I must partly agree with uzbek: “I think the problem is simply Cata isnt as good as Wrath was.”

If Blizzard’s target audience are casual players, there’s simply not much for them to do in Cata. Hardcore raiders and PvPers will have months and months of fun, but your random player who does a heroic a day (and now fails it), or a random battleground (and now cannot get epics) could feel a bit bored.

But the future looks bright!

The two people above Morhaime in the management chain are from Activision.

Blizzard has been successful and has been given a long leash, but that lasts only as long as they don’t screw up. They have just screwed up.

I too have serious doubts Titan is going to be anywhere near as successful as WoW has been.

Contract programmers could be used for certain aspects of code work, but if a company wants someone good for the long term, that company will need to train a code jockey in their processes and philosophy. It takes time to do this, no matter how skilled the new programmer is.

Like Kiantremayne said, trying to keep a handle on multiple releases is a royal pain in the ass. Even if the code doesn’t directly overlap, you need to make sure that the code you’re working on isn’t broken by the stuff farther up the release chain. You’d be surprised at how often things will break when at first blush they don’t seem connected at all.

In the end, however, it all comes down to money, and whether Activision is willing to pay for a larger quality Blizzard development staff.

What will change in 4.2 that would make it impossible to draw a dungeon for 4.3?

And if you do need to change the engine at a fundamental level every patch have you perhaps built your engine wrong? Rift has an engine that is designed around patching in new content, it’s very clear they could give us dozens of new rifts by the end of the week if they wanted to.

And yes, if enough people act like vindictive bastards, it will indeed show them. If not, at least I will have the satisfaction of not contributing to their livelihoods.

I think we’re seeing the maturation of the market. More frequent content additions isn’t a bad idea, but neither does it really recognize the changing demographics of gamers (early WoW adopters may well be having babies now, and *that* changes play patterns) or the changing financial market.

With fun games like RIFT in the mix, yes, I expect WoW numbers to change.

It’s about time. Keep ‘em on their toes, I say.

That’s not to say Blizzard couldn’t do expansions faster. they take a lot longer than other companies, the volume of content in each one isn’t that much more than anEQ or DAoC expansion and they can certainly afford to throw more developers at it. Right now, Blizzard are the George R R Martin of games and Trion are starting to look like the Terry Ratchett games company – also quality and much more output

I think Blizzard is counting on “Project Titan” to pick up what WoW is losing, but I’m not sure that is a realistic expectation. WoW was an anomaly, always has been, always will be. I don’t think anything will duplicate its success, even another game from Blizzard.

I’ll see you in WoW’s next expac, then?