Will SE pull a blizzard?

[MerleSirlos]

To many players the fact that raids are released every 6 months but are usually cleared in less than a quarter of the time is already seen as an issue, catch up patches and 24 man content does very little to entice players who are already at the higher ends of the game as by that point many of them are gearing alternate classes through the same raid that they did for their primary.

An extra 2 months for a playerbase that has been bored for 3 is still a long time.

This is then a completly different problem. The focus of the discussion was dry content on a long gap between last patch and first patch of the following extension. Which is not true. If the content added doesn't suit your taste you cannot complain there is no content. (but you can complain you don't like it.)

And now we are moving the discussion to the time lenght between two high end raids. 6 months might be too long for players like you who finish a raid tier in a month or two, farm it for the following month and are left with nothing to do for 3 months. But for players like me who finish it maybe one week or two before the next raid tier arrives, it's totally fine, it suits my pace. (don't take this personally, I don't know how you play, this is just an exemple to illustrate the situation.)

So which kind of player should the game support more? Obviously the majority, or else the game sinks. the game is a mmo with a lot of different kind of players (that the community liikes to categorize in harcore, midcore and casuals but meh). the content might be too much for some, not enough for others, but the game needs to find a balance where the majority is ok with. If you try to move this balance (for exemple by making more hardcore content which will lead to less midcore and/or casual content) then you are pretty much asking for the game to die.

Square Enix decided to go for a 3 months gap between major patches and high end raid tier every two major patch. that's the pace they decided would be balanced for the majority of players they were aiming for. It's up to the players that are on each extreme to adapt their pace to the game's pace. if it's too fast, you either skip some content or stay behind, if it's too slow, do other content or play something else. In the end it's up to each player to decide how they want to manage their time in the game taking patch content pace into consideration.

[Ryel]

This is then a completly different problem. The focus of the discussion was dry content on a long gap between last patch and first patch of the following extension. Which is not true. If the content added doesn't suit your taste you cannot complain there is no content. (but you can complain you don't like it.)

And now we are moving the discussion to the time lenght between two high end raids. 6 months might be too long for players like you who finish a raid tier in a month or two, farm it for the following month and are left with nothing to do for 3 months. But for players like me who finish it maybe one week or two before the next raid tier arrives, it's totally fine, it suits my pace. (don't take this personally, I don't know how you play, this is just an exemple to illustrate the situation.)

Except the question that started the thread was in concern to content gaps leading up to the expansion.

If the same content schedule follows suit up to the next expansion we will go through a very similar content drought to the period between 2.5 - 3.0 because of where it falls on the patch schedule. There was a very large gap in content for any player that remained current in content, there is even a poster saying they were thankful for the break because they were able to play other games the opposite of what a subscription based MMO relies on to make it's revenue.

So which kind of player should the game support more? Obviously the majority, or else the game sinks. the game is a mmo with a lot of different kind of players (that the community liikes to categorize in harcore, midcore and casuals but meh). the content might be too much for some, not enough for others, but the game needs to find a balance where the majority is ok with. If you try to move this balance (for exemple by making more hardcore content which will lead to less midcore and/or casual content) then you are pretty much asking for the game to die.

Square Enix decided to go for a 3 months gap between major patches and high end raid tier every two major patch. that's the pace they decided would be balanced for the majority of players they were aiming for. It's up to the players that are on each extreme to adapt their pace to the game's pace. if it's too fast, you either skip some content or stay behind, if it's too slow, do other content or play something else. In the end it's up to each player to decide how they want to manage their time in the game taking patch content pace into consideration.

This is a debate for another thread, my initial comment was to illustrate the drought timeline and express that It would be against SE's best interest to have a similar content drought as so far unofficial records have shown a drop in player subscriptions after each occurrence. For some reason however players wish to debate this when it has very much been the case regardless of any individual feelings on SE's delivery of content as a whole.

There have been droughts and we have lost players who have not returned during them, therefore in the future it would be best for them to reconsider the types of content they release in the long period leading up to an expansion release.