Timetable for Expansion 5

As I've said before, the current situation is unprecedented in WoW history (except possibly during Vanilla,) which is that we've got our final raid patch before we've heard a peep out of Blizzard about the content of the subsequent expansion, except for the inference we can make that it will probably bring us to level 100, given that I doubt the Hellscream heirloom weapons are meant to last us two expansions.

While I cannot quite remember how long the gap between 2.4 and 3.0 was (I think it was only a few months, as I recall Sunwell coming out in early 2008,) the time between 3.3 and 4.0 and the time between 4.3 and 5.0 both took a very long time (I could be mistaken, but I believe 3.3 was the longest-running patch, and may have been over a year, though we did get the Ruby Sanctum during that time.)

So, with 5.4 out on September 10th (for my future records!) and Blizzcon essentially two months after that, on November 8th and 9th, one wonders how long 5.4 will last.

Blizzard has stated time and again that they want to speed up the content cycle this time around, and while they've certainly brought patches faster and more furiously, only every other one has brought a new raid. Now, I'm definitely not saying that raids are the only content of worth in WoW. Not only did the "in-between" patches bring a lot of balance and tweaking, but the 5.1 daily hubs were also the most popular ones in the expansion (doubly impressive, given how sick and tired people were of daily quests after 5.0.)

And yet, the raids of Mists of Pandaria actually came out at roughly the same pace they have in previous expansions. We had the usual fall launch, the second tier coming out in the summer, and the third tier coming out the following fall. This pretty closely adheres to the schedule of Cataclysm.

So the question is: can we expect them to be any faster in coming out with the next expansion? I'm certainly not sick of Siege of Orgrimmar yet - only eight of the fourteen bosses are even out on LFR, and I'm hoping that I can get my guild running the flex mode so we can make something like progress.

And I'm all for letting the final patch of an expansion drag out for a bit. This is the time when you get to get your alts geared up, and when you get to go back to the old raids and farm achievements, or take the time doing the silly things.

But do we want to spend a year sieging Orgrimmar? Maybe not.

Of course, the funny thing is that there's nothing really to get excited about yet. We don't know if we're going to be fighting the Burning Legion or the Old Gods or the Great Gazoo, and we don't know if we're getting playable Murlocs, a Tinker class, or just some fancy-looking new character models (I'd guess the latter.)

The thing is, these expansions have to go through months of Alpha testing, and then Beta testing. Historically, Blizzard has generally done an internal Alpha, then a Friends and Family Alpha (which is when most of the first exciting leaks show up, as some of those friends or family members seem to talk to MMO-Champion) and then the closed Beta, where the lucky few get to see the new expansion at its ugliest and most broken (I'm really mixed on doing the Beta, as it kind of spoils the sense of discovery when you first arrive in the new zones at launch. I primarily enjoyed leveling up Icatia, a female human Monk. I think I got her up through Badlands before the beta ended. Oh man, did they make Tiger Palm less annoying.)

But all this testing time means that it will take that much longer to launch the expansion.

We might just have to resign ourselves to the understanding that WoW expansions will generally come out roughly every two years, which means we'll be spending another year in Pandaria. It's not the end of the world, but it does kind of contradict Blizzard's faster content goals.

Alternatively, here's the surprise I'd like to hear at Blizzcon: announce that the Beta is starting like a week, or maybe a month after the announcement.

I don't think we'll have a release date at Blizzcon, as they really do want to test the thing out on the masses to find any nasty bugs. But if they could start the Beta before the end of 2013, they would be set up for a far earlier launch, as early as late spring/early summer.