A false dawn?

I detect symptoms of burn-out in many veteran players of World of Warcraft, including myself. People "taking a break", or playing less, or still playing while being a lot less passionate about it. But most WoW players are in a state of high expectation for the Burning Crusade expansion, hoping that it will rekindle their interest in the game. And I wonder if the expansion can meet those expectations, and how long that will last.

My personal guess is that at the start the Burning Crusade will get people back into the game, and cause a lot of people to resubscribe. But by the "official" count, the amount of content added is only about 25%. So if players of the original WoW got bored after 2 years, they should get bored with the expansion after less than 6 months. In a previous prediction of time to 70 I calculated that the average player would need about 200 hours of /played time from 60 to 70, that is 40% of the time the average player needs from 1 to 60. But that calculation would only be true if you haven't been stuck at level 60 for months. Many level 60 players already spent a lot of time to improve their characters with better gear, and somebody wearing a nice collection of epics will certainly have a head start and need a lot less time to reach level 60.

A few crazy people will probably reach level 70 after a week, and by the end of the year most raiding guild will have enough players to start the new 25-player raid dungeons. Now raiding is a part of the game that can be stretched forever, as Blizzard has shown with the level 60 raiding game, where few people ever reached Kel'thuzad. What is less certain is how far people's patience can be stretched. Very soon level 70 raiding will feel remarkably similar to level 60 raiding, and sooner or later people will just get fed up with that, because it is a highly repetitive activity, driven by rare high-end rewards.

So I wouldn't be terribly surprised if by the second quarter of 2007 we see the numbers of World of Warcraft players decreasing from the inevitable December 2006 Burning Crusade peak. Relmstein suggests that other game companies are aware of that and launch their new MMORPGs in early 2007. But of course that is a chicken and egg problem: Do these games come out to grab the players leaving WoW, or are the players leaving WoW because there will be new games? In any case I consider it unlikely that the Burning Crusade will be able to hold our attention until the next expansion comes out a year later.