MMO Weekly 21/07/09

Ahoy there, my fellow game-heads, and welcome to the very latest edition of MMO Weekly.  Over the past two weeks, I've been whacking away at a bees nest, going after the untouchable sacred cow and, in general, upsetting all the Blizzard fanbois and fangurls by suggesting that WoW, because their endgame content is based largely upon doing work, was in the long, slow process of committing suicide. 


A BIT OF BACKGROUND

My argument in part 1 was that WoW was based primarily on two older MMOs.  The first was Everquest, and the second was Dark Age of Camelot.  Both games, I argued, grew because they followed the well-established dungeon crawl model invented by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in Dungeons and Dragons.  Their style of play based itself on the idea of small group of friends having a fun adventure.  That might take the form of, say, exploring an abandoned tomb, discovering a secret or two, and fighting a slew of baddies.  However, there was a lot of variety in the D&D adventures (both the official modules and many unofficial, but publicly available knock offs), and D&D fully encouraged this kind of creativity by DMs.  Play sessions were full of battles, races against time, traps, survival challenges, rescues, mysteries, and  all manner of swashbuckling.  Both EQ and DAoC captured the feel of this kind of content extremely well. 

Inexplicably, at the endgame, the developers of both EQ and DAoC decided to change the very basis of gameplay, and they introduced very difficult, grind-heavy content.  This content (primarily raids in EQ, and large scale, grind-heavy PvP in DAoC) rewarded players with both loot and skill unlocks unavailable to normal players.  What's worse, willing players were rewarded not primarily for their skill or creativity, but instead for spending endless amounts of time in the game, participating in this artificially hard endgame content.  In a moment of extraordinary maturity, I referred to this endgame content as DICC: Difficult and Increasingly time Consuming Content. 

DRIVING YOUR PLAYERS INTO THE ARMS OF OTHER GAMES

This approach, I argued, slowly alienated normal players.  It essentially made them less-powerful, second class citizens, simply because they were unwilling to participate in the endless grind.  By emphasising DICC, and thus alienating the average player, both the DAoC and EQ developers were slowly killing their own games.  They simply made their respective games a lot less fun, and therefore vulnerable.  The moment a viable alternative/replacement MMO came along – one that made playing fun again - players bolted, leaving both the EQ and DAoC subscriber base shadows of what they once had been.  That game was WoW.


WHO NEEDS FUN?  KEEP THOSE PLAYERS WORKING

My argument in part 2 was that WoW, upon launch, adhered closely to the Gygax Arneson dungeon crawl model, and players loved it.  However, still early in its existence, the WoW devs chose to rather closely mimic the DAoC and EQ endgame content.  The Blizzard developers introduced 40 man endgame raids, which were at the time extremely demanding and time-intensive.  They also introduced a relativistic PvP model that required a truly unbelievable time commitment.  Both of these activities rewarded players willing to grind through this content with the best loot in the game at that time. Again, this made normal players – those unwilling to put in the hours and hours of work - feel unheroic, alienated, and second rate. 

I also argued that, as WoW continued to grow into the juggernaut it is today, it never really deviated from its commitment to time-intensive, artificially hard endgame content.  However, the forms of DICC that the WoW developers fed to the players changed over time.  That ultra-intense sliding scale PvP system?  It was replaced by a much more reasonable system (though still somewhat grind heavy) in which honor points are accumulated.  Soon thereafter, however, the devs introduced the very DICCish Arena system.  This system is exceptionally grind heavy, requiring several hours of play per week for an entire *season*.  Like all DICC content, the rewards for participating in Arena combat are among the best in the game.  Players that participate in the older PvP battlegrounds system?  Under the current rules, they can only earn the older, noticeably inferior Arena gear from previous seasons.  Of course, even that's contingent on them maintaining a minimum 'personal Arena rating'.  This requirement requires them to participate in both battlegrounds AND Arena matches, and thus ensures that a truly outrageous amount of work is required.