World of Warcraft Expansion at E3?

[MongoJerry]

Battlegrounds? They have been in testing for months now. So has been the honor system. Look at the date of first battlegrounds preview. Even with Blizzard's slow development cycle, this is a bit too long. They are working on something else now, it's the only way to justify the super-slow patch development. Compare to EQ, which released 8 instances in one month along with numerous changes.

As stated by Caydieum:

Everyone here agrees that the current rate at which we've been delivering content is not acceptable. Too much time has passed between patches, and the fact of the matter is that bug fixes -- which, while not critical, have been done and waiting -- have been lumped in with content that has been continually pushed back. This is not conducive to running a stable and fun gameplay environment, and the idea of the "monster patch" only hinders you folks in the long run.

After this patch, we plan on delivering patches containing both bug fixes and content in a more timely fashion. I cannot commit at this time to saying "monthly", for example, but they will be coming more often and regularly, and will not be held up due to some large feature being the focal point. The internal processes to make this happen are already in place and operating; the changes are real, and you will see the effects shortly after the current patch is live.

So we know that the reason for the slowdown to the patch schedule was due to "some large feature" that was "continually pushed back." My speculation is that it's battlegrounds, which would both fit the "large feature" part and the part that obviously has been pushed back for months now, since it has always been the feature that's "just about done." The way the battlegrounds previews have written them up, it looks like an absolutely monsterous project that would require a massive amount of both coding and design work to get them done right -- practically an expansion-worthy amount of work. It just makes sense to me that this is why we've seen so little new content since retail release.