MMO Weekly Page 2

McQuaid and his buddies never realised that raid content was wrecking their game, and they continued making more and more raid content.  Did they make more dungeons, too?  Yeah, but for every dungeon they introduced, they introduced more raid content, making that dungeon pale and undesirable by comparison.   

I was once told by an MMO developer that they had studied raids in other MMOs, and that they had discovered something extremely odd.  More than 95 percent of all players in a given MMO never, ever experience a given piece of raid content.  Less than five percent of players did.  So, in essence, MMO developers spend months designing raids that only the most elite, hardcore players will ever see.  "And what about all those other players," I hear you asking, "the more ordinary, casual ones?"  The developers' answer appeared to be, "Go away, kid, I'm busy designing this cool raid where the players kill a demigod and get cool loot.  It's epic!"

Allow me, at this juncture, to shift gears a moment, and talk about the other game upon which WoW is based.  That game is Dark Age of Camelot.  DAoC follows the same mechanic as its predecessor, EverQuest.  Form a group, clear out a dungeon, kill a boss, and get some cool loot.  And, like EQ, when players reached the endgame, the developers decided to change all the rules, and do something completely different from the fun stuff that made everyone enjoy the game so much.  DAoC introduced the Realm versus Realm (RvR) combat on predetermined battlegrounds (BGs).  However, the setup essentially required you to form large, organised groups to do this successfully.  So, RvR was essentially a raid in which you killed other players on a battleground, instead of a boss in a dungeon.  If you were good at this new kind of PvP raid, and were willing to do it for hours on end, you unlocked new talents and abilities.

Now, the battlegrounds weren't as bad as raids.  You didn't have to get 40 people together, you could just form ordinary groups to fight in the battlegrounds.  But the battlegrounds were unbalanced.  You could show up with eight guys, and the other team would have 50.  People began to form strategies based on this.  Entire guilds would log on at 0300hrs to attempt to take battleground fortresses, knowing that no one would be on to defend them.  

Again, this whole system pretty much screwed the casual player.  Sure, you could jump into a battleground every now and then, play for a while, and then log out.  But the people who were super-hardcore about it - who joined a psychotic guild willing to wake up at 3am to win a temporary BG victory - gained more PvP experience, and unlocked more abilities faster than you could ever hope for.  They became much tougher, much stronger, much more powerful than the ordinary player.  If you weren't part of a hardcore RvR guild, and you weren't willing to sacrifice hour after hour doing this, you were pretty much out of luck.  The overwhelming majority of players never played that much RvR; only a small minority of folks participated at that level.  

Like EQ, there were consequences for this emphasis on RvR.  Hardcore RvR players had lots of extra abilities, could take more damage, dish out more, and were simply better than ordinary players.  They became super-powerful, and achieved a kind of elevated, preferred status.  The people that continued to clear dungeons and defeat bosses couldn't really compete, and became second-class citizens in a game they loved.

So let me ask you, my fellow gamer, the fundamental question that these two examples bring to mind:  why did the developers of these two influential MMOs change the basic mechanic of the game when people reached the level cap?  Why did they get away from a style of play (Form a group-Clear a dungeon-Kill a boss-Get some loot) that goes back all the way to Dungeons and Dragons?  Why?  
There is no clear answer.  Both games, as influential as they were, lost their way when players reached the endgame.  When all the bosses had been defeated, players became bored.  And since the average player enjoyed, and wanted, dungeons and boss encounters more than anything else, the developers repeatedly gave them...more raids and more RvR.   

In part 2 of  "The Long, Slow Suicide of World of Warcraft", I'll discuss how these decisions by developers left players disillusioned by both EQ and DAoC, and made those games vulnerable the moment a new MMO came along.  In addition, I'll discuss how WoW is doing the exact same thing.       

On that note, I must leave you until next week.  Ciao for now!