Should the release cadence be increased to 3-4 months period?

Since two episodes were delayed, why not to announce 3-4 months cadence then? If they need more than three months to release the patch with a better quality of the story and the content, then it'd be welcome to release the episodes after 3-4 months after another one.

What do you think?

If ArenaNet are choosing to spend more time polishing their Living World updates then that only be good news to us. If adjusting the cadence can facilitate this then I am all for it.

Edited because SlippyCheeze.5483, below is right, darn it!

It's not like they work on 1 episode at a time only, so that would just be an unnecessary delay for the most part. Just because parts of the community get impatient if they hear that the release isn't going to be ON THE DAY exactly 3 months doesn't mean they should change their schedule. It's an estimate after all. Now if the assumptions are correct we might end up with a release 1 or 2 weeks late, which is next to nothing. Next episode after that might be in 2 months. Who knows

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Arden.7480 said:Since two episodes were delayed, why not to announce 3-4 months cadence then? If they need more than three months to release the patch with a better quality of the story and the content, then it'd be welcome to release the episodes after 3-4 months after another one.

Yup, this.

I've kind of accepted that the new cadence is approximately 3 monthsI leave it up to anet to decide how they wanna communicate

Happy to leave that decision where it belongs.

Or they could just release when ready and people could stop clock counting to each episode. They've given us an approximate cadence and that is enough. If it runs over, it runs over. It just isn't a big enough deal to be concerned over.

That decision is 100% anets to make, if they decide that they need the time i just pray they keep us informed. Id rather have more polished releases than buggy messes, and who knows maybe the extra could at some point give them time to fix other bugs if they get done early :3

I approve when company's set ambitious targets. This gives them incentive to provide better service to consumers. Sure, at times, kitten happens. If ANet deems they consistently cannot meet the target they set, then an announcement of a change would be appropriate. Until then, some consumers ought to learn that statements like "2-3 months barring unforeseen circumstances" is not a guarantee.

Slowing down deliveries is the worst possible goal for a development house. The industry is going in the opposite direction where dev shops are tuning their dev-ops processes to move towards faster deliveries, with the best companies capable of making deployments in hours from coding to live (known as dev-op maturity) The reason for this is that the industry has learned big deployment cycles = large changesets, more bugs, more likely to hit unknown complexity that causes deadlines to be missed and slower ability to react to changes and customer demands. A dev team also naturally slows down without the pressure to deliver fast and often, and are less inclined to aggressively refine features and stories to make them deliverable in shortened timescales.

They should establish a cadence they actually can maintain for sure. IMO 4 months is reasonable, more than that and you are entering in the content drought territory.

I don't mean to nit pick but it already seems like it is, and I voted no.On a different not I already play only dailies, living stories and expansions.Expansions last me 2 months, living stories a week and dailies an hour other than that I'm offline. :/

For some reason I keep on thinking their schedule is 3-4 months, so if they switched to that it would make it easier for me to remember.

But personally I think they're making the right decision already - set whatever release schedule they think is generally reasonable (and the vast majority of releases since they set that 2-3 month schedule have been released on time) so they have a guideline to work to and know what kind of content they can realistically make. But if a release needs more time they should be willing to extend it so they're actually releasing content that's up to their standard, and of course if they're ready early they can release early. (Although I doubt it'd ever be less than 2 months.)

Also if they are having trouble meeting their schedule there are plenty of things they can do behind the scenes to fix it rather than just accepting it. Of course the answer depends on what exactly the problem is, but a good project manager should be able to sort it out.

I said no because I think Anet should set their cadence to whatever they feel is best for providing good content. If they can provide good content in the 2-3month cadence (which they did with sandswept isles and a lot of LWS3 If you ask me) then they should keep at it, but if they feel they need 6 months take 6 months

Release it when it’s ready. While your waiting go play BLESS, I hear that the players are appreciating the polish in that games release. Oh wait....

It's an approximate schedule, not a deadline. i don't know why people don't understand this.

And Slippy is right.

Hell NO! It should be LOWERED!!!!Non-casual players burn the content in 3 weeks or less (1 month at most), having to wait 2-3 more months without any relevant content (no, current events don't count), aka the famous "content drought", is a pain in the a*s.

Why? Nothing has changed. One episode came out a week late. This one might be ... a week later than 3 months. Many other releases were closer to two months.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:Why? Nothing has changed. One episode came out a week late. This one might be ... a week later than 3 months. Many other releases were closer to two months.

Two episodes, this one (provinding it will be only one week later) and the previous one. No releases in LS4 were close to 2 months, I hope we'll see at least one of LS4's episode to come in just 2 months.

@"Zaraki.5784" said:Hell NO! It should be LOWERED!!!!Non-casual players burn the content in 3 weeks or less (1 month at most), having to wait 2-3 more months without any relevant content (no, current events don't count), aka the famous "content drought", is a pain in the a*s.

Content drought? What? You don't know what a content drought is until you've seen SWTOR's post 4.0 evolution. GW2 has oodles of content releases by comparison.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@"Zaraki.5784" said:Hell NO! It should be LOWERED!!!!Non-casual players burn the content in 3 weeks or less (1 month at most), having to wait 2-3 more months without any relevant content (no, current events don't count), aka the famous "content drought", is a pain in the a*s.

Well, new maps are out of content after 3 weeks so yes, in a way there is a content drought for the players who do play a lot outside WvW/PvP or raids.

@"Zaraki.5784" said:Hell NO! It should be LOWERED!!!!Non-casual players burn the content in 3 weeks or less (1 month at most), having to wait 2-3 more months without any relevant content (no, current events don't count), aka the famous "content drought", is a pain in the a*s.

It's pretty much impossible to make a game that takes as long to complete as it does to make, especially if it needs to include story and voice acting. The only way to do it is to either make completing it the first time extremely grindy so players have to keep repeating parts before they can move on (like having to grind faction ranks in a new map before an NPC will speak to you so you can progress the story, or just require new equipment which is a rare drop from a boss).

The alternative is to make it quicker to complete the first time but add lots of repeatable content...but then you need to give players an incentive to repeat it. If it's something they need to progress then you're back to the first option. If it's optional then some people won't bother.

Either way you're not actually making more content, just forcing players to go in circles for a while so it takes them longer to complete everything. Some people might consider that better than finishing quickly, but other people get annoyed with having to repeat the same stuff over and over just so there's a reason to log in between releases and would actually prefer to just complete it and then do something else until there's new content.

Most MMOs tend to go for adding extra grind so people keep logging in, for the simple reason that most MMOs were either built with a subscription model or based on ones with a subscription, and if you're getting your money by charging players for permission to log into the game you absolutely don't want them thinking it's ok to take a break between releases. But that's done entirely for the developers benefit, not for players.

Content drought is all relative as it’ll vary from person to person depending on how quickly they complete the content and what timespan they consider qualifies as a drought.

Many players sit there on release day and rush through everything at once so that they’re pretty much all done before the next day. There are players that take there time and make it last over a month.

Their goal isn't to release the episodes as soon as possible, it's to fill in the gap between the expansions. At the current rate, the time they potentially have to develop each episode has increased by 3 months compared to the last season. The trick is, are they actually needing that extra time, or are they just stalling - it'll become obvious in 2 weeks. They'll likely begin to speed up after episode 3 (or stop), considering they'll probably want to release the next episode at PAX, 80 days after E3.