Having played this game for a year now, I’d have to say that it’s one of the best games of all time. It is a huge, well-deserved success and a great money-maker for its creators. However, Blizzard is showing its FPS and action RPG roots, because the game’s staying power flags considerably as you continue to play. WoW, as it currently stands, does not have MMO longevity. It does provide hundreds of hours of play time, yes. But as it progresses, it actually alienates its player-base, by failing to deliver on its original premise of an ever-evolving world. The game is, in short, the most beautiful failure of all time.
Following is a list of what I feel are the top 10 game-killing problems in this game. I am listing them not to complain, but rather to point out why people are angry and why many are leaving. Hopefully this will engender some productive discussion, and make it more apparent to the Blizzard staff exactly what it threatening the longevity of their product.
The 10 knives in the heart of WoW:
[Knife #10] The 60 wall. This has been explained to death; basically the game’s philosophy changes drastically at level 60. The inherent problem is that after a player has invested hundreds of hours in a character – perhaps playing this game longer than any other, and loving it – they’re faced with a drastic, mandatory change in mentality if they want to keep progressing as they had. Alternate methods of advancement need to be instituted, and soon.
[Knife #9] Broken promises. We know this game was supposed to have no timesinks, revolutionary mechanics, and up to 60, arguably, it succeeds. But what then? And where are the hero classes we were promised years ago?
[Knife #8] Delayed response. Part of this problem is that the nature of the development cycle ensures that things won’t be added when they are needed, but much later. The problems that exist now are not being fixed now; instead, they’re barely showing up on the radar, and getting thrown into the already-overburdened development queue. Notice the CMs telling the community, “The raid game was lacking at launch, so we’re adding AQ.” Then note that the game was launched 13 months ago (!), and they’re still addressing a perceived lack of raid content now, when they should be working on the current problems! A suggestion: Pull developers out of content development if they’re fixing last year’s problems. Get them on today’s problems, now. Customer resentment is only going to increase if you keep defending yourselves for not delivering what people want, by saying that you’re working on something else.
[Knife #7] No world events, no player impact. You can raid a city … and be punished for it. You can slaughter a thousand demons … and no demon lord will rise to avenge his brethren and invade your city. You can kill Ragnaros a hundred times, and every time he will dutifully fall over dead like a scripted event in a Disney ride. Nothing changes, nothing exciting happens. GMs don’t control dragons and make them wander the world. Mass migrations of monsters don’t take place – the elemental events are pale shadows of what they could be. In short, there’s no reason to shake up the world as a player, because no matter how hard you shake, Azeroth will not move.
[Knife #6] Failure to police gold farmers. Players are told to give evidence to Blizzard reps, so that they can act upon it. But then there is no follow-up. No player ever knows if his good deeds are ever acknowledged and acted upon. In fact, discussion of such things is considered bad form. Why do people buy gold? Because they can. Why can they? Because Blizzard doesn’t act against the farmers in a way that encourages people to keep reporting them. Why don’t they? You tell me.
[Knife #5] Non-randomized itemization. This is shocking to me, the boring itemization from the company that created Diablo II. Items should drop from multiple sources, and randomized rares should be more powerful than “uniques.” Everyone should be different. Set items should have variables in armor level, stat bonus ranges, and maybe even occasional “cast on hit” or other specials thrown in. Cookie cutter characters are boring. Give your player base the power to customize. Jewelcrafting looks promising, but it’s only a band-aid on the actual problem: Your items have fixed drop centers, and when they do drop, they are always exactly the same.
[Knife #4] The death of world PvP. The world does not encourage players to go out into it. All of the high-level action now takes place in instances and instanced battlegrounds. The beautiful world you created is now just an unpopulated wasteland seen from a flight path’s vantage. Give us keeps and towers to fight for! And for God’s sake, get rid of dishonorable kills. If you must, make civilians immortal so that questing is uninterrupted. But get rid of them, now.
[Knife #3] The battleground honor grind. Your battleground system is going to die very soon – why? Because the top rewards are about to be eclipsed by your raid itemization, beginning in the next patch. People don’t fight for fun anymore, they fight for gear. And your proportional system with honor decay is making “high warlords” out of two kinds of people. One, those who drop out of real life for two months and risk their health to do nothing but battlegrounds. Two, those who break the terms of service and cheat by sharing their account with others. A fixed PvP system with fixed honor levels per rank needs to be adopted to fix these problems. You might complain, “But then everyone will be grand marshal, that’s not realistic!” So? Everyone is currently level 60, the top of hero-dom. That’s not realistic either. Progression in a game for those who deserve it is natural; stop fighting it. Change the rank names if you have to, so that 14 is merely “Thrall’s Honor Guard” or whatever. But recognize that your system as it stands is broken.
[Knife #2] Blindness to the customer’s needs. When people tell you what they want, even if they are rude, listen to them. Don’t tell them they’re wrong, or that they don’t really want what they think they do. Don’t tell them to adopt a tone that’s more pleasing to you, the paid employee. Listen. Copy and paste. Report your customers’ desires to your superiors. Constructive criticism is golden, but even negative criticism has its place, because it tells you not only what your customers want, but also that they are unhappy. Unhappy customers are bad for business.
Drum roll …
[Knife #1] Factionalization of the player base. No, I don’t mean Alliance vs. Horde. That’s great. Rather, it’s casual vs. hardcore, or raider vs. non-raider, or whatever you want to call it. Your game design paradigm shift at 60 is pulling apart the community you’re striving so hard to create. Players are at each other’s throats; not only because they don’t understand or care for the needs of the other side, but also because you’re doing nothing to heal the divide between them. Give raiders top-end gear for PvE. Give non-raiders access to gear equivalent to raid-gear, provided they put in the time and effort. Equal rewards for equal effort. The key problem, actually, isn’t that casuals are jealous; it’s that raiders vs. non-raiders is breaking the PvP system, making gear more important than skill. My proposed solution to this problem would be to “rate” each player according to the magnitude of their gear. A fully-epic’ed character might rate 100, one in tier 0 blues might rate 50. Then, total the rating of each side when they meet in battlegrounds. If, for example, a rating 1500 group and a rating 750 group meet in Arathi Basin, then change the goals so that the 1500s have to gather 2000 resources to win, but the 750s only have to gather 1000. Study ladder systems such as in chess, professional sports, heck even Battle.net, and apply proportional goals that consider each player’s gear before assigning objective difficulty.
Whew.
As you can see, a lot of these problems are fixable and inter-related. I love this game, I’m going to stick with it for awhile, but when your fanatics from way back see this many game-breaking problems … it’s time to address the issues."
-Frostclaw, 12/16/2005
Alright, you'd like my comments? First of all, calling World of Warcraft a failure on our boards and making references to knives in your heart is insulting, no matter what other words you've chosen to convey your thoughts. The first real statement you made indicated that we're revealing some limitation in designing a massively multiplayer game due to our "action role playing" and "first person shooter" roots. This statement confused me. I didn't know that this was simply a text error - you'd be surprised how many people contact our support departments because they had questions concerning "our games" Command and Conquer", "Doom II" and if I remember the conversations I've had on this subject with the technicians, a Mary Kate and Ashley game boy title.
But I digress...
The 60 wall
It's intended that the game changes once level cap is met. Your main focus for progressing your character is now no longer a necessity or possibility. Without getting into the specifics here as to what is suitable content for you and what is suitable content for the next person at level 60, the fact remains, each patch we are adding more content for players at cap to participate in, and when the expansion releases, players will have a chance to progress as they had previously.
Broken Promises
To be blunt, more adequately phrased - broken misconceptions. We never stated that there wouldn't be timesinks, nor have we ever stated our mechanics are revolutionary. We are very proud of our game and what we've been able to accomplish through the course of its development. Hero classes were something we wanted in the game earlier on. The system is a massive undertaking, and still being developed.
Delayed Responses
What you describe here is very subjective. Everyone has there individual thoughts on what our game's "biggest problems" are and could probably list them in order of what's most game breaking to them. The fact is, we're able to view this game as a whole, take in feedback and determine based upon our own production what's the best series of issues to tackle and what content should receive the most focus at a given time. We do our best, and unfortunately resources aren't unlimited.
No World Events
There is a world event next patch, and our world event's team has been working on content which will serve players in similar ways to what you've described. Unfortunately, implementing world events that all players can take advantage of is much more difficult than you might imagine, however we are very pleased with the progress we're making.
Failure to Police Gold Farmers
We battle this each and every day. The fact of the matter is, releasing the specifics of our efforts would undermine what we were attempting to accomplish. More specifically addressing your thoughts, we have an obligation to protect our player base. We can never tell a player, "alright that player you reported, we've banned him, thanks for the report". In addition, most gold buying and selling occurs outside of the game and our investigations cannot always provide us with the proper evidence. I'm sorry, being one hundred percent certain someone is a gold farmer selling gold on the internet isn't enough, we must catch them doing it and be able to prove such. Our efforts in this battle are much larger than you might realize, but this isn't something that is going to go away overnight.
Non-Randomized Itemization
It's funny you accuse us of failing because our action role playing roots show, yet you fault us for not creating a system found in a standard multiplayer game. The itemization you describe doesn't work the same in an MMO. Although you may be happy to hear the expansion will allow for socketed items. We agree, cookie cutter builds aren't very cool and we takes steps every day to ensure that players have many, many options.
The Death of World PvP
We're actually working on bringing PvP back into this outside world as we speak. I cannot comment on the specifics, but we agree that outdoor PvP is fun and we'd like to incentivize players to participate.
The Battleground Honor Grind
We've stated a number of time that we're going to be making major improvements to the Honor System. This will take time, for now we'll address each issue as we can and make adjustments where we're able.
Blindness to the Customer's Needs
I am not even going to get into how much of this game has evolved directly based upon player feedback. Please read through all of our patch notes, and reflect upon the kind of demands which have hit the boards. Unfortunately, our memories are often short so when players are suggesting a very specific change, by the time it's implemented they've moved onto something else, and when the change is announced you get the traditional "OMG BLIZZ NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THIS" feedback.
Second, these forums are not a place to receive customer support or assistance and we're not customer service representatives. We represent Blizzard Entertainment and each of us have invested a great deal of time learning this game, understanding our players and working intimately with the design team so that we're more effective at what we're seeking to accomplish. Much of what we do is very behind the scenes. I will disagree with a player when I believe they are being unreasonable, or are wrong.
Factionalization of the Player Base
We've discussed this in a number of other threads and are preparing a more encompassing statement soon. Anything I state here will digress every other topic which you've mentioned and I've touched upon.
Eyonix Closes
These are my thoughts on the matter. I am not attempting to argue with you, or state that your thoughts aren't valid. The fact is, I personally love World of Warcraft and enjoy playing the game. I'm excited at what we have in-store for players through content updates and expansion. Please feel free to accuse me of bias, it simply isn't true.
Is the game perfect?
No.
Which is why we continue to make changes and improvements and have dedicated the largest portion of our staff into focusing on making this the greatest game possible. We read your feedback and it's appreciated.
Alright, you'd like my comments? First of all, calling World of Warcraft a failure on our boards and making references to knives in your heart is insulting, no matter what other words you've chosen to convey your thoughts. The first real statement you made indicated that we're revealing some limitation in designing a massively multiplayer game due to our "action role playing" and "first person shooter" roots. This statement confused me. I didn't know that this was simply a text error - you'd be surprised how many people contact our support departments because they had questions concerning "our games" Command and Conquer", "Doom II" and if I remember the conversations I've had on this subject with the technicians, a Mary Kate and Ashley game boy title. But I digress...
The 60 wall
It's intended that the game changes once level cap is met. Your main focus for progressing your character is now no longer a necessity or possibility. Without getting into the specifics here as to what is suitable content for you and what is suitable content for the next person at level 60, the fact remains, each patch we are adding more content for players at cap to participate in, and when the expansion releases, players will have a chance to progress as they had previously.
Broken Promises
To be blunt, more adequately phrased - broken misconceptions. We never stated that there wouldn't be timesinks, nor have we ever stated our mechanics are revolutionary. We are very proud of our game and what we've been able to accomplish through the course of its development. Hero classes were something we wanted in the game earlier on. The system is a massive undertaking, and still being developed.
Delayed Responses
What you describe here is very subjective. Everyone has there individual thoughts on what our game's "biggest problems" are and could probably list them in order of what's most game breaking to them. The fact is, we're able to view this game as a whole, take in feedback and determine based upon our own production what's the best series of issues to tackle and what content should receive the most focus at a given time. We do our best, and unfortunately resources aren't unlimited.
No World Events
There is a world event next patch, and our world event's team has been working on content which will serve players in similar ways to what you've described. Unfortunately, implementing world events that all players can take advantage of is much more difficult than you might imagine, however we are very pleased with the progress we're making.
Failure to Police Gold Farmers
We battle this each and every day. The fact of the matter is, releasing the specifics of our efforts would undermine what we were attempting to accomplish. More specifically addressing your thoughts, we have an obligation to protect our player base. We can never tell a player, "alright that player you reported, we've banned him, thanks for the report". In addition, most gold buying and selling occurs outside of the game and our investigations cannot always provide us with the proper evidence. I'm sorry, being one hundred percent certain someone is a gold farmer selling gold on the internet isn't enough, we must catch them doing it and be able to prove such. Our efforts in this battle are much larger than you might realize, but this isn't something that is going to go away overnight.
Non-Randomized Itemization
It's funny you accuse us of failing because our action role playing roots show, yet you fault us for not creating a system found in a standard multiplayer game. The itemization you describe doesn't work the same in an MMO. Although you may be happy to hear the expansion will allow for socketed items. We agree, cookie cutter builds aren't very cool and we takes steps every day to ensure that players have many, many options.
The Death of World PvP
We're actually working on bringing PvP back into this outside world as we speak. I cannot comment on the specifics, but we agree that outdoor PvP is fun and we'd like to incentivize players to participate.
The Battleground Honor Grind
We've stated a number of time that we're going to be making major improvements to the Honor System. This will take time, for now we'll address each issue as we can and make adjustments where we're able.
Blindness to the Customer's Needs
I am not even going to get into how much of this game has evolved directly based upon player feedback. Please read through all of our patch notes, and reflect upon the kind of demands which have hit the boards. Unfortunately, our memories are often short so when players are suggesting a very specific change, by the time it's implemented they've moved onto something else, and when the change is announced you get the traditional "OMG BLIZZ NO ONE IS ASKING FOR THIS" feedback.
Second, these forums are not a place to receive customer support or assistance and we're not customer service representatives. We represent Blizzard Entertainment and each of us have invested a great deal of time learning this game, understanding our players and working intimately with the design team so that we're more effective at what we're seeking to accomplish. Much of what we do is very behind the scenes. I will disagree with a player when I believe they are being unreasonable, or are wrong.
Factionalization of the Player Base
We've discussed this in a number of other threads and are preparing a more encompassing statement soon. Anything I state here will digress every other topic which you've mentioned and I've touched upon.
Eyonix Closes
These are my thoughts on the matter. I am not attempting to argue with you, or state that your thoughts aren't valid. The fact is, I personally love World of Warcraft and enjoy playing the game. I'm excited at what we have in-store for players through content updates and expansion. Please feel free to accuse me of bias, it simply isn't true.
Is the game perfect?
No.
Which is why we continue to make changes and improvements and have dedicated the largest portion of our staff into focusing on making this the greatest game possible. We read your feedback and it's appreciated.
-Eyonix, 12/16/2005
1 comment:
His last comments that he loves to play World of Warcraft... is that something they always have to write or gettings sued for braking some sort of contract?
I have to agree with that guy even if he is a little bit wrong at the same time, but hey, anyone that read a little bit of gamedesign gets confused when they look at World of WarCraft.
Instead you should start to keep a eye on Seed developed by our Danish neighbours.
http://www.seedthegame.com
That! looks like it can turn into a really interesting MMORPG ;)
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