Are patches coming too fast?
So the Patch 5.3 PTR was announced earlier this week, and I am currently downloading the files for it as I write this. Patch 5.2 only went live a couple of weeks ago, and its PTR began in January, a mere few weeks after 5.1 was released. Oh, and Mists of Pandaria itself has only been available since October! Whew! Ladies and Gentlemen, content in WoW's fourth expansion has been coming at a breakneck pace, and I'm not entirely sure I like it.
I'm a slow player, in all honesty. I like to take my time and explore, do lots of quests, level professions, and generally just take my sweet time. I play WoW largely to relax, and for me, racing through everything as quickly as possible is not relaxing. I also have a pretty hard limit to the amount of time I can spend playing before I start to go stir crazy and really need to get up and do something else. That isn't conducive to rapidly completing things like daily-based rep grinds. So for me, I'm a little disappointed by the short spaces between new content being released. It kind of stresses me out, makes me feel like I need to play more, and harder, to keep up. I realize that feeling is all in my own head, but it doesn't stop me from wishing I had, oh, maybe two extra weeks before the 5.3 PTR was announced!
Of course my wonderful bosses are quick to remind me that content for WoW equals content for WoW Insider. In that regard I would like to thank Blizzard for helping keep us writers employed and providing us with a steady source of material. So it's not all bad that patches are coming quickly. It's just overwhelming at times. It also makes me wonder how long Mists of Pandaria, as an expansion, will last. If patch 5.3 is in testing now, we can probably expect to see it live in June sometime. We already know that 5.4 will contain the Orgrimmar raid, so if the patches continue to release as they have been, we can likely expect to see that in September-October, almost exactly a year after Mists release. Then, what, 6.0 in December? That doesn't seem right! Blizzard has a track record of announcing the new expansions at Blizzcon, and Blizzcon isn't happening until early November.
Clearly, thinking about this any more will only result in further confusion as I lack the clairvoyance to read any developer's mind and attempt to layer assumption upon assumption. Still, I personally would have been slightly more comfortable with just a couple more weeks before the 5.3 PTR. What about you?
