How Many Raid Tiers in an Expansion?

In a very interesting interview with Tom Chilton, WoW's Game Director talked about some intriguing details about Warlords. I recommend checking it out (it's on MMO-Champion and a bunch of other sites.) First of all, Chilton talked about how the WoW team grew by 80 members over the last year (not sure how much they had to start with.) The idea was that they wanted to get a quicker pace of expansions in the future, but they needed a bigger team to produce stuff in the volumes they need. The problem is that with so many new employees, they also needed to get those guys up to speed, which in the short term slowed down their development process. The hope, then, is that now that those guys are up to speed, they will be able to hit the pace they've been aiming for.

I'll believe it when I see it, but if this expansion-a-year cycle is what they're shooting for, what does that mean for raids?

To be clear, Chilton said that any raid tier is going to get a minimum of four months. They don't want another Ulduar situation, where the super-awesome raid everyone worked really hard on (and is beloved by players) gets obsoleted before people have had time to really work on it. But he also said that they want a maximum of six months, which is certainly very welcome given that we're in the middle of a fourteen month stretch of Siege of Orgrimmar.

The interesting thing about this, though, is that he actually said that they are considering not having multiple raid patches in Warlords, if they are able to speed up the expansion-building process. If that were the case, then we could very well actually wind up with only two raid tiers in the expansion.

Reflexively, the thought makes me shudder a little, but on the other hand, if we got two raid tiers and then another expansion (with another starting raid tier, of course) a year after Warlords, it would actually mean more raid tiers.

The question, then, I think, is how we want our expansions paced. Right now, and since WoW started, expansions have been a biennial thing. And in a lot of cases, it's worked out that with three raid tiers, you can sort of start with the expansion's headliner villains, then go and deal with a secondary threat, then return to take out the big bad. Think Naxxramas-Ulduar-ICC, BoT/BWD-Firelands-DS, or HoF-ToES-ToT-SoO. Scourge-Old God-Scourge, Black Dragonflight/Twilight's Hammer-Fire Elementals-Twilight Dragonflight, Sha-Mogu-Sha. Yeah, some of these are a slight stretch, but it works.

The thing is, if we wind up facing Grommash in the raid tier immediately following Blackhand, will that be enough of a build-up? And will Warlords feel kind of light as an expansion?

Really, what it kind of boils down to is whether we want to have two light expansions in place of one heavy one. And while the common response is quality over quantity, it's pretty clear that new expansions are exciting. If they can truly keep them coming once a year, you're far less likely to see these subscription drops (and while I do respect Blizzard as artists, they are also in the entertainment industry, and money is what keeps the gnomes in the giant hamster wheels that generate the power for Blizzard's headquarters fed,) which I think are often from lack of content (also bad decisions about daily quests. 5.0 was pretty rough.)

On the other hand, and this is very likely just because it's what I'm used to - is a year long enough for an expansion?

Leveling up is not a super-long process, at least the first time, which actually means that a huge amount of the work put in to build a new expansion gets consumed in the first week or two (though alcoholics like me can keep that going for a long time, though I am really sick of the Horde intro to Jade Forest, even if I've done it more on Alliance.) But still, it does take a little while to gear up, and to catch up and get your character in a position where you can feel really well-put-together. I'm at a point, for example, with my Paladin and Death Knight where I can stand back and say "yes, these guys really are outfitted as they should be at the end of this expansion." I feel powerful. I can take my DK and slaughter the Ordon Yaungol without breaking a sweat (except maybe the super-powered ones in the shrine.) Every expansion, though, that gets reset (to an extent, every tier, but someone in full ToT epics is still going to feel pretty powerful in most of Pandaria.) So the consequence of this is that if you got an expansion every year, you'd be back to leveling greens once a year.

And that might cut down on some of the alts I level, but on the other hand, I'm insane, whereas most players focus on one or maybe two or three characters. And I'm sure that now that they probably have all three of their hypothetical characters rocking nice sets of SoO and Timeless Isle World Boss gear and probably all of them glimmer with legendary cloaks (to be fair, I've only done that on the Paladin and DK,) they're really, really ready for something new, and likely find themselves in that position relatively often.

Granted, from a player's perspective it's not such a bad thing to be able to take a break from WoW for a while and not feel like you're missing anything, but Blizzard clearly needs, financially, to keep people engaged and playing.

So the year-long expansion cycle, if it is indeed possible, could be a good thing or maybe not. I think right now, Blizzard should try to see if it can pull it off (but for the love of the light, don't sacrifice quality for it.)

And give us some damn Demon Hunters already. Jeez!