by Wolfshead on June 26, 2009
Before I started playing MMOs I was a bit of loner. I was always shy. I was the big clumsy kid that always got picked last for teams in school. I was a kind of a nerd before being a nerd was cool. Then this innovation called online gaming happened. The great thing about MMOs like EverQuest was that they encouraged me to interact with other people via role-playing with my avatar. At first it felt a bit scary and uncomfortable but soon I actually enjoyed it.
Eventually as I grew more confident as a player and as my social skills improved, I craved the shared purpose and camaraderie that I would find in groups and guilds.
Ten years later everything has changed with WoW being the dominant MMO. Grouping for the average MMO players is now the exception rather than the rule. Even talking about requiring that MMOs stress more group related content brings out the charge of “forced grouping” from some respectable MMO commentators like Tesh and others.
In the past few months there have been some good discussions on the whole solo vs group issue that are worth reading. I’d like to offer up my take on the subject and examine in particular this notion of forced grouping. Did it really ever exist and do these playstyles need each other?
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by Wolfshead on June 18, 2009
In every game and sport since the dawn of time, human participants have been their existential lifeblood. The test of skill, athletics, teamwork and stamina as participants go head to head with each other has always been the fundamental building block of gaming competitions. Sports provides us with the joys and challenges of working with teammates and against opponents.
With the arrival of video games came a revolution where teammates and opponents were no longer needed. Sure there are FPS games and varying degrees of PVP in many MMOs where players actually face each other but the typical video game experience is largely a variant of the card game Solitaire.
Virtual worlds have become so incredibly detailed and immersive that the primacy of the player in the grand scheme of things has been eroded. As MMOs become more like movies we’ve become spectators instead of participants. Is the tennis court more important than the players? Is the stadium more significant than the athletes? Has the beauty and majesty of $50 million virtual worlds blinded us?
Have players have taken a backseat to the content?
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by Wolfshead on June 17, 2009
Ten years after the release of EverQuest — one of the most beloved and revered MMOs of all time — one if it’s creator’s Brad McQuaid has apparently resurfaced. For a while there have probably been more sightings of Elvis and Osama Bin Laden then the reclusive Brad McQuaid.
Due to his bungling and mismanagement of Sigil and their subsequent failure Brad has been portrayed as an arch-villain in the MMO world in recent years. We are a very unforgiving community it seems. Failure is something that rabid MMO fans have a hard time dealing with. We crucify our MMO messiahs when they fail and never let them forget it. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s zero.
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by Wolfshead on June 8, 2009
Is there an accurate way to know if a MMO is in decline? For most players it’s something we can sense by intuition. We make mental notes of our anecdotal experiences: we start noticing that there are less players when we log on; fewer guildmates are showing up for raids; it’s harder to find people to group with; there are fewer people buying our goods in the auction house and so on.
Naturally MMO companies like Blizzard will never tell us the truth about how many players are still subscribing to WoW and how many are actually playing on their servers. When they are not busy trying to shut down mom & pop companies that are making iPhone apps, webcomics and fan stores by sending cease and desist letters they seemingly find the time to make exuberant self-congratulatory press releases touting their recent millions served number of WoW subscribers.
I hate to break the bad news to Blizzard but I’ve seen a couple of charts on Alexa.com that have analyzed the traffic that WorldofWarcraft.com has been getting in the past 22 months. Could these charts be predicting the decline of WoW?
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by Wolfshead on May 20, 2009
Thankfully most of us live in a world where competition spurs on industries to make better products. In most cases this drive to succeed has the end result of giving people more choices. As consumers we also value the notion that we pay only for what we use. Let’s look at how a steak house operates: the hungry man that wants to order a filet mignon can pay the high price tag for his pleasure; the weight conscious woman that wants to eat a light salad pays considerably less and both of them can order mashed potatoes and a side of vegetables if they wish.
The beauty of an a la carte menu is that we only pay for what we order — we don’t pay for the lobster the guy at the next table is eating. This kind of restaurant dining experience is a proven, successful, time-tested transaction between the vendor and the customer.
Why then can’t MMO companies offer similar a la carte pricing? Why should one group of players have to subsidize the activities of other players?
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by Wolfshead on May 8, 2009
The fact that Blizzard has refused to implement some form of player housing in WoW remains one of the most bizarre and perplexing decisions in the short history of MMOs and virtual worlds. Player housing long desired by a significant number of WoW players and even Blizzard devs has been a feature that has been successfully implemented in other popular MMOs such as Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online — MMOs that had a tiny fraction of the development budget and incoming revenue that WoW has.
So what possibly could be the reason for player housing not being implemented yet?
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by Wolfshead on April 24, 2009
This week a well known MMO industry blogger and community manager Cuppycake posed a “controversial” question. Let me paraphrase: do game designers who blog know what the heck they are taking about? I’m frankly suspicious as to the motives of her question which I’ll explain later. Could we not ask the same about any discipline? For example, how do we know that we can even trust the credentials and worthiness of the people who write for Time, Newsweek or the New York Times? What makes someone an expert that they should be listened to and believed?
Since we’re all playing the game now I’ll take her bait and take a stab at answering the question.
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We all come to MMOs and virtual worlds with grand expectations. For months before a MMO is released we experience the hype about how this time it will be different. We salivate as we see the trailers and read the marketing copy about how you and your friends will be transported to a world of wonder and magic — a world of adventure and excitement awaits where anything can happen.
