Comments on: Anticipating Cataclysm with Spreadsheets

By: Epic

Epic — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:59:29 +0000

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.

By: Salera

Salera — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:12:38 +0000

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.

By: Chrizesu

Chrizesu — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:18:05 +0000

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.

By: Mania

Mania — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:23:53 +0000

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*

By: Nimizar

Nimizar — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:05:29 +0000

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 :)

By: Nachtwulf

Nachtwulf — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:20:36 +0000

Um… We have another uber raid already. It’s called Icecrown Citadel.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:04:06 +0000

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.

By: Mr. Perfect

Mr. Perfect — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:11:49 +0000

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.