Blizz Slows to a Crawl, Comprehensive Analysi

#0 - Feb. 12, 2009, 1:07 a.m.

(TLDR: Scroll to Bottom SUMMARY)

I think many people who have been around since the beta of original world of warcraft may be seeing a somewhat trouble trend with blizzard.

In short, blizzard has slowed to a crawl with content. What I mean by content is major content patches.

Now Please, hear me out. I am not about to spew hyperbole. I come with evidence. I also come with the answer on why they are possibly slowing down.

First let us begin to analyze WoW's Major Content patch history:
This will be a extensive and complete list. It will be long but I am calculating the months in between patches to prove a point. This may also give you a good prediction on when newer patches are coming out in the future. Keep in mind that testing and problems always push back patches no matter what(voice chat caused a massive headache and split patches in two as you can see below).

I have also done some statistics analysis for a more indepth look at the variance. See the data below the dates listed.

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WoW was released in November 24 2004. This is actually Patch 1.1
http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.1.0

Release date for the Patch was actually November 7th 2004.
---
Patch 1.2.0 Mysteries of Maraudon 18 December 2004
(This is 24 days after WOW Release)
---
Patch 1.3.0 Ruins of the Dire Maul 7 March 2005
(this is 79 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.4: The Call to War 8th April 2005
(this is 32 days after last patch)
---
Patch 1.5: Battlegrounds 7 June 2005
(this is 60 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.6: Assault on Blackwing Lair 12 July 2005
(this is 35 days after last patch)
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Patch 1.7: Rise of the Blood God 13 September 2005
(this is 63 days after last patch)
----
Patch 1.8: Dragons of Nightmare 10 October 2005
(this is 27 days after last patch)
----
Patch 1.9: The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (One of the best patches IMO) 3 January 2006
(this is 85 days after last patch)
----
Patch 1.10: Storms of Azeroth 28 March 2006
(this is 84 days after last patch)
----
Patch 1.11: Shadow of the Necropolis 20 June 2006
(this is 84 days after last patch)
----
Patch 1.12: Drums of War 22 August 2006
(this is 63 days after last patch)
----
Patch 2.0: Before the Storm / The Burning Crusade December 5th, 2006
(this is 105 days after last patch).

Statistics from this Data Set:
Mean(Average): 61.75 Days
Standard Deviation: 26

ON average during this period patches came out every 61 days. Just eyeballing the days above you can pretty much see that.

(Continued on next post)

Zarhym

#33 - Feb. 12, 2009, 2:17 a.m.

A lot the of 1.X content was already partially developed by the time the original game shipped. When a patch was released in that era, development on the next patch was already under way. This isn't to say we're making it up as we go now. We have clear outlines and development schedules. Ever since the release of The Burning Crusade though, the next patch to come out is more or less developed from scratch. The actual internal development pace has changed very little over time. If anything, content is developed more quickly now than it was when the game began.

Q u o t e:

QFT. Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are going to be massively successful, thus the increased manpower assigned to them. Why not keep milking the cash cow for all its worth? You can keep people going with a surprisingly small amount of new content...

This isn't really true at all. There are separate development teams fully staffed for each project.

Zarhym

#44 - Feb. 12, 2009, 2:32 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Although I do not doubt this, from my experience developers get reassigned to new projects, rather than hiring off the street. The overall headcount in the company stays about the same. "Fully staffed" for a brand new piece of software tends to be an order of magnitude larger than for a maintenance phase.

My guess is that the top-end devs/artists/designers are going 80% new project/20% WoW patches. Also from experience, people tend to get burned out if they work the the same project year after year. Having people switch to new projects makes good business sense.

It's true to an extent. Like any other company, people do go for different jobs within the company and move around according to their skill sets. This stuff doesn't usually happen suddenly though, and more often than not replacements are found before transitions happen. In other words, even if employee A moves to a new project, employee B prepares to be promoted in his place, and employee C is hired in or promoted from a different department to take employee B's place, and so on.

Zarhym

#46 - Feb. 12, 2009, 2:34 a.m.

Q u o t e:
O rly cuz i belive they alrdy have gone back in time and you can kill most of the main characters right now not to mention they've alrdy done naxxramas

Metzen will always find something awesome for you to do. The creative development department is like a factory of cool.

Q u o t e:
Zarhym started as a floor buffer.

lol... Close enough. ;)

Zarhym

#67 - Feb. 12, 2009, 3:19 a.m.

Q u o t e:
No offense intended, but that argument doesn' t make much sense at all. Either you completed the content or not... Unless you're saying you had a lot of partially created content that was abandoned that you went back to.

Art assets take quite a bit of time. If dungeon and model art for something like Dire Maul is mostly completed long before the patch is slated to go live, it's going to take a lot less time to prepare that dungeon. Ulduar's been virtually built from the ground up since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of new art is being fed into this dungeon.

Q u o t e:
Even so, what do you call Naxx? Obviously you had to re-tune it and do a lot of work to change it for Wrath, but it certainly falls under the category of "partially completed" content. Given your argument, you'd think Wrath would have come out significantly faster after TBC than TBC did after Vanilla.

I'm not sure Naxxramas relates to this conversation. We're speaking specifically about time between patches. Expansions are an entirely different animal.

Q u o t e:
One interesting issue that's missing though is there seem to bit quite a bit more mechanical and behind the scenes changes going on these days than there were in 1.x patches. I don't have anything quantitative to prove that, but it's just how it feels to me, having played since beta.

I've read a few feeling-based assumptions in this thread, most of which sound completely alien to what I see every day I come to work. Thank you for at least not stating your feelings as though they're facts everyone should know. :)

Q u o t e:
Sure, but is the WoW content design/creation team the same size as it was? Not saying it's not, just plain curious.

I don't have actual numbers, but I'd very comfortably argue that the WoW development team is bigger than it was when the game first released.

Zarhym

#71 - Feb. 12, 2009, 3:31 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Then spend less time on art. Lets face it, nobody is playing this game for its modern graphics. It really wouldn't be significantly less fun if we were killing GC's hunter pet untextured cubes. ;)

Like... no. :)

Zarhym

#80 - Feb. 12, 2009, 3:45 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Zarhym, doesn’t that somewhat contradict statements made by developers (Jeff Kaplan I believe it was) where it was said that they’re always “working two patches in advance”? Your statement seems to imply that only one patch is worked on at a time. Does working two patches in advance mean that they’re actually working on one while someone has a “cool idea” on paper for the other patch or does working on two patches at once mean that there’s actually designing and coding going on for two at the one time?

That's why I said we're not making it up as we go, and have pretty clear outlines far in advance. For instance, a lot of art and programming for Ulduar has been in progress since before Wrath was released, and is very much still in progress now. At the same time though, every day there is a more clear picture of what 3.2 and beyond will bring. We're always looking and developing in advance, but a lot more of the basic structures and art assets for many of the 1.X content patches were already fairly far into development by the time the preceding patch was released.

Crygil

#98 - Feb. 12, 2009, 4:14 a.m.

Q u o t e:

I’m absolutely mystified personally by how long it takes Blizzard to release new content for WoW.

New content is developed from "scratch" and then made in such a way that it is mostly seamless. It baffles me that so many people think that this is something that can be simply mass-produced. It's a very painstaking labor of love. As a person who has attempted to "make" games myself, I understand the immensity of this undertaking. I only wish more people would put the time in to attempt to actually create a simple game. Then, multiply that by the scope of thousands or hundreds of thousands to see the complexity of the game that our design team has produced. Perhaps then, this argument would fade away into the annals of obscurity as conjecture was replaced by reason. One dares to dream.

Zarhym

#99 - Feb. 12, 2009, 4:15 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Which is it?

In context, a little of both. Are you looking to ensure my responses have a robotic perfection to them?

Edit: First.

Zarhym

#141 - Feb. 12, 2009, 5:52 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Why every single patch so far had servers crashing for couple days? "Ice has melted" is so far best patch, nothing is crashing, just annoying chat bug.... but how can you not notice something like that? All it takes is to slap patch on internal server and log in to see if it works.

That's not really true. We do quite a bit of testing for all major content patches, but there's one major way to ensure a patch will work smoothly on the scale for which it is required to run on thousands of servers around the world -- release it.

Q u o t e:
Why is Kara + Gruul were ready out of the door, while now we only have Nexus (recycle)?

I'm assuming you mean Naxxramas. Very few people saw Naxxramas, and it fit perfectly into the story line. We included it because we thought it would be cool, and I still do think it's cool.

You could argue that Kara and Gruul were ready out the door. You could also argue that they were not tuned nearly as properly as Naxxramas. Yes, some people find Naxxramas too easy. This could be true. It could simply be because the encounters were no big secret. Either way, we decided this time around to give people a very accessible entry-level raiding experience, giving players a few months to level up, clear Naxx, and gear up before releasing the next tier.

We're also keeping more of an equal path with PvP and PvE progression. For the most part, we're going to be making sure that the next tier of raid gear is in line with the next tier of PvP gear.

Q u o t e:
Why are we still doing major balance adjustments... like 30% nerfs/buffs so late after expansion shipped?

Because we think balance could be better. That's probably not the answer you were prying for. It just happens to be true.

Zarhym

#151 - Feb. 12, 2009, 6:20 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Of course it's not true, but uhhh you neglected to mention that the Budget for the WoW project has probably been cut in half or more.

I have forgotten to mention a lot of things in this thread that could be circulating as baseless theories in the minds of those reading, you're at least right about that. :)

Zarhym

#159 - Feb. 12, 2009, 6:40 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Just out of curiousity, Zarhym, how "open" is in within the company in regards to development and such? You, for instance, are a CM, but are you briefed on new content, or is the whole company involved in the discussion? Or do you get sneak peeks because of your position?

Nothing specific, but how much of it does the average employee get to see, before the public does?

It definitely varies depending on one's position. There are sneak peaks of sorts every so often for most everyone in the company to see, but they're by no means comprehensive. It's more of a presentation of what the different teams are working on. Community managers are typically privy to a lot of information since we spend a lot of time filtering between the developers and the community.

Zarhym

#167 - Feb. 12, 2009, 7:01 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Cmon now, New MMO on the horizon, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and a movie, we're not that naive, budget cuts have been made, and WoW is the now the old clunker-cash cow you still need to get to the new stuff, and giving it the bare minimum.

Obtaining knowledge isn't the same as taking a guess, educated or otherwise, so there isn't a need to play off how sure you are of things you don't know.