The last major patch for WoW was the introduction of the Sunwell Plateau on March 25th. While this patch was packed full of content, there are no further major patches planned for World of Warcraft until the release of the next expansion pack, which is currently slated for release probably near Christmas (ebWorld’s date is just a guess). Assuming even as early as an October release, this could mean 7 months without a major content infusion.

Last night, they released patch notes for an interim patch for WoW, and as my wife pointed out, most of it is a grab bag of small data tweaks and long-standing bugs. Clearly, a skeleton crew is manning the boat while most of the WoW’s teams efforts are focused elsewhere, probably on WotLK.

If so, this may be a mistake on their part. I still believe that, when working on Shadowbane, one of our biggest mistakes was releasing our second expansion pack. It wasn’t a bad expansion – it gave us the time and money to add some features to Shadowbane that severely needed adding.

However, the amount of focus that it stole meant that we broke our cadence in terms of how much we were delivering new features and bug fixes, and how often. We went something like 4-6 months without a patch, when previously we were regularly patching once a month (sometimes more frequently). When the updates stopped coming, then players seemed less motivated to hang around, to see if their pet feature would be implemented or upgraded, or balance problem would be fixed.

Of course it didn’t help that World of Warcraft shipped in the middle of our development. Echoes of which that can now be seen in Conan’s unexpected success. I suspect Funcom is benefitting greatly from the lull in WoW patch cycle.

Is this actually affecting WoW populations? Hard to know for sure, all I have is anecdotal data. That being said, I do know that my guild’s having a harder and harder time fielding a full team for a 25 man raid, and my low pop server has an ever dwindling pool of new recruits to pull from. And the funny thing is, we haven’t gotten into Sunwell, and don’t really have much interest in doing so either.