Laurion's Song: Only 2 Missions and 8 Raids

I'll be doing what DBG want someone in my position to do; hang around 3 year old content doing some aug / gear hunting to be able to box my way through progression for the exp boost that I'll no longer need as Overseer will have got me to max level way beforehand.

I'll continue to log in for 30 minutes a day to do Overseer and may grind a few AAs in-between looking at what else there is out there, and playing it.

I'll do this until my rota of characters are level 120 and have so-so gear. Then I'll probably have a year or so haitus.

I won't be buying the next expansion.

What did they get right? Casuals outnumber raiders 2 to 1. Giving any player that little amount of content is terrible for the community

Most likely missions was cut short for the expansion because they were working on 25th anniversary content.

This is a plausible reason, depending on what the 25th Anniversary content ends up being of course.

What did they get right?

I agree. I think DBG has a given with next year being the 25th anniversary - people will likely stick around to see what is coming for that.

I did notice the Ji Ham called the current population super sticky in his presentation. This suggests they feel they have a core audience that they feel like they can take gambles with and not lose too much faith. It will be interesting to see how sticky the current population is if LS and the 25th Anniversary don't take off.

I have bought 1 expansion, usually I buy 3 to enable me to run missions/hunt named. Those other 2 I played them for 3 months Dec/Jan/Feb they were sitting unsubbed since then and they will be sitting unsubbed for the next year.

It is a sticky audience, until it isn't, so taking gambles is still gambling and that means it can still bite them in the butt if they do it too much or too big.

I think the 25th "event" probably gained a lot more pressure upon it to be good, if it sucks after the expansion was missing a good chunk of content people are not going to be in a forgiving mood.

I would actually call on the management to seriously plan to put out some follow-up content for LS during the year and bolster what LS offers before they begin work on the next expansion.

Content is at such a low quantity these days I think Darkpaw are mistaken if they think putting out even less is going to be well-tolerated. There might not be a boycott, there might not be a sub-withdrawal, but it will for sure erode faith & goodwill a ton.

Also I will add that I am quite surprised there is no word from Jen Chan about this, the 30th Expansion IS a milestone expansion and it reflects badly upon the studio that such an auspicious milestone expansion is failing to deliver on expectations right out of the gate by not being able to put out the expected amount of content - if anything this expansion should have been aiming to exceed the normal (well recent) paradigm some and the buck should have stopped with Jen getting the message out with a decent explanation not a singular dev with basically no explanation.

Lessons can be learned but I think this was a no-brainer situation.

I understand that things happen. This year seems to be bad for almost everyone I talk to including myself. Crazy things that are out of your control stuff. This has happened at Darkpaw also. For me I am happy they are still providing us new content for this game we all love. To say I'm not disappointed would be wrong. I do however understand. Im glad we still at least have new things to do. I hope things get better for Darkpaw, maybe we can look forward to some really cool stuff coming for the 25th anniversary.

Well put and I do agree.

Company expenses go up, price stays the same, and thus product is reduced. It's actually 100% rational.

And sales go down, then revenue goes down, and budget gets cut, then less content, and resulting in lower sales. Begins, a bad spiral.

I am not surprised JChan has nothing to say to the public about this because it is probably all out of her hands. She gets her orders from Daybreak and I doubt even they have that much say in resources and timelines.

They had at least one other dev that was good at content creation and she left and went to work for Zenimax to work on ESO. Very telling and very unfortunate.

She's Studio Head, ultimately reponsibility & accountability for this situation lies at her feet, and that's why it is strange she has not taken ownership of this, it's her team - and there is no side-stepping that.

We should all be expecting an official response from her about this, explaining it, apologising for it. taking steps to ameliorate the impact it will have, rescheduling tasks if required to minimalise the damage.

It shouldn't have been coming from Absor in the first place.

In good faith I can understand an expansion having less content, but I sincerely hope it won't become the new "standard". As long as things get done, I'd be happy to pay a little more or even wait an extra month...

IMO the biggest reason to stay with an mmo is expectations for the future. You're driving for max level; your hoping to someday get that big drop you wanted; you unlock new content. Stuff to strive for; stuff to look forward to. When there is limited content this diminishes the reason to keep your subscription going. Last year many people finished early and basically logged in after that just for the raids. This year even moreso. IDK maybe this is an experiment to see how much (or little) people will put up with.

That is, at best, an absolute failure.

Unless we're going back to group ores (this last experiment was pretty miserable) and we get at least 4 per chest and 2x the currency or something, I hope they have a plan. Thats just a horrible look, and a glaring lack of content.

I never thought I'd be looking back at TBL as something that should be emulated going forward (because the smoke gate was just dumb), but here we are...

lol…you guys are too easy…take a lap!

Unlikely, but we should all be holding the management's feet to the fire over this and expecting them to do better.
I bought the Pre-Order of Laurion's Song on the strength of the promise & potential held by the Alternate Persona feature and the clear & understood expectation that we at least would be getting an expansion comparable in size to the past few.

I realise now that my hope for the auspicousness of a 30th expansion for this game, historically one of the most important titles in gaming would maybe get something a little special this year was ill-founded.

Even though I have the knowledge of how small expansions have been recently, even while I am unhappy about how small they already are, the last thing I am going to be happy about is getting even less content than the already minimalised amount we get in expansions nowadays under this Post-SoE ecosystem.

Shrinkflation, inflation, cost of operation, staffing situation, constipation, discombobulation - I don't care what -ation they want to lay the blame for this on we are getting less & we deserve more for our dedicated & stalwart, passionate patronage for this ancient game.

Most of us would consider paying more for expansions if the content gets ramped up in quantity & variety, many of us already pay way more than the base, many of us buy multiple copies for our other accounts, I think we all deserve better than this.

Disappointment is something most of us have grown accustomed to, but it barely covers what this amounts to.