The Sky is falling, the Sky is falling! Oh wait, it’s not
It’s that time of the year. Or, to be precise, it’s one of these times of the year, when thoughts from different angles come together in a common train just waiting to derail into an argument.
WoWinsider’s Amanda Miller reports on yet another taunt by some unheard-of developer for Age of Conan (currently scheduled for 2008, and, from what I can gather, is about to start large-scale closed beta) who claims WoW is past its prime. This also echoes one of the sentiments expressed on the o-boards (along with the usual mix of hatred, loathing, despise, envy, bile, discontent, frustration, annoyance, sense of entitlement, bad faith, contempt and general anger you’ll find every single day Elune makes, or something) by part of the playerbase who start entering the burnout stage of their addiction. A sentiment which echoes the fatigue and loss of interest which creeped in during the course of 2006 while people started to wait for TBC to hit the streets, an understandable one, for that matter.
Indeed, players less afflicted by Altitis (or Altosis, heh) have now spent most of the year flying to and from Shattrath, so when you’re mostly raiding, and Illidan just raises his hands and drops his loot when he sees you, it can get boring after a while. There’s a point where no matter how, the game may become stale and boring, and the Sunwell Plateau won’t necessarily do much to alleviate that either, so we’re probably starting to see the beginning of the “wait for the next expansion” depression.
Others see the beginning of the end, or rather the End, and in the spirit of the never-ending debate, attribute this to, you guessed it, good old Welfare Epics, as a cheapening of the game experience. The game’s running out of carrots to keep people playing, so claims Yet Another Night Elf.
Arena and PvP gear start to remind me of the Good Times virus, in the sense that all kind of nasty things appear to come from it including generating the falling sky and signaling the beginning of the End of Times. However, if I go back to the days pre-TBC, there were epics relatively easy to get in ZG, AQ20 and MC – you’d have to slap together 10-11 people, basically a Kara run without the hassle for the former, 15-16 for AQ20 and 25ish for MC and you’d get a bunch of epics, either off drops or off reputation and token turn-ins. Nobody claimed that was cheapening the game experience for that matter (but back in the days, PvP epic gear was locked behind a gruelling grind, so there wasn’t really any alternative to compare with). At the same time, Tier2 to Tier3 were a totally different matter, and basically out of reach of both casual players and guilds. Just like T5, T6 and SWP gear remain totally out of reach to your average casual to dedicated player.
And while this will become an academic question in a mere couple of words, let me ask this nonetheless: how good is a carrot which is, in practice, firmly out of reach, exactly? Because to me, the very second I simply integrate the fact that T2+ pre-TBC and T5+ nowadays is stuff I will never, ever have access to, it becomes irrelevant to my play experience. It’s no longer a carrot on a stick, it’s perhaps a turnip, and I don’t like turnips. It’s not even part of the equation which keeps me in the game.
As is usual these days whenever Welfare Epics are mentioned by people unhappy about them (and who keep ignoring badge loot to only focus on PvP gear under that moniker), the fundamental misconception they harbor is that Arena gear is an end, like raiding drops. Yet even for someone who arenas as casually as I do (and pretty much sucks at it these days), the gear is just the means, not the end. I arena for fun, and because it’s pretty much the only group activity I can be bothered with these days. My carrot isn’t walking around in full S3 gear to get oohs and aahs in Org, my carrot is finishing the season with a duelist title, because it will prove that my teams and me have improved ourselves over season 2.
And while this is far from bringing closure to the whole matter, the lines are clearly marked. On one side you have people who arena a bit or a lot and do it for the challenge, and see the arena gear as the means to an end, an enabler. On the other side you have (some) focussed raiders who just cannot grasp this and believe that loot is an end and the reward for skills. It’s that fundamental difference in considering the gear which causes the endless argument. Differenciating the PvP and PvE sets, even as far as changing the quality colour and renaming it from epic to battler or duelist, but also awarding more other marks of recognition than just gear to raiders, like cool-sounding titles (Dunno, “Cleanser of the Black Temple”, “Preserver of the Past”, “Demonslayer”, for every endboss or something), might also lessen the argument simply by giving PvE more than just loot as an objective as well as a mark of achievement (but would raiders want that? Despite week long arguments, I still don’t know for sure).
Back to the matter at hand, though, even if WoW loses a third of its subscriber base until WotLK finally gets released, it’s still going to remain the 800 pounds gorilla in the room. Among others because this year, as Relmstein notes, the MMO market failed to deliver any interesting alternatives.
Hate it or love to hate it nowadays, World of Warcraft has made MMOs mainstream in the Western Hemisphere, by appealing to a very broad customer spectrum, from the most casual to the hardcore. By fostering a mix of play options catering, as much as possible, to most of these different player types, it has also introduced not one but several types of carrots, and turnips, and salad, and meat, and fruit, and pasta, and rice for people with different tastes to go after. People claiming that Blizzard should just focus on one aspect, especially concentrating on the hardcore segment of the population, have obviously missed what happened to Vanguard.
With the hopes that 2008 will be better for the rest of the market, as long as there isn’t an emergence of a game appealing to a similarly broad audience, chances are that the subscriber base may drop down a bit until the next expansion gets released and then pick up again. As for people claiming that Warhammer Online will mark the end of WoW’s domination, let me just caution that the bigger the expectations which are piled on it are getting, the harder the disappointment may be in the end. It’s probably also quite unfair to the game and it’s developers, for that matter, because even if it gets released as a very good game in its own right (and that’s all I wish for them) with a very smooth launch, the weight of expectations from all the people hoping it to be a WoW killer may severely hamper its reception on the market.
Is there room for more 5+ million subscriber MMOs on the market? Most definitely. But let me just play the divining game a bit here and predict that the next games to reach such subscriber numbers won’t be, simply can’t be, those who are hyped as WoW-killers while they are under development, because these will just not live up to the expectations. The next big successes will probably come from unexpected quarters, build relatively quietly by a team striving to provide the best game they can deliver, who do not resort to early posturing against WoW.
In conclusion, no, I don’t believe we’re at the beginning of the end of the WoW adventure. We may be entering a stage where some of the subscribers tire and try out different pastures while waiting for the next expansion, just as was happening during late Summer and Fall ’06. And while 2007 didn’t really offer any alternatives for players who are tiring of what’s in the game at the moment, in the spirit of Winter’s Veil, let me offer my best wishes for all games scheduled for release in 2008: May you have a true game-fixing Beta, May you have the smoothest of launches, May you live up to the expectations you set, and most of all, May you not be crippled to the core by early over-hiping. To the MMO market and 2008!
Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!
Quote: “However, if I go back to the days pre-TBC, there were epics relatively easy to get in ZG, AQ20 and MC – you’d have to slap together 10-11 people, basically a Kara run without the hassle for the former, 15-16 for AQ20 and 25ish for MC and you’d get a bunch of epics, either off drops or off reputation and token turn-ins.”
I’m not so sure you played the same game I did. Before burning crusade I don’t ever remember people running MC with 25 ‘slapped together’ people and getting easy epics. In fact I don’t remember Molten Core being done with 25 people and only once have I ever even heard of a PUG for it and it certainly wasn’t going to get any epics.
ZG? AQ20? Sorry, these two like MC all pretty much required a guild and a coordinated one at that. You could not simply slap together a couple of players and go get free epics.
I have no idea what you’ve been smoking since pre-TBC to make you have such a WRONG view of how things were back then.
Maybe you didn’t mean PUG, maybe you meant a ‘loose guild association’ but it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as easy as your words make it seem.
What I feel is holding back wow, is that at the end game you only have three choices of time investment:
1. PvP for Epic Loot
2. Guild Raid for Epic Loot
3. The Sub Game of maximizing crafting, learning new recipes, making money from Auction House or farming, raising alts
I feel Blizzard spends far too many resources on having more and more ‘epic lewtz’ be available and not near enough time adding more ‘sub games’.
I for one don’t see any point in spending 3 months raiding, countless hours and days, just to get some purples that make me somewhat better now, when in 6 to 12 months Wrath will be released and I’ll be vendoring all of that stuff I worked so hard for.
Blizzard needs more goals in the game that are not loot.
Whether that be finding more crafting recipes, or hunting down a new character skill, or trying to find the last piece of some special outfit, or trying to kill ever monster there is in the game, etc. etc.
Anyways…
“Maybe you didn’t mean PUG, maybe you meant a ‘loose guild association’ but it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as easy as your words make it seem.”
Loose guild association, definitely. Half-guild, half-PUGs we’ve done too. Notice I didn’t say clearing but in ZG and MC in particular, getting the first couple of bosses down while being severely understaffed was no special feat, nor even rare, with nothing but people geared through these raids and crafted stuff. There’s a bunch of vids on YouTube showing 24-man kills of the first 4 bosses in MC wearing nothing but T0 to attest that.
I will drink to that toast. Kampai!
I liked lotro enough to max out a character but the ride was too quick and the endgame wasn’t there. Guild Wars Eye of the North I also really enjoyed but was also very very short. Other than that it seemed like an year of MMO disappointments and delays.
I’m not sure what the new year will bring in WoW. I hope for many great things in WotLK. I also hope for more subgames within the game that cater to people like me who are just dedicated players being neither casual nor hardcore players.
I know I will try Warhammer when it comes out, I’m looking forward to it as something different or until WotLK comes out. I play for fun. I sure don’t play WoW because of Epic raiding loot. Its nice to get but for me it would just be about seeing the content that’s there and the loot as part of the reward for the attempt at overcoming the challenge. It would also be nice to have a single player dungeon. But of course that just not going to happen due to Blizzard focus. That benefits ever player even if your gear due to raiding higher level surpasses it. Maybe you could get titles that matches your accomplishment. I’ve never earned a title in WoW other than a Netherwing faction title. Yet I’m a good player with the masses. Lot of stuff in the game don’t balance to the majority. I have no clear answers how it can be all fixed.
I’m skilled enough to raid if I choose to, but WotLK will be out soon. Looking at it I’m not sure I want to invest the time in months on end in drama ladden guilds just to see content. So I’m just about at another crossroad in my thought process looking at the endgame. I’ve worked hard to get there and now that I’m there at the point in game when WotLK is on the horizon ahead not sure how much time if any I want to commit to raiding.