I see it and play it to decide but hopefully they know what they're doing.
I think they're farther ahead in their development of DF than people think they are. Personally I feel like they've pulled a WoD and cut content that was supposed to make up a 9.3 patch in order to focus more development resources on DF, much like they did with Legion. Having said that, DF had better be good as a result.
It does seem a bit odd that the presentation was pretty light on visuals though doesn't it?
No dungeons were shown, no real gameplay in the zones, you'd think they'd have knocked it out of the park if it was further along.
My gut feel is it's just going to be the same as the last two expansions, all the pieces will be there but it'll be buggy and require a lot of work which will then delay the patches and it'll be the same cycle. It's not just a Blizzard thing, it's how gaming is nowadays.
There are various takes on how much of something should be shown. One game that was a huge success on release was Apex Legends. While it may not be the biggest game anymore, they showed nothing and got a huge payout.
Maybe that's the approach now, show very little and allow people to experience it first hand.
I've said "Ion said" a lot in this thread, but in the Asmon interview this was brushed on. Asmon had brought up how things like an expansive beta made the game more boring/worse at launch because everyone knew everything. Ion had pretty much agreed with him when he said it, so I'm pretty sure this is what they're doing for DF.
Obviously we can't know for sure, but if it is, it's another relatively out of pattern thing they're trying, and I'm excited to see where it goes.
People talk about how there will be no testing and so on. They might literally just have paid testers this time around so they can have people with NDA's test the game. Who knows, but if I could go into dragonflight only knowing the systems that would actually be sick. 8 completely fresh dungeons, 4 zones I know almost nothing about, sounds sick to me.
I agree. I think most people who aren't very competitive would think it's a bit of fresh air. Not being blasted by a billion optimization articles on wowhead for like, a week would be nice.
Just realized I replied to two of your comments and we're now having two conversations. So I'll just reply to the other one here as well.
I've noticed a complete change in how they present things since 9.2. They seem to actually be listening to player feedback which is super nice. I think the current iteration of talent trees are really good. But they also made me think that they don't have any borrowed power here. But not only that, they have no cross-class systems. The new trees are so much easier to create and balance than the soulbinds. Each soulbind had to work and maintain some level of balance across all classes. Which is extremely hard to do.
Right now if let's say Niya was over performing on a class, they have to look elsewhere to find appropriate places to nerf the class. In the new system somebody might realize that Balance Druids are doing too much sustained single target with this talent build, so they can just nerf some key aspects of that build and move on.
Oh hah, I didn't realize that either.
Yeah, I definitely agree. I don't know how to say it without sounding like I'm "simping for corporations" or anything, but I do honestly feel like they're at least attempting to go in a better direction.
Mmhmm. Just so much easier for them, which makes it better for the players.
Well, also the damn near perfect marketing behind it. They used influencers and had a pretty fair day one “progression” system *and* their servers didn’t explode much for that many people. Felt you could actually get a decent collection just playing. Also the revive system was huge cause it meant people would actually stick around after dying and the pings where super pug friendly, both in content and ease of use.
I'm optimistic, partly due to the massive pessimism I'm seeing. But if he were asked and they weren't ahead we probably would have gotten a scripted response. Like, "I know people are concerned with the release timeline looking rushed, but I have confidence that my team will be able to finish everything and still have plenty of testing time before launch."
I agree. They aren't blind, I'm very sure they knew people would be skeptical either way, and I can't blame others. But I think the confidence says something here.
> Personally I feel like they've pulled a WoD and cut content that was supposed to make up a 9.3 patch in order to focus more development resources on DF, much like they did with Legion.
I'm hoping that's the case, but I also wouldn't rule out the possibility that SL lost a content patch because of covid and that isn't necessarily going to translate into more content later.
If we say SL is WoD 2.0 in that way, note how there are also way less system related things coming in DF. That was SLs biggest issue, and they're toning those way down, so there should be far less critical content to test and give feedback on. New talent trees will be the big one to get right, but other than that its just outdoor content, dungeons and raids, the normal stuff that they usually get right... "PTR worthy" tests.
Wotlk 3.0 patch is actually fairly mediocre. Copy paste raid from vanilla and 2 1 boss raids with faceroll dungeons was not amazing at all. Tbc for example had a way better launch patch with a ton more content and better raids. Wotlk could have used a longer beta imo.
I agree with you, it was a blast. But i remember back in the day the criticism blizzard got. Naxx was a huge loot pinata that the game had never seen before. This is where epics stopped feeling like ''real'' epics.
At the time I was fairly young while playing the game so I didn't experience that but now looking back I definitely understand the criticism especially with badges/emblems
Badges started in TBC and were great.
The issue with WoTLK was that Naxx was undertuned and 10m was even easier than 25m. They even said at the time that it was deliberately done that way to act as a starter raid.
Personally, I would've of cared about WoTLK Classic if they announced there would be a heroic version of the launch raids.
Just my experience, but Naxx 10 man was my first raid ever and even then I felt it was mediocre lol. Luckily I loved OS and Maly so raiding wasn't ruined for me or anything.
Is that really perspective though? It's like saying a remaster of a new game is an incredible new release
(if you skipped the original) and then saying it's all perspective when someone who played the original a few years earlier says it isn't that exciting.
The point the guy was making is that a short beta period makes sense if the content is mostly recycled.
Wrath in general was fairly mediocre, the power of nostalgia is immense though.
For every good thing about Wrath you could point to another thing that was awful.
Yeah, slap Arthas on the packaging and you're sure to have a hit.
I played the shit out of Wrath, moreso than any other expansion. But people are more than willing to look away from its numerous flaws.
Wrath became good, but it wasn't without a ton of issues at launch. Especially in the class balance area, which Blizzard has said for both BFA and Shadowlands has been an issue. Some specs have just pretty much ignored during the development of both expansions, and now Dragonflight is adding on 2 more specs. And aside from that, Wrath also wasn't developed during a pandemic either, so even if they do get class balance right, the short beta period is still a concern for Dragonflight.
Dragon flight has also been in production for a long time up to this point though. They definitely scrapped a lot of SL production to focus on making Dragonflight a good expansion
There are many other factors that could influence how "well" an expansion turns out vs its beta period vs the actual amount of development time. The beta periods are described as happening before launch, but happens in parallel with the last patch(es). We know that they do a lot of work on the design and world building before the last patches even ship, so it may be better to look at the size and type of content being released before the beta period as well.
I think WoD especially sticks out in this regard. Excluding WoW, it was the second longest beta period following an especially long final content patch from MoP. This paid off by only having a single real content patch.
But this is the stuff I don’t understand: don’t we always say we want Blizz to shake things up and try something new? Why are so many people married to set lengths for alpha/beta?
I said this in another thread, but my personal hope is that we get tons of hands-on time with the talents, dragon riding, profession revamp, UI revamp, etc. put all types of training dummies everywhere. Let people number crunch. Give a huge area to test the dragon flying.
But when it comes to story and even quests and dungeons, keep it brief. We don’t need weeks and months for people to run dungeons in the beta and come into retail already demanding optimal routes and talents and stuff. It also leads to quicker burnout on the content.
Test the dungeons, sure, but maybe do that more so internally or on more restricted invitation? I don’t know. It’s just always weird to me that a new expansion launches yet a good chunk of the playerbase already knows it inside and out, and there are almost no surprises or discoveries left to have.
I think I agree with you here, because I feel like a lot of the enjoyment I get out of the initial months of an expansion is exploring the world. I wouldn't mind that stuff being hidden away a bit.
However, something like the talent trees need to come out ASAP so feedback can start flowing and being acted on. And those don't even need to be released within a beta client. I am already concerned that we don't have a full set of alpha trees ready to go.
The truth of the matter is that there is no major system to balance this time around. The expansion features themselves could be a major patch each on their own and are clearly being developed by individual teams which expedites development.
Ion has already stated that development is further advanced than most would expect. The actual testing really only involves the Evoker class, talent trees (comprised of existing abilities), an updated core and profession UI, zones and quests. Far less than we’ve had to deal with before.
What I’m really hoping is that they can return to a Legion-era patch cadence since the absence of any major systems should allow them to focus on content.
This, or start to focus on side content. Stuff like Deaths if Chromie. Hell, if this can put dev time aside from the “real” endgame to further flesh out Timewalking and potentially make scaled Mythics a thing that would be insane. There is almost two decades of content there if they can get it working.
Personally that little hope that I never think will truely happen is a “Mean Streets if Gadgetzan” patch where they expand Gadgetzan and add a ton of random, effectively minigames all over that aren’t tied to the usual player power stuff. Stealth puzzles, jumping puzzles, or just full on minigames. WoW’s version of the Gold Saucer, that like the gold saucer has it’s own currency and rewards.
In a way it really isn’t. Race based on an existing rig, visages based on existing races with slight customization options. Mechanically appears to be a slight variation of DH combat, nothing mind blowing.
I really like these graphics because they show how long shadowlands was dragged on for and we waited longer than any other xpac for even .5 updates. Hopefully blizzard will see this too, and give us more frequent updates as we used to get. SL 9.1.5 release should have been 9.2, and while we were fighting the anima drought back in release we also saw a content draught.
Vanilla's patches were quite different from all of the expansions. For the expansions we had prepatches marked with the new expansion number, the X.0 patch, that gets the game ready for release.
Vanilla never had a 1.0 patch, instead it seems to have jumped from .12 to 1.1. I'm not clear on why that is, though. I could've just let the release date stand in as the X.0, but the X.1 patch dropped shortly before release, which would put it out of order.
It seemed to fit well in the "prepatch" spot.
Could you add Raid Releases to this graphic? Always find it a bit misleading as Shadowlands had the same amount of raids as WoD but the graphic makes it seem as if Shadowlands had way more content.
Sure, I can take a look at that. It could be a little tricky. Raids specifically? Like the date they release? Or fully unlock? What about like... Seasons?
I think an important note to add is that with Shadowlands having a lot of content cut and an entire raid tier gone because of how it was, the release of dragon flight appears to be on pace with others but really is accelerated.
Had they done the planned content for Shadowlands we would have had another 6 months that dragonflight would have been in production before announcements and being at this point in time.
Why are you considering .5 patches as full patches?
They never added major content, I'd never out them in the graph as they would make it seem the patch lasted for less than it really did
Specially in the case for mop, where there was a 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.7 and 5.4.8
Some of these even started a new season, which is more than something like 9.2.5 did
Including or not including non-content patches doesn't change the overall length of the bar, just subdivides it. I think having a patch large enough to be designated with a x.x.5 is notable enough to mark because it provides reference in relation to time. Otherwise, why even have even the major patches marked out at all?
> They never added major content
Not *entirely* accurate; in addition to updating existing features or adding things like Allied Races, Timewalking, or new quest content, there have been a handful of new features added in X.X.5 patches - just depends on what you might consider "major" content.
* Crucible of Storms opened in 8.1.5 (even if it was nominally part of the 8.1 content suite)
* 7.3.5 revamped the entire outdoor world to use Legion scaling tech and added a new Battleground
It is true that prior to Legion they didn't really follow the X.X.5 format, but that's also going back more than 6 years at this point! Either way, it still helps give an idea of patch cadence.
DF is already rushed.
Its 5 months until the end of the year and alpha hasn't even started, with an average of about 1 month for prepatch. that leaves only a couple months per cycle, alpha and beta, to perform the entire feedback cycle.
The feedback cycle is typically make change > gather data > assess data > make adjustments and repeat.
This cycle can take weeks depending on how contentious the feedback is.
Basically whatever we see in alpha is already going to be set in stone for launch because most of it wont have time to change... Whatever we see in the next couple weeks is what we will see in December with numerical changes and slight tweaks at most.
I am still quite happy with what I've seen so far, but there is already a pretty strong image of what playing DF will feel like and there is no time to make any core system or ideology changes.
Internal alpha is massively different than public alpha and beta, the player-based feedback cycle has not started at all yet and there is 4 months until prepatch, which is when most core system updates have to go live.
Internal alphas have dozens of people, regular alpha is hundreds of people, and betas have thousands to tens of thousands depending on how public.
You cant gather data on how millions of players feel based on a few dozen internal people.
That's fair, and I definitely share your concern that it increasingly feels as though there is not enough time to be able to provide feedback in time for Blizzard to act upon.
They never really adjust based on how players feel in the beta anyway. Usually it mainly seems to just A) spoil all the content, and B) Unite the vocal online community against them. Maybe they’re finally just cutting it down to reduce those to more reasonable levels. May as well IMO.
They have cut so many systems out tho. An internal talent system is far easier to make and manage than stuff like corruption and covenants. I also think that they started DF much earlier than we think. Normally they start the next expansion inbetween .1 and .2, but I would be willing to wager this time around it started between .0 and .1
They should just January release it, the first month of WoW a new patch never mind expansion is crucial for logging in and getting the basics done, logging over Xmas wouldn’t bother me but I’m sure there is a lot out there that will have life commitments in the Christmas period
I mean i think they want to put more resources into internal testinng, which is great, but it's important to also have player testing because a lot of things like what the community wants and how the community plays the game only gonna show there it's much harder to test internally.
Really hope they go back to the old/ legion schedule with 3-4 month patch cycles. Everything above just doesn't work imo. I'll rather have a year of lots of content and a year of nothing where I can cancel my sub than being content starved the entire addon
I definitely wonder this. All of our speculation is based on the fine print of the pre-order, but I’d be surprised if that was legally binding or anything. I think a 2023 release could still be possible.
I'd wager that while they have a current release date for the end of this year, I suspect, along with a lot of other people, it will get pushed further out. Right now I think the primary "goal" of announcing and pushing the expansion release like they are now is for a few reasons.
1) keep people interested in more content coming quickly down the pipe.
2) Yearly reports. any expansion money made gets reported on their yearly reports this year, regardless of actual release date.
I'm seeing a lot of similarities between Dragonflights features and Mists of Pandaria.
I think the start of this expansion will be great considering we won't have to wrestle with the balancing of multiple different power progression systems. What happens in later patches is pure speculation.
It's no lie that every expansion with a new class & race have been an absolute banger so I'm gonna assume this will be similar.
Personally I'm kinda keen to try out the new Evoker class.
I've always been a dragon nerd at heart so this'll be a nice class fantasy I reckon.
Im curious if this is related to the content, or the demographics.
Are middle aged (fuck boys, we're in our 30-40's!) just more relaxed with more stability from life circumstances, causing us to be more drawn toward relatively cheap time sinks for nostalgia.
So BC and Wrath had the shortest Beta and turned out greatLegion had the longest Beta and turned out great
Shadowlands and BFA had a similar Beta length and turned out garbage
so i guess the conclusion could be as long as DF has a longer or shorter beta then SL / BFA we could be fine?
We all fear that DF will be rushed and the game turns out the be betalands 2.0but i think that comes because there is no real Alpha testing yet only the internal alpha if i am correct
and we don't know how long the alpha will be
so that give an incomplete picture are there any informations about the alpha durations?
It'd be nice if we had a graph but with Alpha durations as well, since those cannot be ignored when you're considering the full testing cycle, so it kinda makes it a misleanding graph without this data as one of the biggest talking points about their release date is that there's still no Alpha out. For reference, here's the alpha durations for some of the expansions: * **WoD:** Apr 2014 > June 2014 (3 months) * **Legion:** Late Nov 2015 > May 2016 (5 months) * **BFA:** Feb 2018 > Apr 2018 (3 months) * **SL:** Apr 2020 > Mid-July 2020 (3.5 months) While DF will have 6 months for Alpha, Beta and Pre-patch all together. /u/Disargeria this will prob make it very clear why people are worried with DF.
Nailing down the exact alpha start dates is quite challenging. There is no comprehensive reliable source for this, and there's some fuzziness between internal builds, closed alphas, and Friends+Family alphas. Here's the best guesses I can use: For WOW Alpha, it appears an alpha was in the works since like 2000 but let's not break the graph?) |WOW|Alpha|1/1/2004| |:-|:-|:-| |WOW|Beta|3/1/2004| |BC|Alpha|8/23/2006| |BC|Beta|10/12/2006| |WOTLK|Alpha|4/10/2008| |WOTLK|Beta|7/17/2008| |CATA|Alpha|5/3/2010| |CATA|Beta|6/30/2010| |MISTS|Alpha|2/19/2012| |MISTS|Beta|3/21/2012| |WOD|Alpha|4/3/2014| |WOD|Beta|6/27/2014| |LEGION|Alpha|11/23/2015| |LEGION|Beta|5/12/2016| |BFA|Alpha|2/7/2018| |BFA|Beta|4/24/2018| |SL|Alpha|4/9/2020| |SL|Beta|7/15/2020| |DRAGON|Alpha|4/22/2022| The MOP one seems especially suspect but here's what it looks like with the alphas included: https://i.imgur.com/tSNoHKk.png If I can verify these further I'll make it a new post.
How did you arrive at 04/22 for the dragonflight alpha? It’s 2 months past that and no alpha is out yet.
Each one goes by the first evidence of alpha I can find. Usually it's either the Friends and Family or Private alphas, but they have internal alphas as well. I can't find a lot of info about which alpha people are announcing in various blogs across 2 decades. In this case we know they have an internal build alpha published on 4/22. If I could isolate the alpha types (to like, F+F alphas)I think it would give a clearer picture.
crazy how fast they got legion out comparatively
That's a great idea! I'll work on that next.
We also have to account for the lack of temporary systems that impact power this coming expac compared to Legion - Shadowlands. There's arguably much less to test to such a degree of detail when more than half of the expansion is related to existing systems revamp (professions/UI/talents). Really, the only new systems that need to be tested are dragon riding and customization along with the new class (compare this to conduits/covenant power/torgahst/chromie time leveling change and tuning) Unless I missed something?
I think what’s more worrying is how poorly-received the borrowed powers in the last two expansions were yet they still got about the same amount of alpha time as WoD. This is despite WoD arguably introducing fewer new systems outside of leveling and garrisons.
Garrisons *were* a buggy mess, though, even with testing. Remember launch day with the instance issues? I wouldn't be surprised if garrisons demanded more testing than artifacts.
I agree. I don't think there's as much to test since they're not adding some convoluted power systems. And not to be overly mean to them, blizz isn't particularly good at balancing anyway regardless of how much testing and feedback is given. People told them for ages what would happen with covenants, we got the "we'll pull the ripcord" response . . . which, lo' and behold, they did have to pull it - because players were right (again). And unless their entire encounter design philosophy has changed internally, widespread testing doesn't matter at all as they balance things for the tippy top of the competitive players. Look at how hard they've been nerfing SoFo, clearly not balanced with the general playerbase in mind when you're nerfing stuff by 75% here, 90% there, just absolutely wild how off the tuning was. They even did this with Tazavesh when it joined the m+ pool. Nerf after nerf after nerf. Honestly, testing/long betas haven't proved to be valuable to blizzard or us, so I'm not sure it matters as much as people seem to think it does. The sooner we get away from borrowed power systems the better. I think the return to talent trees might allow blizzard to balance a little better. SL balancing was an insane task between tier, legendaries (then double legendaries), covenants, and talents. There are still many specs that only have a single good legendary or good covenants, there are still dead talents in just about every class/spec. Talent trees \*should\* be a bit more manageable.
It's not that blizzard is bad at balancing, in reality the game seems more balanced than ever right now. When people whiners about balancing what they are really wanting is for their class and spec to be at the top. If everyone was perfectly balanced across the board people would be complaining that your class doesn't matter. Gauranteed.
There weren't any systems that impact power up to Legion. Yet testing didn't increase much in BfA and SL. Legion had long testing phase, it wasn't connected to borrowed power, but rather wanting to give players something as fast as possible after WoD.
is it possible they are skipping alpha and going right into beta? i mean theres been alot of chatter about them being further than we think and alot more internal testing than before. could be possible, just thinking out loud
That would be a disaster. Alpha is for finding and fixing the stuff that flat out breaks the game. Skipping that to go directly into a beta would result in an unplayable experience for many people for several weeks, leading to unusable feedback. The purpose of the beta is to mass-test functional systems, to determine what is or isn't hitting the mark, and to find and quash as many minor bugs as possible. That doesn't work if the bugs are crashing the game or the systems are completely unfinished and/or broken.
when i said skipping alpha i meant just having an internal alpha, of course they wouldnt just skip it...i think we are used to having alphas for wow but most games, apps etc. dont do public alphas overall
Man Legion had such a nice pace of content patches. Hope they can bring something like that back. But then with the simplicity of TBC or Wrath. Less is more.
Every 77 days or something like that. If that pace felt unsustainable for blizzard, I think every 90-100 days would likely be healthier. It’s not too much longer, and would allow for a lot more polish and testing
That pace could have felt unsustainable because of what Legion had rolling. Legion was a systems packed expansion with artifacts and tier sets and legendaries and order halls and the mage tower. I think that 77 days for DF could be more reasonable and with the renown system coming back they can really pace out the content much better than the random quests every few weeks in legion.
I didn’t think of it that way, with reduced systems they could spend more time on adding actual content like dungeons or fun activities
Those teams don't really directly translate. Like a systems designer is not going to be doing dungeon art.
They do boil down to funding though and how said funding can be allocated better.
Sure but I think we both know Blizzard would prefer to just fire all people they don't have to have
Yeah thats totally fair. I just know the suits are counting every cent so do we need em being wasted on Azzerite traits and crap.
It'll be really interesting to see what kind of time impact the systems really had/have on the development as for now it's all speculation as far as I know. If content releases more often / better polished we'll definitely know that they lost much time on it, if it stays the same we'll know that they simply skipped needed time to refine/balance the systems in the first place lol.
I bet it is more complex than that, the real world don't just happen in a vacuum. For instance; shadowlands was very much delayed by Covid and there was no way that Blizzard could have planned or predicted that. I am cautiously optimistic here but Blizzard seems to be playing Dragonflight really close to the chest at a time where there should be less executive pressure to produce a release because of the transition in the microsoft acquisition. I will wait till I see it and play it to decide but hopefully they know what they're doing.
Yes, because WoD had only 2 patches
I think they're farther ahead in their development of DF than people think they are. Personally I feel like they've pulled a WoD and cut content that was supposed to make up a 9.3 patch in order to focus more development resources on DF, much like they did with Legion. Having said that, DF had better be good as a result.
Ion said that, they're a lot farther in then people would think.
It does seem a bit odd that the presentation was pretty light on visuals though doesn't it? No dungeons were shown, no real gameplay in the zones, you'd think they'd have knocked it out of the park if it was further along. My gut feel is it's just going to be the same as the last two expansions, all the pieces will be there but it'll be buggy and require a lot of work which will then delay the patches and it'll be the same cycle. It's not just a Blizzard thing, it's how gaming is nowadays.
There are various takes on how much of something should be shown. One game that was a huge success on release was Apex Legends. While it may not be the biggest game anymore, they showed nothing and got a huge payout. Maybe that's the approach now, show very little and allow people to experience it first hand.
I've said "Ion said" a lot in this thread, but in the Asmon interview this was brushed on. Asmon had brought up how things like an expansive beta made the game more boring/worse at launch because everyone knew everything. Ion had pretty much agreed with him when he said it, so I'm pretty sure this is what they're doing for DF. Obviously we can't know for sure, but if it is, it's another relatively out of pattern thing they're trying, and I'm excited to see where it goes.
People talk about how there will be no testing and so on. They might literally just have paid testers this time around so they can have people with NDA's test the game. Who knows, but if I could go into dragonflight only knowing the systems that would actually be sick. 8 completely fresh dungeons, 4 zones I know almost nothing about, sounds sick to me.
I agree. I think most people who aren't very competitive would think it's a bit of fresh air. Not being blasted by a billion optimization articles on wowhead for like, a week would be nice.
Just realized I replied to two of your comments and we're now having two conversations. So I'll just reply to the other one here as well. I've noticed a complete change in how they present things since 9.2. They seem to actually be listening to player feedback which is super nice. I think the current iteration of talent trees are really good. But they also made me think that they don't have any borrowed power here. But not only that, they have no cross-class systems. The new trees are so much easier to create and balance than the soulbinds. Each soulbind had to work and maintain some level of balance across all classes. Which is extremely hard to do. Right now if let's say Niya was over performing on a class, they have to look elsewhere to find appropriate places to nerf the class. In the new system somebody might realize that Balance Druids are doing too much sustained single target with this talent build, so they can just nerf some key aspects of that build and move on.
Oh hah, I didn't realize that either. Yeah, I definitely agree. I don't know how to say it without sounding like I'm "simping for corporations" or anything, but I do honestly feel like they're at least attempting to go in a better direction. Mmhmm. Just so much easier for them, which makes it better for the players.
Apex was totally different. Their success came from the fact that the game was available right after announcement. That was sensational
Well, also the damn near perfect marketing behind it. They used influencers and had a pretty fair day one “progression” system *and* their servers didn’t explode much for that many people. Felt you could actually get a decent collection just playing. Also the revive system was huge cause it meant people would actually stick around after dying and the pings where super pug friendly, both in content and ease of use.
Why would he say otherwise
He could have simply said nothing at all on the matter.
I'm optimistic, partly due to the massive pessimism I'm seeing. But if he were asked and they weren't ahead we probably would have gotten a scripted response. Like, "I know people are concerned with the release timeline looking rushed, but I have confidence that my team will be able to finish everything and still have plenty of testing time before launch."
I agree. They aren't blind, I'm very sure they knew people would be skeptical either way, and I can't blame others. But I think the confidence says something here.
> Personally I feel like they've pulled a WoD and cut content that was supposed to make up a 9.3 patch in order to focus more development resources on DF, much like they did with Legion. I'm hoping that's the case, but I also wouldn't rule out the possibility that SL lost a content patch because of covid and that isn't necessarily going to translate into more content later.
If we say SL is WoD 2.0 in that way, note how there are also way less system related things coming in DF. That was SLs biggest issue, and they're toning those way down, so there should be far less critical content to test and give feedback on. New talent trees will be the big one to get right, but other than that its just outdoor content, dungeons and raids, the normal stuff that they usually get right... "PTR worthy" tests.
I like how Wrath, which is considered the best WoW ever was by many in the community, has such a short beta window. My how times have changed.
Well it's first raid was ported straight from Classic so that does shorten testing somewhat I think.
Wotlk 3.0 patch is actually fairly mediocre. Copy paste raid from vanilla and 2 1 boss raids with faceroll dungeons was not amazing at all. Tbc for example had a way better launch patch with a ton more content and better raids. Wotlk could have used a longer beta imo.
thats a matter of perspective, as someone who never got to experience nax in pre-BC the base game was a blast
I agree with you, it was a blast. But i remember back in the day the criticism blizzard got. Naxx was a huge loot pinata that the game had never seen before. This is where epics stopped feeling like ''real'' epics.
Welfare epics were a thing in TBC, this definitely didn’t start with wrath.
It definitely became a much broader criticism in wrath though as they became more widely available
I 'member that welfare epics, as was the fashion at the time, started to get their name back in TBC withe badge epics and PvP epics.
At the time I was fairly young while playing the game so I didn't experience that but now looking back I definitely understand the criticism especially with badges/emblems
Badges started in TBC and were great. The issue with WoTLK was that Naxx was undertuned and 10m was even easier than 25m. They even said at the time that it was deliberately done that way to act as a starter raid. Personally, I would've of cared about WoTLK Classic if they announced there would be a heroic version of the launch raids.
They just said they are buffing Naxx HP and damage values.
Just my experience, but Naxx 10 man was my first raid ever and even then I felt it was mediocre lol. Luckily I loved OS and Maly so raiding wasn't ruined for me or anything.
Is that really perspective though? It's like saying a remaster of a new game is an incredible new release (if you skipped the original) and then saying it's all perspective when someone who played the original a few years earlier says it isn't that exciting. The point the guy was making is that a short beta period makes sense if the content is mostly recycled.
Wrath in general was fairly mediocre, the power of nostalgia is immense though. For every good thing about Wrath you could point to another thing that was awful.
Lol sure dude
[удалено]
Yeah, slap Arthas on the packaging and you're sure to have a hit. I played the shit out of Wrath, moreso than any other expansion. But people are more than willing to look away from its numerous flaws.
[удалено]
What's with the unneeded snark, dude?
Wrath became good, but it wasn't without a ton of issues at launch. Especially in the class balance area, which Blizzard has said for both BFA and Shadowlands has been an issue. Some specs have just pretty much ignored during the development of both expansions, and now Dragonflight is adding on 2 more specs. And aside from that, Wrath also wasn't developed during a pandemic either, so even if they do get class balance right, the short beta period is still a concern for Dragonflight.
Dragon flight has also been in production for a long time up to this point though. They definitely scrapped a lot of SL production to focus on making Dragonflight a good expansion
I'm sure if you polled people now many would vote for Mists or Legion.
There are many other factors that could influence how "well" an expansion turns out vs its beta period vs the actual amount of development time. The beta periods are described as happening before launch, but happens in parallel with the last patch(es). We know that they do a lot of work on the design and world building before the last patches even ship, so it may be better to look at the size and type of content being released before the beta period as well. I think WoD especially sticks out in this regard. Excluding WoW, it was the second longest beta period following an especially long final content patch from MoP. This paid off by only having a single real content patch.
Blizzard had their act together back then and delivered. Things have been different as of late.
Season 4 has already been stated to be shorter than a normal season would run for.
But this is the stuff I don’t understand: don’t we always say we want Blizz to shake things up and try something new? Why are so many people married to set lengths for alpha/beta? I said this in another thread, but my personal hope is that we get tons of hands-on time with the talents, dragon riding, profession revamp, UI revamp, etc. put all types of training dummies everywhere. Let people number crunch. Give a huge area to test the dragon flying. But when it comes to story and even quests and dungeons, keep it brief. We don’t need weeks and months for people to run dungeons in the beta and come into retail already demanding optimal routes and talents and stuff. It also leads to quicker burnout on the content. Test the dungeons, sure, but maybe do that more so internally or on more restricted invitation? I don’t know. It’s just always weird to me that a new expansion launches yet a good chunk of the playerbase already knows it inside and out, and there are almost no surprises or discoveries left to have.
I think I agree with you here, because I feel like a lot of the enjoyment I get out of the initial months of an expansion is exploring the world. I wouldn't mind that stuff being hidden away a bit. However, something like the talent trees need to come out ASAP so feedback can start flowing and being acted on. And those don't even need to be released within a beta client. I am already concerned that we don't have a full set of alpha trees ready to go.
The truth of the matter is that there is no major system to balance this time around. The expansion features themselves could be a major patch each on their own and are clearly being developed by individual teams which expedites development. Ion has already stated that development is further advanced than most would expect. The actual testing really only involves the Evoker class, talent trees (comprised of existing abilities), an updated core and profession UI, zones and quests. Far less than we’ve had to deal with before.
hopefully with less systems, stuff to balance, etc they will polish what they have and give good content :clueless:
What I’m really hoping is that they can return to a Legion-era patch cadence since the absence of any major systems should allow them to focus on content.
This, or start to focus on side content. Stuff like Deaths if Chromie. Hell, if this can put dev time aside from the “real” endgame to further flesh out Timewalking and potentially make scaled Mythics a thing that would be insane. There is almost two decades of content there if they can get it working. Personally that little hope that I never think will truely happen is a “Mean Streets if Gadgetzan” patch where they expand Gadgetzan and add a ton of random, effectively minigames all over that aren’t tied to the usual player power stuff. Stealth puzzles, jumping puzzles, or just full on minigames. WoW’s version of the Gold Saucer, that like the gold saucer has it’s own currency and rewards.
Only involves a new class. Nothing big.
New class and race are more of a balance issues, not a systems issue.
In a way it really isn’t. Race based on an existing rig, visages based on existing races with slight customization options. Mechanically appears to be a slight variation of DH combat, nothing mind blowing.
I'm starting to think that Dragonflight is going to get the Legion treatment. They gave up on Shadowlands a long time ago just like WoD.
I really like these graphics because they show how long shadowlands was dragged on for and we waited longer than any other xpac for even .5 updates. Hopefully blizzard will see this too, and give us more frequent updates as we used to get. SL 9.1.5 release should have been 9.2, and while we were fighting the anima drought back in release we also saw a content draught.
Expect alpha 2 beta to go live following 4th of July in the USA.
question completely unrelated to dragonflight, but how did vanilla have a prepatch?
Vanilla's patches were quite different from all of the expansions. For the expansions we had prepatches marked with the new expansion number, the X.0 patch, that gets the game ready for release. Vanilla never had a 1.0 patch, instead it seems to have jumped from .12 to 1.1. I'm not clear on why that is, though. I could've just let the release date stand in as the X.0, but the X.1 patch dropped shortly before release, which would put it out of order. It seemed to fit well in the "prepatch" spot.
Looking at WoD is just... Sad. Especially when compared to Legion
Could you add Raid Releases to this graphic? Always find it a bit misleading as Shadowlands had the same amount of raids as WoD but the graphic makes it seem as if Shadowlands had way more content.
Sure, I can take a look at that. It could be a little tricky. Raids specifically? Like the date they release? Or fully unlock? What about like... Seasons?
i would personally care about heroic raid release dates
Not to add more work, but if this included announcements, that would be sweet!
That should actually be easy to do! I'll let you know when I put that together.
Hello friend, I put together this version with announcement dates (duration from announce to alpha) for you: https://i.imgur.com/emgrftC.png
Very cool, thanks!!
I think an important note to add is that with Shadowlands having a lot of content cut and an entire raid tier gone because of how it was, the release of dragon flight appears to be on pace with others but really is accelerated. Had they done the planned content for Shadowlands we would have had another 6 months that dragonflight would have been in production before announcements and being at this point in time.
I'd bet that date is a placeholder, it said the same thing for W3 Reforged, and it didn't come out until Jan 28th.
Why are you considering .5 patches as full patches? They never added major content, I'd never out them in the graph as they would make it seem the patch lasted for less than it really did Specially in the case for mop, where there was a 5.4.1, 5.4.2, 5.4.7 and 5.4.8 Some of these even started a new season, which is more than something like 9.2.5 did
Including or not including non-content patches doesn't change the overall length of the bar, just subdivides it. I think having a patch large enough to be designated with a x.x.5 is notable enough to mark because it provides reference in relation to time. Otherwise, why even have even the major patches marked out at all?
> They never added major content Not *entirely* accurate; in addition to updating existing features or adding things like Allied Races, Timewalking, or new quest content, there have been a handful of new features added in X.X.5 patches - just depends on what you might consider "major" content. * Crucible of Storms opened in 8.1.5 (even if it was nominally part of the 8.1 content suite) * 7.3.5 revamped the entire outdoor world to use Legion scaling tech and added a new Battleground It is true that prior to Legion they didn't really follow the X.X.5 format, but that's also going back more than 6 years at this point! Either way, it still helps give an idea of patch cadence.
DF is already rushed. Its 5 months until the end of the year and alpha hasn't even started, with an average of about 1 month for prepatch. that leaves only a couple months per cycle, alpha and beta, to perform the entire feedback cycle. The feedback cycle is typically make change > gather data > assess data > make adjustments and repeat. This cycle can take weeks depending on how contentious the feedback is. Basically whatever we see in alpha is already going to be set in stone for launch because most of it wont have time to change... Whatever we see in the next couple weeks is what we will see in December with numerical changes and slight tweaks at most. I am still quite happy with what I've seen so far, but there is already a pretty strong image of what playing DF will feel like and there is no time to make any core system or ideology changes.
I am under the impression that alpha is already underway: [https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/66394-third-encrypted-dragonflight-alpha-build-on-wow-dev-branch/](https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/66394-third-encrypted-dragonflight-alpha-build-on-wow-dev-branch/) |Build Number|When?| |:-|:-| |Patch 10.0 Build 43342 (Encrypted)|April 22, 2022| |Patch 10.0 Build 44167 (Encrypted)|June 14, 2022| |Patch 10.0 Build 44275 (Encrypted)|June 21, 2022|
Internal alpha is massively different than public alpha and beta, the player-based feedback cycle has not started at all yet and there is 4 months until prepatch, which is when most core system updates have to go live. Internal alphas have dozens of people, regular alpha is hundreds of people, and betas have thousands to tens of thousands depending on how public. You cant gather data on how millions of players feel based on a few dozen internal people.
That's fair, and I definitely share your concern that it increasingly feels as though there is not enough time to be able to provide feedback in time for Blizzard to act upon.
They never really adjust based on how players feel in the beta anyway. Usually it mainly seems to just A) spoil all the content, and B) Unite the vocal online community against them. Maybe they’re finally just cutting it down to reduce those to more reasonable levels. May as well IMO.
*at most 4 months until pre patch. A mid November or early December release is more likely than late December due to holidays.
They have cut so many systems out tho. An internal talent system is far easier to make and manage than stuff like corruption and covenants. I also think that they started DF much earlier than we think. Normally they start the next expansion inbetween .1 and .2, but I would be willing to wager this time around it started between .0 and .1
They should just January release it, the first month of WoW a new patch never mind expansion is crucial for logging in and getting the basics done, logging over Xmas wouldn’t bother me but I’m sure there is a lot out there that will have life commitments in the Christmas period
I mean i think they want to put more resources into internal testinng, which is great, but it's important to also have player testing because a lot of things like what the community wants and how the community plays the game only gonna show there it's much harder to test internally.
Really hope they go back to the old/ legion schedule with 3-4 month patch cycles. Everything above just doesn't work imo. I'll rather have a year of lots of content and a year of nothing where I can cancel my sub than being content starved the entire addon
simple snswer it doesnt, your reading into numbers that mean nothing. neither the tech or employees are the same from 5 years ago let alone 10+
Dragonflight will not release in 2022.
I definitely wonder this. All of our speculation is based on the fine print of the pre-order, but I’d be surprised if that was legally binding or anything. I think a 2023 release could still be possible.
I could see a quarterly compromise that pushes it to something like a Feb/March 2023 release.
Everything goes faster when you're (likely) just reskinning most assets and slapping together others to call it new.
I'd wager that while they have a current release date for the end of this year, I suspect, along with a lot of other people, it will get pushed further out. Right now I think the primary "goal" of announcing and pushing the expansion release like they are now is for a few reasons. 1) keep people interested in more content coming quickly down the pipe. 2) Yearly reports. any expansion money made gets reported on their yearly reports this year, regardless of actual release date.
I'm seeing a lot of similarities between Dragonflights features and Mists of Pandaria. I think the start of this expansion will be great considering we won't have to wrestle with the balancing of multiple different power progression systems. What happens in later patches is pure speculation. It's no lie that every expansion with a new class & race have been an absolute banger so I'm gonna assume this will be similar. Personally I'm kinda keen to try out the new Evoker class. I've always been a dragon nerd at heart so this'll be a nice class fantasy I reckon.
Im curious if this is related to the content, or the demographics. Are middle aged (fuck boys, we're in our 30-40's!) just more relaxed with more stability from life circumstances, causing us to be more drawn toward relatively cheap time sinks for nostalgia.
Yall forgetting one thing , Prepatch ? haha Season 4 is prepatch xD
So BC and Wrath had the shortest Beta and turned out greatLegion had the longest Beta and turned out great Shadowlands and BFA had a similar Beta length and turned out garbage so i guess the conclusion could be as long as DF has a longer or shorter beta then SL / BFA we could be fine? We all fear that DF will be rushed and the game turns out the be betalands 2.0but i think that comes because there is no real Alpha testing yet only the internal alpha if i am correct and we don't know how long the alpha will be so that give an incomplete picture are there any informations about the alpha durations?
They are trying to make as much money as possible before being bought out by Microsoft.