by Byron Mudry on Nov 12, 2006
This week I set my critical eye on the expansion rate of WoW. What I want to look at is the general expansion rate of WoW now that we have a set day for the first official expansion. How has World of Warcraft expanded or grown since its release up to this point? How has the community reacted to the expansion rate? Will the community remain happy if this expansion rate continues? All these questions and more looked at…
The first thing to look at is, has the world of Azroth grown and expanded since its first release. For this the answer is a definite yes. There have been many changes and additions to WoW since its first release. There have been festivals, world events, new dungeons, new quests and more. In fact I looked at this a little while ago in the following article: What’s Changes in 2005? - http://wow.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=299.
The article gave a look at what changed in WoW last year, of course more has changed since, but it’s a good start. It shows that lots has changed even though we don’t always remember it. Since then even more has changed with the release of Naxxramas and several other events. Most character classes have also been completely or partially updated since the initial release.
The second of the questions above is a bit trickier, how has the community responded to this rate of change. It’s trickier because it depends who you talk to. If you ask a raider, they are probably fairly happy since they are still working their way through Ahn’Qiraj and Naxxramas. There are a few guilds that have defeated these raids, but they are few and far between. If you ask a PvP’er they may or may not be happy depending on which one you ask. If you ask an average player they are probably not very happy since most of the content added has been for the raiding and pvp crowd.
Even though Blizzard responded to casual players complaints over lack of gear or things to do at the top level cap of the game, the response was generally viewed as a cop out. No new content was added, instead they recycled and reused existing content, making you run already tired and overused instances again and again.
The biggest complaint that has been heard from players recently is the length of time it has taken to get the first expansion out the doors and into their hands. Most MMO’s take anywhere from a year to 18 months to get their first expansion out, however by the time players are playing the Burning Crusade, over two years will have passed. This just isn’t acceptable to most players. Players realize that it takes a while to get things ready and to make sure that it is as bug free as possible, however with the resources available to Blizzard it just seems way too long. An MMO is about change and growth, when the end game becomes stagnant, players leave. Luckily for Blizzard the buzz around WoW has kept more people joining than leaving, but how long can that continue for.
Also while players in general are happy that things have changed, most are not happy with the amount of change. You can hear constant complaints in the game about the amount of money that Blizzard is collecting and the lack of return for the players investment. After all Blizzard has over 6 million players paying roughly $15US a month or $90 million dollars a month. At that rate we should be getting a lot of changes each month, not the average small patch every 6-8 weeks. By now Blizzard has long since paid off their development costs and they are strictly raking in the cash now. Shouldn’t they give something more than the bare minimum back to the players? To many the fees are going to pad Blizzards pocket book instead of being turned back into the game.
Obviously a company should profit on its success. The question here (and the complaint) is to what degree should they profit. I remember seeing a long time ago and article about WoW and how Blizzard expected 1-2 million players. That means they expected and planned for 15-30 million dollars a month in income. If they had planned for it that means they were going to be able to make a profit with that amount of income. They also had to have an expansion plan based on that income. To many this is still the plan they are following despite have 3x the cash flow they were expecting. With 3x the income, we should expect 3x the change and they could still expect 3x the initial profit. It’s simple math. Instead we seem to be seeing the same planned change and Blizzard is receiving 50 times the profit (or more).
Lastly, is the community happy with the current rate of expansion? I would argue that no, they are not. However this will immediately change upon the Burning Crusades release. Everyone will be gung ho for the new zones, dungeons, and adventures. They will quickly forget past complaints and rush to explore the new zones. By the time they tire of the Burning Crusade they will have forgotten the lull before it and start over.
My thought is that the Burning Crusade will sate players desire for something new for at least 6 months, giving Blizzard enough time to come up with something to keep them busy for a bit longer. This should take them to almost next Christmas before players start to complain again.
So if players are likely to be happy for the next year, should they be?
I would argue that no they shouldn’t. With the player base that Blizzard has they have a huge amount of funds coming in each month. I believe we should almost be getting a Burning Crusade sized expansion for free each year! At the bare minimum a new instance each month, a raid every other and a new zone every few months would be acceptable to me. Instead of the slow crawl of new content.
To be fair the content expansion is on pace with the average MMO’s out there. However WoW is not an average MMO. It is THE MMO, it dominates the market. It sets records for paying players. In short it defines the genre and the MMO market. If the average MMO manages to put out the same amount or more new content with 200 – 500 thousand players, shouldn’t we demand more with 6 million plus paying players?
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