Graphing the Curve
As someone who has played AL since the very beginning, it's been brought up over and over the level of frustration over the turn around time for new content. Of course, with any game, the level of content expansion tends to be developed slower and slower the older the game becomes. And this only makes sense as the time it takes to upgrade a game with a whole new skin/interface, new skill systems is probably entirely a waste of time if you want to keep the game looking current and grabbing new players. With today's mentality, people tend to throw out the old quicker, and just grab the new shiny thing on the horizon. This is just the current zeitgeist of the era with almost all things and the response (especially with mobile gaming) is to come out with a new product.
The way this ties into the current issues with arcane legends is an increasingly long time for new things to come to your loving game. It would be foolish to ignore history - This has happened with virtually every Spacetime game and is for the prosperity of the company as a whole.
Much has been talked about transparency, but sometimes it's wise to back up and look at the larger picture. One of my favorite posters was the doccyness, and with all this complaining going on about virtually everything, I was reminded of his useful graphs about major content releases. I do not want to take away from the critiques about glitches in the game and problems with the way operates, it definitely has warrant.
Below (I believe this is correct) is the release dates of major expansions :
AL's Release (11.02.2012) > The Dead City (12.19.2012) > 1 Month & 17 Days
The Dead City (12.19.2012) > The Kraken Isles (02.21.2013) > 2 Months & 2 Days
The Kraken Isles (02.21.2013) > The Battle for Nordr (04.19.2013) > 1 Month & 29 Days
The Battle for Nordr (04.19.2013) > Realm of Shadows: Shuyal (08.29.13) > 4 Months & 10 Days
Realm of Shadows: Shuyal (08.29.13) > The Dragon Enclave (03.13.14) > 6 Months & 13 Days
The Dragon Enclave (03.13.14) > Today (03.17.15) > 1 Year & 4 days.
I do understand that there have been many mini events which is not taken into account. However, many of these newer events are simple re-skins of old events with minor re-colors. This is like Nintendo releasing Super Mario World on every new system and attempting to squeeze every ounce of $ out of older games. It is smart, but after a time it begins to become tiresome, and disheartening to older players.
As you'll notice - the time between expansions has almost been doubling since Nordr. That is not good news, and unfortunately if you look at other legends games, it will probably start to mimic the path those games have taken as well.
Below, I've adjusted Docdobig's graph to add another layer of clarity for those who like to skim posts.
I hope the above puts into perspective reasons why players can feel so frustrated. In retrospect, the planar tombs might be classified to some as a major expansion, I do not see this as a major expansion. Regardless, the gaps between new major content is huge and wholly frustrating. Also, if viewed on a PC my graph appears huge! I have no idea what I did, but it gets the point across all the same lol.
Cheers,
-Jexy
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