In the Burning Crusade content patches were roughly one year apart from each other with balancing patches being done in between. This model was unfavorable to guilds that were successful because of the constant need to recruit new people guilds were falling apart left and right at the end of every content push. The Black Temple content push was by far the single worst of all of them. By the time Nihilum (the number one guild in Europe) was able to crush through all of Black Temple a year had past and now hundreds of guilds had caught up on progression and many more were getting better luck with key pieces of gear (War Glaives of Azinoth).
SK Gaming (who got all the Sunwell world firsts) set up a precedent for gaming with how they dealt with Black Temple. Seeing as how Hyjal and BT were cleared in one day they raided Black Temple on alts. They geared out there alts and then by the time Sunwell came along they had multiple alts (along with just other people) who were as geared as their mains. This allowed for constant swapping for perfect group compositions for each raid with optimal gear setups. Compare that to Nihilum which was losing members left and right and simply unable to replace. People in hardcore settings do not enjoy social farming.
So what kind of people do you recruit to a guild that raids one day a week? Skilled socials of course! This was the line Nihilum fed the raiding community as it fell to world 10th on Kil’jaeden. This sent blizzard a very clear message from roughly 25 of their biggest fans…. they needed to produce content on deadlines. Sunwell was supposed to be released three after Black Temple as a tier compliment. Blizzard was so focused on making their broken arena system work that they forgot what the majority of their game was doing.
In Wrath of the Lich King I think you saw a complete 180 on their content push schedules. Instead of waiting too long on new content they actually released it too fast. Naxxramas to Ulduar was fine only because the Naxxramas tier of content was lacking and weak. However afterwards it just seemed that content was coming out of nowhere. The raid additions went: Ulduar > Trial of the Crusader > Onyxia’s Lair >Icecrown Citadel > Halion. Each one of these was released within 5 months of each other and each with with large packs of achievements that people did not have time to do.
What effect did this have on the game? HIGHER RETENTION RATES. People were sticking to guilds longer and it almost became impossible to get into a strong guild. Instead of people watching the top three guilds they moved to watch the top ten and eventually the top 100. The skill cap in these guilds rose as people were able to keep their members and develop their guilds. In a Burning Crusade world all the good players would flock towards 10-20 top guilds… I did. In an atmosphere where bosses die people are likely to stay and as people cleared through literally 2x as much content that was available in Burning Crusade there was a sense of well being in guilds.
So come to today. Blizzard announced that Firelands before Cataclysm came out and most thought it was going to be entry-level content because it was featuring the recycled Ragnaros the Firelord. People thought it was coming soon considering how fast this entry level content was cleared. So now they’re going to delay content so that people can clear it. The general feeling is blizzard may return to this old BC farm model. Problematically of course is it will make recruiting for your guilds painful as you endure long progression pushes.
TheGameGuru.Me 