Mists of Pandaria General Information & Discussion - Release Date 9/25/12

from MMO-Champ site
"This afternoon the Upgrade Available icon appeared on Battle.net Cataclysm accounts as well as an image of the
previously leaked box art. A preorder or release date announcement is likely to be coming in the near future! "

Anyone else think this is going to be some sort of surprise release? like instead of having a several months for release, they will spring it on us that MoP will be out in a weeks, not months? Aug sometime maybe? With as far along as beta is and 5.0 Being on the PTR, just seems different this time around.

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Originally Posted by Lyonheart

Anyone else think this is going to be some sort of surprise release? like instead of having a several months for release, they will spring it on us that MoP will be out in a weeks, not months? Aug sometime maybe? With as far along as beta is and 5.0 Being on the PTR, just seems different this time around.

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With Bobby Kotick running things, "different" could mean "rushed" or other things besides "finished early." Remains to be seen.

I would hope not. I think a lot of people have rather come to expect some decent time for the pre-release event and to do all the things people do to gear up for an expansion. Plus they've been utter garbage about getting out new content for the entirety of Cata, despite their blathering on about wanting to release more content more quickly. If anything, we're probably close to preorder, but I still think we're looking at October-ish for the expansion.

surpise release would be cool. After each maintenance I hope I got new spells and talent trees but meh no. :'(

Previous expansions had a Blizzcon before the release.. so my thinking is this .. No Blizzcon+more time and resources to spend on MoP. With GW2 coming out in Aug..with NO content for MONTHS past and none until a few weeks before release.. they know they have the highest probability of losing, maybe millions, to GW2. It would be in their best interest to try and at least match that date. The beta is almost complete, the PTR is up ( the patch anyways ) ..so many reasons for them to launch sooner rather than later. AND this beta is already been going on as long or longer than any other beta past.

So heres a wild guess. " Blizzard anounces a release date only weeks before it hits shelves, is this a desperate move to keep players, after many months of no new content? Players might find GW2 an atractive alternative, and based on beta feedback, GW2 is a strong contender to finally be that elusive "WoW killer" no other MMO has yet accomplished"

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Originally Posted by Lyonheart

GW2 is a strong contender to finally be that elusive "WoW killer" no other MMO has yet accomplished"

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By "killing" WoW you would have to stop it dead in its tracks and that's obviously not going to happen. Guild Wars 2 isn't going to release on a Wednesday and by Thursday afternoon no one is playing WoW anymore.

Every time a new game is about to release there is all this talk about it "killing" World of Warcraft. Then a few weeks later the game ends up being plagued with endless problems that have seemed to elude the beta stages and everyone is complaining that X feature is missing or should be implemented. What's funny is that most of those threads that talk about having X feature be implemented is that it can usually be tied back to something that's in WoW because WoW gives most people everything that they need in a game -- That's why nothing is going to "kill" WoW (I feel dumb for saying that).

Even if the planets and stars align on the GW2 launch day and WoW loses 10+ million subscribers overnight (:rolleyes:), it'll still have at least 1 subscriber -- Me, because I don't find Guild Wars 2 appealing.

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Originally Posted by MiRai

By "killing" WoW you would have to stop it dead in its tracks and that's obviously not going to happen. Guild Wars 2 isn't going to release on a Wednesday and by Thursday afternoon no one is playing WoW anymore.

Every time a new game is about to release there is all this talk about it "killing" World of Warcraft. Then a few weeks later the game ends up being plagued with endless problems that have seemed to elude the beta stages and everyone is complaining that X feature is missing or should be implemented. What's funny is that most of those threads that talk about having X feature be implemented is that it can usually be tied back to something that's in WoW because WoW gives most people everything that they need in a game -- That's why nothing is going to "kill" WoW (I feel dumb for saying that).
even if the planets and stars align on the GW2 launch day and WoW loses 10+ million subscribers overnight (:rolleyes:), it'll still have at least 1 subscriber -- Me, because I don't find Guild Wars 2 appealing.

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I know what the true definition of "killer" would mean. In the case of WoW, any game that took million"s" of players away would put a hurting on WoW and would be considered a WoW killer by some.. But IMO, any MMO that took enough to have more players than WoW could be thought of as a WoW killer. But yea.. nothing will ever TRULY kill WoW.

That being said, it was more about WHY Blizz might put the expansion out sooner than most think. And GW2 is just one part of why I think they might.

it might take "millions" away but at least half of those would be back in 3 weeks, about the time it takes me to see what i wanna see in new MMo's, The only true WoW killer out there is blizzard themselves.

This is my own personal opinion.

Regardless of how many time it takes for actually pressing & distributing the boxed games - which will be less and less due to digital downloads - they still need a good month or 2 for their media campaign.

School is the ultimate WoW-killer. Millions of players stop playing and go back to school since there's nothing to do between August and October. Then Brewfest comes up and they all come back.