So it was announced a short time ago that the new ICC raid instance in 3.3 was going to have some stipulations in it. Those stipulations being (in brief):
Now, because I am child of the warcraft blog-o-sphere, I have been reading a lot of disappointment about this news. These stipulations have been interpreted as Blizzard trying to put the breaks on hard core raiding guilds, they are appeasing to the more casual guilds, etc. and so on.
I disagree.
Now because I am not playing the game right now, or when I was playing, I was not in a totally hard core raiding mindset. I can understand why blizzard is doing what they are doing. This patch, 3.3, is supposed to be the last patch of the expansion. Arthas is supposed to be the last boss of the expansion. Just like Illidan was supposed to be the last boss of the BC expansion (and look what happened there).
If Blizzard was going to just open the doors to ICC on the first day the patch is released. Then Arthas would probably be taken down within the first week by the major hardcore raiding guilds. By the second week more guilds would have him down, and within the first month or so most of the hardcore-type raiding guilds would have this instance on farm. Now these guilds aren’t exactly common, but there are more than a couple on every server. Which means that a large population of the raiding folks on every server will get bored within the first two months of the patch having been released and will slowly congregate on the forums complaining about the lack of content and that Blizzard needs to release more content or all of the people that have nothing to do are going to go and start playing Aion (or whatever the new flavor of the month MMO is).
I am not saying that the hard core raiding types are all a bunch of whiners. They are paying money for a game just like everybody else if they want the hardcore raiding content they should have it. Just like the people that want to pvp should have the pvp, and the people that want to level up 100 alts should get new and interesting content there as well.
Because Blizzard is staging the content of this new patch, they are able to do 2 things. First it adds some lore to the game in that it makes the attack on ICC seem more like a Siege than just killing the boss. You are spending weeks in this dungeon working towards this common goal that all of the npc’s are also working towards, in a way it makes the event seem more real. But second, it also gives the developers a little more time to work on Cataclysm that they otherwie wouldn’t have.
To be honest, Cataclysm is who knows how many months away, we have yet to see so much of the new content, most of the stuff heard from Blizzcon was phrased as “We think” or “We would like to see”. I saw more story board art than actual screen shots, and they aren’t even in beta with the new expansion, which we know will take months.
Knowing Blizzard they will take as much time as they need to get the new expansion finished up. If releasing 3.3 in stages allows them more time to work on polish then I am all for that. I would just hate for them to feel overwhelmed and that they will need to release something new and we get either another filler patch (like Sunwell) or an unfinished expansion.
