Posts tagged warcraft

World of Warcraft is considered, by most measurements, the #1 MMORPG in the world. With millions of active subscribers (Blizzard claims nearly 12 million), it has made the MMO genre very visible, and earned a place in popular culture. With so much success, it is easy to point out all of the things that Blizzard has done correctly with the game.

That being said, the game is not without problems. There are some severe issues I currently have with World of Warcraft that I do not expect to change. It is my hope, rather, that these problems are considered for future MMOs and addressed then. While I can see these problems in WoW as it is what I currently play, it seems that most of the fantasy MMORPGs nowadays are simply watered-down clones, offering nothing new to the genre in their attempt to cash in on the craze.

In the following post I hope to clarify the problems I have with WoW. Please note that this is not a QQ, “WoW sucks,” or “I’m going to another game” post. In that I stated that most other recent MMOs are clones, this also means that these games are also guilty of many of the same transgressions. As such these are merely areas I personally see for improvement over the existing formulas.

Problem 1: The PvE raid endgame, a throwback to the days of EQ, has outlived it’s usefulness.

What is currently happening with Icecrown Citadel is a perfect example of how raiding has outstayed it’s welcome as the focal point of PvE content. For every top end guild that seems to have blown through all the ICC wings as soon as they were released, there are hundreds of guilds that are still struggling to beat encounters in the Plagueworks and Crimson Hall. This is not strictly because of the content difficulty, but because even in a 25-man group, the attitudes of the individual players are often mismatched.

Consider that in WoW, most players who raid regularly can be summed up by the following thee skill/attitude levels:

Type A: Good players who know their classes very well, read up on strats before the raid, review logs to tweak performance, and strive to bring their A-game to every raid.

Type B: Decent players who know their classes reasonably well, but they don’t always put the extra effort into maximizing their performance.

Type C: People who don’t care about their performance, and who basically want to be carried to free epics with minimal effort.

With this in mind, the success of a guild will likely relate directly to the ratio of each type of player. If we use Ensidia as an example, their raids are comprised entirely of Type A players, and they naturally see huge success in their attempts to blow through content like it is nothing. However, an average WoW raid guild consists of roughly 1/3 of each type of player. This basically means that out of every common raid, there are 8-9 players who basically aren’t trying very hard and are more often than not directly (or indirectly) the cause of wipes.

Some may claim my numbers are high, but my experiences in WoW for the past five years have been fairly consistent. The only difference between now and in classic, raids with too many Type C players would be stuck in Molten Core perpetually unless their leadership wised up and started kicking the poor performers out. As a result, Type C players usually never saw past encounters such as Razorgore or Vael. Unfortunately, nowadays we are given literally free epics, and the previous raid tier (ToC) was a complete joke on normal difficulty. The result is that you have a lot of Type C players who are geared up and now expect spots in ICC 25-man raids.

Why do the Type A players stick around in a “lesser” guild, one may ask? In many cases they will not, if opportunity arises for them to move into a more progressed guild. However, some will stick around for reasons such as time constraints (they cannot make the higher end guild’s schedule), or because they prefer to stay with their friends in their current guild. For these people, the Type C player is a constant headache.

The real problem is that in order for the average guild to fill out raid spots, even in a 25-man group, they must suffer the presence of at least some Type C players, even though in fights with hard enrage timers or very strict mechanics, Type C players can and will be the bane of your guild’s existence. This is because under current design, you still need their minimal DPS or healing to finish off the easier bosses unless you over gear them (not something most 25 man raids can say about ICC at the moment.)

In order to smooth things out, Blizzard will likely nerf the hell out of ICC over time. They have already applied several nerfs to the Lower Spire, and I expect that within a few weeks, bosses within the Plagueworks will get hit as well. I expect to see nerfs such as Festergut’s enrage timer being extended and his damage reduced, as well as reduced complexity and damage in the Rotface and Putricide encounters. This way Blizzard can keep everyone seeing the newer content and thus keep the subscription money rolling in until the next expansion. (I believe their stated goal is for most players to be able to kill the Lich King at 80, but for that to happen, nerfs will be necessary.)

The problem with doing this shows how broken the current model is. In order to keep the most hard core people happy, and to artificially drag out content longevity, Blizzard is forced to release something that is at least reasonably challenging to them (but overly challenging to average players) and then nerf it over time as the better guilds move onto “hard modes.” We basically saw the same thing with Ulduar, and can expect to see it in ICC.

My big question is, why do we even still believe we need to rely on the raid model when it is abundantly clear that most players have the most fun (with the least amount of accompanying drama) when they group with a smaller amounts of people of similar mindset. If there was a 5-man version of ICC, I can guarantee you that most people would do that over the 10 or 25 man variants.

Many would argue that large amounts of people present amount to a more “epic” experience, and for some this may be true. However, the same thing was argued about going from 40-man to 25-man back in TBC, but it does not seem to have impacted the “epicness” of the fights thereafter. The simple truth is that single-player RPGs have managed to have some fairly epic fights over the years, and these are largely designed to be centered around no more than six party members (And in many cases, encounters are designed around a single individual. Link does not need 24 other people to be a hero, and Cecil saved the world with only 4 others at his side. Why does my MMO character need such a massive group?). All a good encounter requires is creativity.

I remain unconvinced that MMO designers simply can’t release more difficult or more expansive 5-man content. The only reason we are still stuck with an EQ convention, where the real challenge of the content is to find enough people competent enough to pay attention. We have more advanced game engines than we had in 1998, but in many ways, it still feels like we are playing the same game with better graphics and voice acting.

Problem 2: The sense of adventure has been whittled away.

For me, part of the fun in an MMO is feeling that I am playing an adventurer in a large world with many challenges and opportunities in it. It has been a long time since I’ve had that feeling in WoW, though a lot of it seems to have to do with Blizzard caving to the people who want things handed to them “instantly.”

First, the perceived size of the world has been diminished greatly. I believe the first big change to the game that really “shrunk” the size of the world was the introduction of flying mounts. The ability to fly safely above any and all obstacles at 280% speed was certainly convenient (especially for gathering), but there was something not-quite tangible lost in the transition. Other changes, such as adding more mage portals everywhere, requiring fewer people for summoning stones, and reducing the hearth cooldown have only increased the problem.  Nowadays we are auto-ported to 5-man dungeons, and it feels that Azeroth has been reduced to a series of interconnected quest hubs.

WoW also does not do much reward exploration, outside of getting XP from uncovering your map (which can be done safely from an epic flyer). In Classic, the game was bad enough about this, but at least you had to sometimes fight your way through mobs to uncover the map. There were a few hard to discovered quests tucked away here and there, which I appreciate. But in Northrend, I cannot really think of a single cave or area that you go to without the direction of a quest giver who can be easily located in a quest hub. To make matters worse, they have recently added a quest tracker that basically tells you where to go to complete every quest. Easier and faster? Certainly, but at the cost of what?

I would say that it is better than the old days of EQ, when new player was pretty much dumped into their starting area with little direction on what to do or where to go, but I feel that Blizzard has gone too far in the other direction. Players are simply not encouraged to, nor rewarded for, exploring things on their own. Instead, one is now rewarded for porting from random dungeon to random dungeon and zerging through it as fast as possible.

Problem 3: Arenas

Not much to say here that hasn’t been said by just about every PvE-focused player. Arenas are by far my least favorite aspect of WoW. Not because it is PvP, but because it is PvP on such a close scale that every perceived class balance issue is blown up tenfold. Arenas have forced Blizzard to spend time rebalancing classes and mechanics in ways that impact PvE negatively, and this is really one aspect of the game that I actually want to see completely removed rather than simply readjusted. There are games that do hard core PvP far better than WoW, and anything that turns developer focus away from PvE is a negative, in my opinion.

Problem 4: Lack of Character Customization

While most of the character models in WoW are not bad, by any means, the player’s ability to customize their characters is pretty much limited to a face, a hairstyle, a skin tone, and some piercings or other misc. features. This leads to quite a bit of monotony when encountering other players.

Expanded character customization, such as being able to control your character’s height, build, and voice (as well as giving some options for armor dye) would help break this monotony. Yes, it is cosmetic, but it is really silly that everyone looks the same and that players have very minor control over their character appearance.

Problem 5: The Community

In many ways, WoW is a victim of its own success. The community of players within the game is probably the biggest example of this, as it is so large that it is impossible to placate and police.

Read the majority of the comments in the official forums, or within Trade Chat, and you will understand what I mean by the community being downright bad. People in WoW are, for the most part, belligerent, rude and condescending. A new player asking legitimate questions about the game will usually be met with hostility. They will be ridiculed for being a “noob” or not taking their inquiry to Wowhead. Mean-spirited comments and jokes are made at a near incessant level in all public chat channels.

I also may add that in every other subscription based MMO I have played, regardless of the quality of the game, the community has been much more receptive and helpful. Perhaps it is that players in other games do not have the luxury of a massive amount of players, so any new player scared away is a loss to the game. Or perhaps it is that the helpful individuals in WoW are merely drowned out by the inane banter. For whatever reason, the WoW community’s attitude towards its own members is the game’s largest problem by far, and one that I see no solution for as there are simply too many players to deal with.

It should also be of note that the community is the root of a lot of the other problems in the game, as the game’s transition from a merely more accessible MMO into one which caters to the lowest common denominator has mainly been enacted in response to community demand. Things such as easier travel and more accessible epics were enacted in response to repeated requests by a large amount of players. So perhaps part of the problem is that Blizzard is listening to the community a little too much.

Conclusion

Blizzard has certainly done many things right in WoW, especially in the area of making MMOs more accessible to the masses. Overall, the combat mechanics and UI are still world above many other games, which time and time again are what make me come back. However, the game is not perfect and does have many problems that Blizzard may wish to address before a competitor does. While I doubt that Blizzard will take great strides to move away from a formula that is currently making them quite a bit of money, it is not outside the realm of possibility that these things could be addressed.

Side Note:

It seems that many people are very concerned about the Blizzard store offering in-game pets for a fee (on top of your normal subscription fee). Right now, I do not see cosmetic items as a huge problem, so long as achievements related to the number of these cosmetic items you have are possible without them. It is a valid concern to many of us, however, on what Blizzard’s future plans for the online store may be. With many game publishers (in the MMO world and outside) latching onto the idea of micro transactions and DLC, this is certainly an area of concern.

I feel it would be very unwise for Blizzard to start offering gear, or things that actually impact the game’s mechanics in any way, for a fee on top of the subscription. (Examples: Selling epic gear, selling faster mounts, unlocking access to a new hero class, etc.) This would greatly change the dynamic of the game and would be a huge bait-and-switch on the entire community.

We already pay $15 a month to access this game, and for five years, all players are on an equal footing as far as the opportunities available to them to experience the game content and collect gear (outside of novelty items for the Collector’s Editions and Card Game). The very idea of people being able to get better gear or even equivalent gear to what you’d receive from end content for RL money is very distasteful to me. (I have visions of a spoiled rich kid with access to daddy’s credit card dominating in PvP, or blowing through content he’d normally struggle with, simply because he has the luxury of being able to buy premium epic gear with superior stats.)