MMO Weekly 30/06/09

In part one of this two part series, Jeff Hollis discusses how to bring the long, slow and painful death to an MMO.  Using the most popular MMO available at the moment, Hollis draws comparisons to other, previously more successful, MMOs.

Hello there, my fellow gamebots, and welcome to the latest and greatest installment of MMO Weekly.  In this week's article, we're going to talk about everyone's favorite MMO, World of Warcraft.  Specifically, we're going to talk about how WoW is killing itself.

Yeah, that's right, you heard me.  WoW is in the act of committing suicide, and Blizzard don't even know it.  Now, before you get all huffy and angry with me (save that for later, you Blizzlovers, you), allow me to give you a bit of background.  And when I say background, I mean way, waaaaay back, to the games that inspired WoW in the first place, and to where these games went wrong.

First up: EverQuest.  EQ was a very, very good game.  You created a character (and they gave you a LOT of options), you formed PUGs, you went on adventures, and you delved some dungeons.  Of course, you got loot drops along the way, and your character ended up in some pretty sweet gear.  You did this for months, and when you finally reached the endgame, you did this some more.  This basic mechanic - get a group, clear a dungeon to reach a boss, kill that boss, and get some drops - was the thing that everyone found so utterly fun, so endlessly amazing, and they wanted to play EQ for years.

And that's when the development team behind EverQuest got together and said, "Hey, guys, you know what would be a great idea?  What if we took this extremely successful, fun game, and then we changed the fundamental mechanic which makes it so much fun?  What if we change all the rules once people get to the endgame?  Wouldn't that be just brilliant?"  And everyone on the team agreed that this would be a great idea.  And Brad McQuaid, developer-king of EverQuest, genius that he is, introduced the worst concept to ever plague an MMO: the raid.

A raid is basically a super-sized group, meant to explore a super-hard, super-long dungeon.  Instead of 5 or 6 people, a raid was comprised of forty people.   The idea is that if a group is fun, a big group raiding a big dungeon will be even more fun.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work.  The problem is logistical: it's hard to get 40 people to the same place at the same time, organise them into smaller groups, and then make sure there's enough healing, nuking, tanking, etc in each group.  There also needs to be systems to handle loot drops, a waiting list when critical people drop out of the raid, and other considerations.  In EverQuest, it was all pretty darned complicated, and most people didn't raid.  Sure, maybe they tried it once or twice, but it wasn't fun.  It was work, and it took hours to complete a single raid.  Of course, a few guilds - really, very few - got into this concept, and they raided consistently.

There were several consequences to introducing raids to EQ.  1) Because of the epic gear that dropped in the raid dungeons, people in raid guilds became super-powered.  2) Raiders also achieved a kind of elevated status; if you needed a tank for your group, you'd naturally choose a tank in raid-quality gear over one in normal dungeon gear.  That super tank would almost ensure the success of your group, no matter what bosses your group was trying to beat.  3) People no longer enjoyed their hard-won dungeon gear; it had become second rate the moment raid gear was introduced into the game. 4) As a result of point 3, running a dungeon suddenly became a lot less fun than it used to be.  Essentially, you formed a group and cleared a dungeon and killed a boss, and your reward (when compared to raid loot) was some bland, mediocre gear.  Whoopie.