Farewell World of Warcraft

As you probably gathered from my earlier post (if you read it), I have become increasingly disillusioned with WoW after the release of Burning Crusade, and my wife and I have decided to quit the game cold turkey. I mailed my valuables to friends in game and we've uninstalled. Buh-bye.

As with all MMORPGs, WoW's chief addictive quality is personal relationships. While the game may become tedious, boring, unrewarding, or repetitive, one's sense of obligation to friends in the game is often the thing that draws one back in. You might stop playing for pleasure, but a friend will plead with you by AIM or email or phone to just come join tonight's raid.

The single worst feature in World of Warcraft is raid caps. A given "instance" has a maximum number of players who can enter it as a group. For most it is five, but for the hard instances -- the ones for which guilds are formed -- it used to be twenty or forty. Almost all the tension in guilds was a consequence of these caps, since you needed to make a guild large enough to handle specific instances (e.g. 40 for BWL or Naxx) which generally meant making it too large and then cherry picking members to fill your raid.

Contrast this with, say, EverQuest, where most raids could be as large as you liked (within the technical limits of servers). Now, Blizzard's designers were afraid large raids "trivialized" content, which leads us to the second-worst flaw in World of Warcraft: bloody-mindedness.

Tedium is to EverQuest as bloody-mindedness is to WoW. It seems that most high end encounters are specifically designed to be possible only for an ideally composed raid with idealized gear performing at 90% or better of optimal output. Furthermore, you can only succeed by knowing the encounter in advance -- i.e. by trying it and failing or by reading spoilers. Preferably both.

It seems to me that Blizzard has made some huge mistakes with Burning Crusade, and I think I'll list a few of them. The first two mistakes are huge because they undermine the personal relationships which are the chief addictive component of the game.

1) They charged for the expansion.

As I understand it, if you sell a game for $40 you get $15 wholesale of which $10 or so is profit (after you subtract production and distribution costs). Blizzard gets $15/month from its players, so every player who quits because the expansion is too expensive is a huge loss, while the gain is trivial. The negative consequences are huge because they can't make the old world more interesting (then folks who haven't bought the expansion might enjoy themselves, and we can't have that) or thread new content into it. The potential cost is huge since I know of many players who baulked at the $40 which made them likely to quit the game. Why risk subscription income for a one off profit equal to a single month's subscription?

The only reason to charge for the expansion was to keep retailers happy, since most of your $40 goes to them (and middlemen) and not Blizzard. This is dumb; it's not like retailers will refuse to sell some new Blizzard console game because Blizzard sold its WoW expansion direct to customers (or gave it away).

I'm guessing charging for BC will, of itself, cost Blizzard 5-25% of its customer base.

2) They changed raid caps.

The proximate cause of our departure from WoW was idiotic guild leadership trying to reshape the guild solely to deal with Karazhan -- the first "end-game" instance -- despite the fact that it will probably be "old hat" within a month or two, and the next set of instances will be 25-man, meaning more wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Many cry "Karazhan isn't like UBRS, because it's hard" forgetting that UBRS (and Strath and Scholo) were very hard way back when. Oh well, those who do not know history -- even having lived it -- and condemned to repeat it.

On our server it seems almost every major guild is self-destructing in one way or another specifically owing to changing raid caps. I conservatively guess this may cost Blizzard 10% of their player base on its own in the short-run, and possibly seriously dent WoW's player base in the long-run.

3) They didn't fundamentally improve their content in any way.

Burning Crusade is literally just new content in the old engine. Or old content with new graphics. Where are the dynamic instances and quests? Where are the dungeons where you can choose your path? (WoW dungeons are, with almost no exceptions, linear.) Perhaps the most promising thing anywhere in BC is that some of your early quests require you to kill "20 Fel Orcs" (say) where any kind of Fel Orc will do. (Versus quests requiring you to kill 15 Fel Orc Sorcerors and 5 Fel Orc Attendants. "No no no, 36 Sorcerors and 4 Attendants is not good enough, go away.") But this promising trend quickly disappears and we go back to the usual slaughters and collects.

If anything, the new content is more repetitive and banal than anything from the old world. I found myself doing a quest where I'm basically killing giant level 66 sheep and thinking "so this is essentially a super tedious copy and paste version of a newbie quest" ... and guess what, it was part of a set of nine essentially identical quests. The quest "line" was a copy and paste version of a near identical quest line (from an NPC with the same name) you do at level 35 in Stranglethorn Vale. Wow, someone gets a credit for "Game Design" for this masterpiece.

Although this last major mistake does not directly attack the relationships which keep people playing an MMORPG, I think that in the long-run this is going to be the most damaging mistake. In the end, BC shows that Blizzard has run out of ideas (or that the folks with ideas have run out of Blizzard).

What might they have done?

In Dark Age of Camelot there are plenty of dynamically generated mini-quests. If you want to work on smithing, you can get a quest which gives you a customer for whom to make something which allows you to make a slight profit by buying or acquiring materials, making the item, and delivering it. Blizzard hates this idea and has designed all tradeskills to be incredibly tedious to improve and intrinsically unprofitable. The only way to make money is kill stuff or get it from other players. If you just want to help the local authorities you can be assigned a random local mission (go kill some bandits).

In Anarchy Online and EverQuest there are dynamic quests and dynamically populated "dungeons". The most "dynamic" thing you get in Blizzard dungeons is some random spawns (e.g. there might be one NPC who only spawns 10% of the time in a given instance, or can appear in one of three places) and loot tables.

In Guild Wars there are instanced outdoor areas, allowing for epic (or seemingly epic) journeys. Every outdoor area in Burning Crusade is teaming with other players eliminating any sense of heroic adventure. "There they stood, in the Valley of Dark Death, facing the Arch Fiend, when three level 70s wandered by and gave them some free buffs and then killed the shadow fiend three times waiting for motes to drop. 'Wanna join up and score the kill credit?' they asked."

Most of the quests in Burning Crusade are ridiculously local, along the lines of understandably dumb newbie quests: "Seek out wolves and kill 8." Hmm, I seem a bunch wandering aimlessly around me right where we're standing... This is probably because quests requiring you to run around in the old world were very unpopular; but Blizzard never figured out this was because the rewards sucked, not because travel is bad. (A quest requiring 15 minutes of travel through dangerous areas generally yields very little money or experience, while a quest requiring you to kill 10 monsters strolling about within a few yards of the quest giver will yield far more. This is why everyone hates "long journey" quests.) In Guild Wars you can be sent on a quest to kill a bear and bring back its skin because the outdoors are big and finding a bear is an interesting task in and of itself. And you don't mind, because the rewards are decent. (Hey, I'm not saying you should play Guild Wars; I'm saying that Blizzard's designers should -- they might learn something.)

Finally, Blizzard could have allowed Horde and Alliance to cooperate and mingle in some or all of the new world. This makes sense with the back story, and it would have afforded huge new possibilities for creating new social glue to hold players into the game. Instead, the exact opposite makes, as I understand it, the PvP realms almost unbearable (imagine trying to complete quests in a city 2/3 full of enemy players). I imagine a lot of PvP realms have become, effectively, PvNo-one realms.

Anyway, I'm done with time-sink games for now, and -- I hope -- forever. When someone brings out an MMORPG whose business model isn't based on keeping people on a repetitive treadmill while charging them for it, I may come back. Meanwhile, I will probably go back to games that I used to consider outrageous time-sinks, like Final Fantasy XII -- my goodness, 50h of gameplay with 25h of repetitious crap? That's ridiculous.

Telstra Tells Apple To "Stick To Your Knitting"

As well as teaching me a new colorful Australian expression I hadn't previously encountered (note: I'm an Australian living in the USA, perhaps knitting has taken on greater cultural significance in the five years I've been living in the US) this has given me another reason to hate Telstra (known in Australia as "a bunch of wankers|tools|drongos|galahs|English Test Cricket players"), even though I no longer have to deal with them.

Apparently, in business-speak, this phrase is akin to telling a company to "stick to its core competency". Telstra, of course, is a phone carrier ("a mob of greedy bastards"), so its core competency is providing lousy customer service and billing. Among its core competencies, building excellent telephones and/or identifying what is and isn't good technology don't figure.

Anyway, apparently the key thing is that Telstra hasn't been offered the phone and therefore instead of "whinging" they've decided to say the phone is "shit house". Maybe this Telstra fellow was just "coming the raw prawn". Or it's just another publicity stunt (a la the wrangling over the iPhone name -- anyone else got a better way of keeping iPhone in the news for the four month period between product announcement and actual availability?) Will Telstra be forced to back down owing to customer demand and then, sheepishly -- in free headlines -- announce that they will be offering exclusive access to the iPhone -- which they'll suddenly decide is a "little ripper" -- for only the US price x the exchange rate x 2?

"Pig's arse", Telstra.

Blizzard Want Ads: A Game Designer With A New Idea

So I got to 70 in Burning Crusade about two weeks after it shipped. At first it seemed like leveling up was going to be fun, because of all the new content. But then it turned into a grind, because of all the "new" content.

Executive Summary

Landscape Artists: 10/10 (great job, as usual)
Creature Artists: 7/10 (nice job, but a little lacking in variety)
Game Designers: 4/10 (boilerplate content with some nice writing filling the blanks)

OK, Gorey Detals

Here's the deal. World of Warcraft is a game engine that, fundamentally, allows you to run your avatar around and, in a very limited way, interact with other figures (computer- and player- controlled). You can accumulate possessions, some of which affect your character's appearance and/or "capabilities". The graphics are very pretty, the controls are responsive, but that's about it. Pretty much everything beyond this takes place, more-or-less, in the head of the player.

E.g. the game contains lots of "quests". Lots and lots and lots of quests. But a quest in fact comes down to:

a) Click on a computer-controlled figure ("person" or "wanted sign" or "random object").
b) A dialog box appears. Read it.
c) Follow the instructions in (b).
d) Click on another figure and receive a reward (items, money, experience).

Where item (c) is one of:
1) go somewhere.
2) go somewhere and "kill" a prescribed number of things. ("Killing" is essentially a process of clicking buttons and watching animations.)
3) go somewhere and "collect" a number of things (either by "killing" figures and taking the items from them or just clicking on things).
4) go somewhere and click on one or more things (e.g. "talk to so-and-so" means click on them, "read such-and-such" means click on it).
5) escort a figure from point A to point B (which generally involves "killing" some stuff).

There are some minor variations on these themes, but that's about it.

So, any idea that you are "talking to someone", "killing someone", "embarking on a dangerous journey", "undertaking an urgent and desperate mission" takes place entirely in your (the player's) head and not really in the game itself, which is really just an engine for wandering around virtual landscapes and clicking on stuff.

Very little assistance is given to the player in order to help the "head game" (which is all that separates an enjoyable computer game from, say, balancing your checkbook in Excel) beyond very nice graphics. E.g.

i) conversations in World of Warcraft are not interactive. In many cases, you just get a dialog box.
ii) "urgent missions" are, with very few exceptions, not urgent at all. There's no time limit. You can abandon them and try them again later.
iii) nothing you do has any impact on the world. E.g. if you're told to kill a terrible orc chieftain who has been harassing villagers, you may have to queue behind other folks killing the exact same chieftain. The chieftain may "respawn" before you've even finished "looting the head" of the chieftain you kill to complete the quest.
iv) "dangerous journeys" often involve travelling no more than a few yards down a well-marked path.

This is not to say the World of Warcraft is not a compelling and enjoyable game. It certainly is, and moreso than most single-player games. But its weaknesses are magnified in Burning Crusade (the recently released expansion). The quests are more repetitive, more formulaic, and more predictable than before. The "zones" are (aside from cosmetic differences) populated with nearly identical creatures and quests. It's all a bit of a yawn.

And, having reached level 70, it seems that the future holds key and faction quests ad nauseum. Oh, how original.