Anticipating Cataclysm with Spreadsheets
I am very excited about the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. A big part of that is the promise of new pets, new pet families, and possibly new mechanics for stabling our pets (which was mentioned in the last BlizzChat Twitter thing).
But even beyond the pets, I am just ecstatic about the notion of changes in old Azeroth. Do you have any idea how many characters I’ve leveled to 25 or so over the past 5 years? No, me either. (I tend to delete them when I get bored.) But I suspect that it approaches 50 at least. And after 50 characters, I am thoroughly exhausted by the existing content. I still like it, I’m just exhausted by it.
So I’m on the edge of my seat here, waiting for Cataclysm. Or even any tidbits of Cataclysm news, really, which have been few and far between so far. The two bits of information I am most desperate for: a launch date, and the date that beta will begin. I expect that I am not alone in wanting to know these things, either, although I admit that I have ulterior motives.
First off, I need to schedule my burnout. See, I go through phases where I am very into WoW and playing every day (or at least wanting to play every day) and phases where I couldn’t really care less about the game. These phases tend to be pretty short — which is why I never bother to cancel my account — and I don’t have a ton of control over them, but I can at least modulate my playtime to burn out less soon if I know I need to. And it would be really sad if I’d just gotten annoyed with WoW when the Cataclysm beta started …
Moreover, even if I’m not in the beta I have to be ready to beg, borrow, and bribe for any snippets of information I can get about the coming changes to pets (and mounts, and tabards) so I can be ready with sexy, useful, updated sites on launch day.
Anyway … I’d love to know when the Cataclysm beta is going to start and I’d love to know when Cataclysm itself will launch.
So as I often do when I am interested or concerned about some topic, I made myself a spreadsheet. I grabbed the launch dates for the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, and then looked up the start dates for their alphas and betas (at least as well as we knew them). This let me make some comparisons in terms of number of days in alpha vs. number of days in beta and so forth.
Coming at the same question from the other side, I also grabbed the dates for each major patch since 2.0 so I could look at the number of days between major patches. In this case I only went back to patch 2.0 because the philosophy of patches seems to have changed right around then. (There were 12 major patches between 1.0 and 2.0, but only four between 2.0 and 3.0, and we seem to be on schedule for three or possibly four before 4.0.)
So … my conclusions (such as they are):
In the best case, Blizzard won’t be holding Cataclysm for the holidays and they aren’t terribly far behind their presumed normal development schedule. So if Patch 3.3 was the last major patch of this expansion and the timeline is similar to the run-up to Wrath, then we should see Patch 4.0 around mid-June and Cataclysm proper around August. If that were true, then we could see beta in mid-April and probably something about a Friends-and-Family alpha by … err … the beginning of March.
Well, if we don’t hear something about alpha soon then we know that guess is probably way off! *grin*
In the worst case, Blizzard may hold Cataclysm for a holiday launch — which generally means mid-November — or they may be a bit behind schedule and have decided to shim in another major patch. In this case, we might expect to see a Patch 3.4 in May with patch 4.0 in October. This is actually pretty close to the timeline for Wrath: Patch 3.0 went live on October 14th and Wrath itself launched on November 13th.
If we are looking at a holiday launch — and for my own sanity I rather hope we’ll see Cataclysm before then — we’re probably looking at a beta that starts sometime in August, or, if they really want to maximize their beta time, possibly as early as the beginning of July. In that case I’d expect to hear something about a Friend & Family alpha in May or June.
By the way, it should go without saying that all of these dates and the assumptions behind them are absolute hand-waving and have no distinguishable connection to reality. And I most certainly do not have any inside information about this!
This is just the sort of thing I do when I don’t have any books to read …
8 Comments
Ah ha, very cool use of old data.
Didn’t the F&F beta begin already? That should put them more or less on schedule.
Blizz will hold Cataclysm until another mmo makes them feel vaguely threatened, so they drop an xpac on their competition’s head like an anvil and kill them, just like they dropped BC on Vanguard and WotLK on Warhammer.
Expect Cataclysm to come out sometime shortly after SW:ToR does.
Also, no xpac shall arrive before a high-end raid that only like 2% of the game’s population will ever experience, like Naxx40 and Sunwell Plateau. Expect another uber-raid before we can really write off Wrath as being over, probably coinciding with squeezing in one more arena season as well.
Um… We have another uber raid already. It’s called Icecrown Citadel.
Aaron – Blizz have explicitly said that they don’t like the fact that so few people got to see Sunwell and the original version of Naxxramas. Hence the re-use of Naxx as the starting raid in Wrath, the introduction of raiding Hard Modes (allowing normal mode to be more forgiving) and the incremental player buff in ICC.
Mania – I think your patch counts are a bit off, as Blizz have done a lot more “3.x.y” patches for balance and content updates in Wrath (and I seem to recall they did quite a few in TBC as well). They’ve even announced that the Ruby Sanctum will be coming in a 3.3.5 patch rather than 3.4. Given that 3.3.3 is still on the PTR (and likely will be for at least another couple of weeks), we’re probably looking at getting that raid instance on live realms some time in May. Give people a couple of months to play with that and we’re back to looking at a July timeframe as the earliest possible date for a patch 4.0, and Cataclysm no earlier than September.
Those sorts of dates bring us back to a late April/early May kind of date for a F&F alpha.
I must admit when I saw the title of this post, I thought you were going to have a bunch of pre-prepared spreadsheets for any lucky alpha- or beta-key recipients to fill in and send to you as soon as any applicable NDAs no longer applied :)
Nimizar: You’re undoubtedly correct. I just wanted some time frames to ease my mind, and my quick ‘sheeting gave me a min and max I can be comfortable with. :>
I like the idea of a spreadsheet for beta-testers, but I think we’ll need to know more about fundamental changes before I could really put one together. I guess the new/changed pets would be simple enough, though … *wanders off to think about that*
You also have to take in account that blizzard also wants to push another game in release this year.
I hope blizz is smart enough to not stack big releases and put atleast a month in between two.
My friend’s brother, a programmer at Blizzard, has promised a shiny Cataclysm beta for me when released, but he says it’ll probably be a bit. Right now, they’re concentrating Starcraft II since those beta keys were just released.
I’m totally with you Mania. I have WAY too many characters and probably half of my “alts I got to 25″ were hunters… Those of us who have played since the beginning hardly have to think to get our characters to that level and fall into predictable patterns. I mean, you try to mix things up, but its just become very easy and mindless to wade through the old content without enjoying it or even trying. Except my mage alts… survival tended to always be interesting on my mages…
I am also chomping at the bit to get info on cata. As soon as I get any hard info about any new tamable beasties for cata, I’ll post it straight away.
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