The State of WoW

[utterances-bot]

The State of WoW - Matthew Prado

Talking about streamers, corporate attitude, and the rise of other competitors.

https://www.mprado.ml/blog/warcraft-dethroned/

[Br0Tat0]

I agree with you 100% percent!

[neoevans]

I'd like to offer some "old guy" perspective here, but first I want to address your math. 20k hours in WoW, and 10k in SWToR? You realize 20k hours is the equivalent of working full time (40 hrs/week) for 9.6 year, right? I'm gonna need to see a /played on that... ;)

Anyways, a couple of points you made here I felt worth commenting on. First, you said:

The moment shareholders are prioritized over gamers, the moment the game loses its special flame.

Let's be clear about one thing. Gaming is a business first, and a form of creative expression second. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you, to themselves, or both. The indie developer dreams of success by getting millions of players to buy their game. The indie development team dreams of the same, and of getting acquired by a larger studio. Studios under large publishers like Activision or EA spend hundreds of millions to make the best game possible, in order to maximize the potential return on investment. You might argue that there are thousands of examples of free games that never achieve any of this and aren't trying to, and that's true. But I'm willing to bet those developers would be happy to see financial success in addition to players. This is why different monetization strategies exist. Developers gotta eat, and studios gotta profit.

That leads me to my next point. You said:

WoW killed itself because it lost its ability to innovate and became to comfortable in its monopoly. I refer to both Classic and Retail as a whole when I talk to this, solely because that the company is to blame, not a problem with the game in itself.

As someone who was there from the early days of Vanilla WoW, I want to offer a different point of view. If you've ever seen the original "Incredibles" movie, the main antagonist famously says:

When everyone's super, no one will be...

This was something I witnessed first hand, which I strongly believe contributed to the decline of WoW in the first 10 years. That's not to say it was the only reason, but one that took away from the "soul" of the game. I'll explain.

The lack of information, add-ons, and skill gap that vanilla WoW had makes the discoveries of new items no longer interesting.

In the early years, before the datamining websites took all of the fun out of exploration in WoW, you had to do things differently. You ran to a location in the game, there was no flying mounts and fast travel routes were limited. I once swam around the entire continent of Kalimdor because I was convinced there was somewhere on the map you could only get to by swimming. It took me 6 hours or so. If you wanted to do a dungeon or raid, you had to announce your intentions in general chat, or by standing on the steps of the bank in Ironforge and /yell. People would inspect each other, ask about strategies, and other techniques to determine whether or not you were a n00b, and we all marveled at the half dozen or so players decked out in the tier 1 or 2 raid gear, while the rest of us were wearing the best available blues and crafted epics.

Today, people have obligations

Are you suggesting this generation is somehow the first to be busy? No, I'm sure you aren't. But to be clear this generation has more time-saving tools at your disposal than any before it. If anything, you have more disposable time on your hands. But my point isn't that "back in my day, we had to blah blah uphill both ways", it's that the game being challenging and time consuming is what made people like me make the time, even with 2 kids, a wife, and a full time job. It was that desire to get the unobtainable that drove people to play.

Fast forward a few years, when dungeon and even raid finder queues were added to the game, something intended to improve quality of life and maximize player time, and suddenly none of the 120+ members in my guild wanted to play. We went from pushing the top tier content in 40 and 25 man raids, day 1 Naxx, to not being able to throw together a 10-man. What happened? Everyone had access to the best gear available with minimal effort. Everyone was special, so there was no point in playing 20-30 hours per week when you could log in any time, grind out your gear through quick-play, and log off. We had some of the top-10 DPS and healing players in the world in our guild, who simply didn't care anymore. We had PvP Grandmasters who couldn't be bothered to log on, because their achievements meant nothing.

It wasn't that the content wasn't coming enough, in fact it was coming too much for anyone to keep up with. No, the problem was that Blizzard was giving the player base everything they asked for, and in doing so they robbed the game of what made it special. I see the same happening in SWToR, Destiny 2, Fortnite, and countless other properties.

One could argue that it's a natural evolution of any successful franchise. Start with something new and exciting, grow larger than your expectations, and once the player base is large enough that a vocal part of the community starts to have influence on the whole, their voice starts to drown out all others and you end up bending to their will. Every community on Reddit is an example of this. They become echo chambers or negativity, and anyone who dissents is a "shill" or "white knight" for a faceless corporation.

The problem with this is, players make terrible game designers. The vast majority have no idea what they are asking for, and can't predict the long term impact it will have when making complaints about gameplay, balance, level or character design, or anything else. Most people have no idea what it takes to make a game, let alone a AAA game that costs $100M+ to make and operate. And yet, the producers have no choice but to meet the players' demands, and often the result is a game that lacks purpose. Because when we can all have everything with little to no effort, what's the point?

My WoW guild is still there, 15 years later, and a lot of those top-ranking members have become life-long friends for me. But WoW died for us long before the content got repetitive and stale. It died when you no longer had to form those relationships in order to reach the heights it had to offer.

So I would argue it's not so much the corporate big brother or even the studio becoming out of touch with the players ruins a franchise. It's the player base, time and time again thinking they know what's best for a game simply because they play it.

[mapoztate]

@neoevans Hey, good to see you here! I'll send a screenshot whenever I resume my WoW subscription...but a lot of those hours are either shared with family, playing two games at once, or AFK hours so don't worry (totally not like I play in class and during work as well but let's keep that our secret!)! I definitely agree with your point of that while game development first starts as a hobby, the whole point is to eventually monetized.

The addition of so called "quality of life" experiences such as reduction of travel time (summoning stones, flight paths, etc.), ease of finding groups (Dungeon Finder, LFR, etc.), boosts, WoW token, and whatever other "innovations" that Blizzard added over the years killed a lot of time spent on the game (and possibly experiences). While it does reduce the barrier of entry (grindy leveling, getting killed by Horde while travelling to a raid), a lot of the new players don't get the experiences that we did of "fun" memories. So I think it's sort of a retention of the "casual player base" vs a special experience to be remembered by loyal players.

When I refer to "people have obligations", I mean that the original player base originally loyal to WoW no longer have the drive to get those "unobtainable items". My generation still has that drive to get the "unobtainable" and like you said, more disposable time to do so. I make this claim out in the random, but I like to believe that when people get older, their focuses are more toward real life, examples being promotion, higher education, family, and the sort.

I admit that I fall to the same "customer knows best" as a lot of people where we're often blinded by what we think is best for the game but otherwise would drive the game down. Often, what makes a game successful is the "freshness" of the features that the game is adding, whether that be something technical such as or something to do with the culture of the game such as an original story. WoW tried to "innovate" with new currencies/systems, but at the end of the day, they're all reskins of a core gameplay feature. I'm clearly not a game dev, but there's certainly not much that I can think of that'd give WoW that freshness. I don't know if you're updated with WoW's story these days, but the current Shadowlands is not only repetitive, but feels like a Wattpad fanfic that I could've written.

The reason why I'm still impressed by games such as SWTOR, even if they are adopting "casual-like" features, is because of its story. I think that SWTOR was still the first of its kind to successfully implement a voice acted storyline that could last people for days at a time and still manages to keep up the quality and originality with games that have a higher budget. Of course this "special" aspect of the game that's successful will eventually be stolen by another game, but it's the thought of making a new innovation every DLC that counts.

Reddit communities and a toxic player base definitely pressure a game into begging at the knees of the players, especially with the rise of cancel culture and other things that could possibly bring harm to a customer's employees. I'm less worried about that, like you said it's bound to happen at some point as a game grows bigger; I'm more worried about the rising negative feedback with working at Blizzard. I'm not in the company, so I can't really comment, but a company's internal structure does reflect upon the state of the game.

[neoevans]

Hey, that probably came off a little more “judgy” than I intended. What I meant overall is that all successful games eventually go through this cycle. The natural trajectory seems to be one where the initial success gives way to player expectations, and ultimately it’s decline. How high the game climbs and how long it lasts depends on so many factors; strength and depth of initial IP, gameplay, reward systems, community engagement, etc… and both WoW and SWToR come from a good place. I loved SWToR in the first year, and am not surprised it’s still going strong. Final Fantasy XIV is surprising. That whole franchise has the direction of a caffeinated toddler, but that’s probably just my opinion. I played a lot of FF in my youth, and I just don’t get it.

Anyways, the community feedback loop is a double edge sword. Don’t listen to your player base and they will leave in droves. Listen too much and they will still leave, just more slowly either due to the IP drying up as it eventually will, or because the game loses what originally made it fun. In WoW’s case, I think it’s a combination of these things. 17 years is a long time to try and keep it fresh.