The Daily Grind: How much content should an expansion have?
by Samuel Axon 
Nov 20th 2008 at 8:00AM
Filed under: Expansions, Opinion, The Daily Grind
Well, you'd think that, anyway. Word on the street is that there are already Death Knights at level 80, and all the raid content in Wrath has been completed. One player reached level 80 in only 27 hours. Over a year of development for one week of content? Are MMO players just too damned hardcore, or did Blizzard aim too low? How much content should you be getting for $30 or $40 and your continued subscription, anyway?
There are some folks out there who (to continue using WoW as an example) are still hacking through The Burning Crusade's content, or even the classic stuff. How do you think a balance can be struck between those folks, and the crews who have already bested all the Wrath content?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
VOIDsama said on 8:09AM 11-20-2008
If you want a good amount of content look at FFXI. The most recent expansion is a year old but many players are still trudging through it. While Many of the hardcore people out there did beat it swiftly there has also been periodic updates to the expansion content as well to expand upon it and keep people from being able to blitze the whole thing.
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Jeni said on 8:15AM 11-20-2008
That player that hit level 80 in 27 hours spent months in the WOLTK beta planning out the best way to do that and had an out of party pocket priest healing him through the entire experience. He got full experience, the priest got nothing.
Did you read the interview with the guy? He had a team of 5 people that he thanked for helping him powerlevel. XD So, in reality, it took him 3-5 months or so to clear the content, if you give all the prep time.
Naxx (the first raid) is SUPPOSE to be easy. It's meant to be taken as an instance that allows 10 or 25 people into it rather than 5. It's more like a booster seat for new raiders to get use to working with lots of people and to practice synergy.
If you look at the in game achievments, it's not in completing Naxx. It's completing the 25 man version with 20 people or less. ^__^
In fact, all of the entry level raid content (which is all that is out right now) has quirks for the hardcores to go after. You get better loot the LESS trash you kill in one raid (attacking the boss and the trash all at the same time). Blizzard made the raids easy for the casuals (though Uldar is suppose to be very hard and will be released in a few months). And it also gave incentive to the hardcores by offering better loot when they do incredable things like leaving lots of adds with the boss or bringing far less people than suggested.
That said, some people like to rush. I'm a casual gamer. My druid is level 74. My priest is almost level 71. I play about 2 hours a night, though I will admit to playing most of the weekend. ^__^
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ymrar said on 11:24AM 11-20-2008
It took them less than 3 (three) days to rush through the raid content. That includes bosses like Malygos that are After Naxx. Also as some people say that they have rehersed all this in beta.. so they did in TBC.. It took about two weeks (I checked.) to get world first Kara clear. Naxx (v2.) took a little over two days.
But I don't like rushing myself. I think people who rush through content like that without enjoying and admiring the work put in it are fools. What gets me, is that if endgame content (until next patch months away) would have been cleared by someone this fast on any other MMO there would be tons of negative posts on it.
In the end, if you're having fun it's the only thing that matters.
Bam! said on 8:36AM 11-20-2008
This is why Turbine has the updates it does. They started with Asheron's Call and their monthly updates. Thats right, MONTHLY content updates (that are still going 10? years later). DDO and LOTRO do something like quarterly updates. Obviously due to the graphics of those games the art and development is much more difficult to crank out than something like AC. Moral of the story is, they have the proper update schedule for a MMO. They COULD very easily switch to a microtransaction business model with this schedule.
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Uldon said on 8:38AM 11-20-2008
One reason I left WoW, it's made casual friendly but be warned if you play it that way, the Hardcore Elites in that game are brutal on the forums and everywhere else about how you should play every class.
LOTRO so far is amazing. There are hundreds of people that rolled the new classes and even more that rolled older classes to level up with them. I have NEVER seen a more friendly player base in any MMO out there than this.
As for content, I have friends who have all thier 5 character slots filled with 50's, but they never get bored with the game. Even with the Moria content out, I think the highest level last night was 54 and thats because everyone gets sidetracked by the visual display of everything in the game and you can easily forget you wanted to level.
Legendaries is the main talk of the game right now though, and how absolutely amazing they are.
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Jeni said on 9:14AM 11-20-2008
I think I would have played LotRO if DDO hadn't killed Turbine for me. I effectively (as a casual gamer mind you) beat the game on two level 10s in 4 months. I was invited into Lotro beta but the art and style was too much like DDO for me to play. I tried it out again during their free weekend and only logged in for about 2 hours before uninstalling.
I really do need a LOT of content in my games. I still have not finished every single quest in Wow and it's going on 3 years for me. I like that. It also has great replay value for me since there are different same-level questing hubs.
I feel bad for the people that rush. My guild nightly hears me giggling about this or that from what I have just discovered in Wrath. Last night, it was the poor oil soaked creatures in the Borean Tundra and the little mechanical gnomes that I was "squeeing" at. ^__^
I remember one of my officers saying: "Jeez, I just rushed through those quests. I didn't even notice this and that."
^__^ For me, it's all about enjoyment. I might not ding 80 til Christmas, but I am loving each and every moment!
Tim said on 9:11AM 11-20-2008
WotLK raid content finished??? It's not all in the damn game yet!
The analogy would be some guild whining they finished all the TBC raid content after clearing Kara once.
Now we see why Blizz had instituted the keying systems for the raid content in TBC.
I swear, if people quit bitching for a week the internets would collapse.
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Vrain said on 11:02AM 11-20-2008
It shouldn't be considered expansion content if it's not in the game yet. Anything after is free content patches.
Andrew White said on 9:14AM 11-20-2008
Why does a balance *need* to be struck? That guy who dinged in just over a day probably had a lot of fun getting so much exposure. At the other end of the spectrum is little old me. I've been playing for a year, though with huge gaps, and my main just got her first blue yesterday. In the Western Plaguelands. I have fun taking my time, checking out the scenery, and reading the quest text. At the same time, I'm learning Lua so I can write some add-ons. I'm in the UK, and my friends are in Canada, so its unlikely I'll ever raid with them. I really enjoy playing the game my way.
It is really driving me nuts that people seem to be forgetting that games are fun when it comes to the MMORPG. If all you want to do is chat and fish, hey: go nuts! Its a game. Don't play it if its not fun.
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Simon said on 10:15AM 11-20-2008
From what I've heard, Blizzard seem to have struck things right this time round.
There are always people who going to hoover up the content within a few days levelling - OK that's fine for them, but you can be sure that more than 90% of the playerbase are going to take at least a month to get through to 80.
Re. the raid content being cleared quickly - fine, these people are the elite of WoW's playerbase, good for them. Most people will take a good deal longer than this and finally Blizzard seem to be aiming their content at 'most people' instead of providing content aimed at the elite players.
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Abriael said on 10:37AM 11-20-2008
If it takes three days for the "elite" (lol) to clear the content of an expansion, how much will it take for the average raiding guild? 2-3 weeks at most?
That's definately too few for a paid expansion. It's pretty simple. Let's be honest there, Blizzard was loosing subscriptions (and with th current activision overall losses any loss is a big one) and rushed the expansion out. Good marketing move (from their own point of view) on the short term, but on the long run they might (and should) get the bottom end of the bargain.
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Jeni said on 11:06AM 11-20-2008
Abriael --
One thing Blizzard never does is rush things. ^__^ That's what WAR and AOC did...rushed. They had to leave a lot of content out and broke lots of stuff in the process.
I am in a casual raiding guild. We raid twice a week for 2 hour increments. It took us just about the entire BC expansion (over a year) to do what SK gaming and Naxx did in a month. I think that my guild (we've got 50 solid members...most of whom are level 71-74 at the moment) will be ready to step into Naxx around Christmas.
Wrath made this game just so much more fun for me. We had about 10% of the guild leave for WAR...and every single one has come back and canceled their WAR accounts. I'm sorry that the hardcore guilds are bored. But remember when Tigole said that only 1-2% of the playerbase ever got to see end game raiding in Vanilla? With BC, I'd say 50% got to see end game raiding. With Wrath, I hope 80% + will get to see it. ^__^
We're interacting with amazing lore figures (Arthas told me that I was not worthy of him 30 minutes after stepping into Northrend...it made the fangirl in me giggle...even after he killed me. Boo). We're playing a well run, well rounded, breath taking game. We have new quest mechanics and quest ideas I've never seen before! The instances are beautiful and the bosses are intrequing.
If you don't like the game, don't play it. But for the 11 million of us (minus the top end guilds that rushed), we're trucking right along in our murloc suits saving tadpoles and spending 10 minutes alone checking out the murloc suit dance and heading into the mists to watch hordes of mobs jump out of viking longboats to attack the Tuskarr villages... Well. Let's just say that we know what you and the rushers are missing. But that's okay! I hope you are having fun in your game of choice. We're having fun in ours!
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DrunkenPandaren said on 9:14PM 11-21-2008
Uh, AoC was rushed. WAR wasn't, you are dumb for comparing a game with years of polish with a new release. My guild did leave for WAR, but came back to WoW because of the expansion. Once we're finished with the content there in Wrath we'll return back to WAR.
Stop sounding too much like a fangrrl.
Jeni said on 11:07AM 11-20-2008
You know that they release their financial statements right? Blizzard-Activision is doing exceptionally well. And WoW tacked on another million subscribers. ^__^
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Tom said on 11:25AM 11-20-2008
A lot of us just take our sweet time with these games. I know I do. Rushing through content is an option, I guess, but for me it would suck the fun right out of the experience. Plus -- some of us actually have *lives* outside of MMOs to attend do!
Wrath is not going to bring me back into the WoW fold; I'm having too much fun in LotRO at the moment to even be tempted by the Lich King expansion.
But as to the original question, I'd say most expansions hit it about right in terms of content. The whiners saying there isn't enough to do really need to get out more, imo. :)
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Syme said on 11:36AM 11-20-2008
"Over a year of development for one week of content?"
First of all, even the guys who have defeated the biggest bosses in WotLK have probably not done every single quest, or even the majority of them.
Even if they have done the majority of all that is in the expanision, it's their loss to tear through it. I'm having fun with my 2 level 71s and a level 56 DK, reading quests, reading the new books in the DK starting area, stopping occassionally and just looking at the sights. While they are complaining on the forums, I'm enjoying the game.
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Syme said on 11:39AM 11-20-2008
Once again Abriael visits us from the parallel dimension in which he resides to dispense snide sobriquets and frabricated facts about WoW.
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Darkdust said on 12:53PM 11-20-2008
"Completing all quests" doesn't actually mean the same as "experiencing all the content".
If players skip over enjoying the art, music, and writing in an expansion, they haven't actually gotten all the content yet. Even for powergamers, if they don't have all the new equipment, they haven't gotten it all yet, either.
And not all games' expansions follow that sort of model. Take a look at EVE Online's Quantum Rise: re-architecture of the server infrastructure, many new missions, staged delivery (over several months), etc. In fact, you couldn't possibly just "experience" it all because it's not just a new area with new raids and such. The expansion fundamentally altered the game for everyone.
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rinks said on 12:56PM 11-20-2008
Yeah, people are hitting 80. But as far as clearing content is concerned, I hardly think 25 people out of 11 million is some kind of paradigm shift.
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Abriael said on 1:47PM 11-20-2008
Actually Activision-blizzard lost 107 millions dollars on the latest quarter, Jeni. Not exactly what I would call "exceptionally well".
As of "blizzard never rushes things", can only say "lol". WOTLK is the evident proof that they do. The addition in content is seriously insufficent for a boxed expansion.
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