The Queue: Insert gimmick here

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Sure! That’s how we got in there, right? We jump on the back of a mount and dive down the hole. Why can’t they do it the same way?

I don’t know anything about dogs except Polish Fest here in Milwaukee always has a little booth where you can hang out with Polish Tatra Sheepdogs. They’re cool lookin’. So I’ll go with that one. Because to me, every other breed of dog is just a dog. Big dog, little dog, yappy dog, quiet dog, fast dog, slow dog, they’re all just dogs.

The chauffeured mount because I don’t know how to drive nor do I want to learn how to drive. Someone else can drive for me. I mean, most of these mounts are animals so you don’t exactly need a driver’s license to ride them, but I don’t know how to ride a horse, either. And I don’t want to learn how to ride a horse. Or a dinosaur.

I have legs. Public transportation exists. I don’t trust myself at the wheel of an enormous machine or with the reins of an enormous beast. If someone wants to volunteer to drive me around, sure, they can do that. Otherwise, I’ll walk or take the bus. Worst case scenario, I call a cab.

I don’t think this holds up entirely because there’s something else to examine, which is expansions themselves. Should every expansion release more slowly than the previous one so new players can check out Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor before they catch up on Legion content? Nah. The goal is to get those people caught up quickly and easily so they can either make friends on current content or play with their friends who are already on current content. The same would apply to patches, I think. With each new content patch, the hurdles one must jump to reach it are lowered. Newer players should have a somewhat easier time progressing up to current content than the people who were there initially.

I’m not Blizzard, I’m not in marketing, I’m not even a game designer, but I’d think the cycle would be to recruit new players with the latest expansion, but use content patches to keep them. Whether Blizzard approaches it that way or not, I don’t know. But over the history of subscription numbers, we’ve seen how players come and go. New expansions are definitely what brings in the new players and brings back the players who let their accounts lapse. People will stick around for as long as there’s new, interesting content to do, but as soon as we hit a content lull, they leave in the millions. Warlords of Draenor had an enormous launch. It had a huge marketing push and its launch content was genuinely great — I stand by my launch day opinions that the questing was some of the best WoW had ever had, and the journey to max level was amazing. Problem was nothing of note came after that and the game hemorrhaged players.

Slowing down content releases seems like the opposite you’d want to do if you want people to keep playing. Patches should focus on player retention. Save recruitment pushes for major expansion releases.