Blizzard COO, Paul Sams, made public the claim that “starting with The Burning Crusade, every year thereafter we plan on bringing out a new expansion set – so every 12 months”.  This is an ambitious task for a team of designers whose released works have been spanned by large gaps in time, but they say that they are up for the challenge.  Joystiq was told by Jeff Kaplan (WoW’s lead designer) that Blizzard’s plan for expansions is “a little bit more ambitious than one every two years. We have to weigh that against the quality of the product and how much content we want to put into it. We won’t put something out until the quality level is there. So, our goal though is to provide content quicker than we have been up until now. We’ve really beefed our team up — we have about 100 now and when we started we had around 50.” 

Blizzard has always been about high-quality productions, and fans seemed not to mind waiting the extra while for them.  Hopefully in the wake of their newly-developed plans to increase quantity, Blizzard won’t exchange their reputation of superb game-developing for one of pulp and viral sensationalism.