Rarely do we get a chance to peek behind the curtain at Blizzard Entertainment. The company that makes the most popular MMO in the history of gaming is fairly secretive and clandestine about their development process. Blizzard is so cloak and dagger about their operations that their street address is never published lest hordes of angry fans upset at the latest class nerf show up with torches and pitchforks and storm their hallowed halls.
To be fair they occasionally give us a glimpse into their inner workings at various BlizzCons and Game Development Conferences. Last year it was Rob Pardo who gave a speech at the GDC — an annual conference aimed directly at game industry types. This year it was Jeff Kaplan’s turn to ask for absolution from his fellow game designers with a talk entitled The Cruise Director of Azeroth.
Broken Toys has already pounced on this story as has Mobhunter each giving their own unique takes on his speech. There’s another report from Gamasutra as well. I’d like to put my own Wolfshead spin on Jeff Kaplan’s lecture.
Let me first say that I think we need much more transparency in hearing from MMO devs instead of the usual corporate spin doctor speak we get from the community reps on the official forums. Jeff comes across as being brutally honest, self-deprecating and *gasp* even humble which is a very refreshing change from the high school bravado of his days back as a guildleader of Legacy of Steel.
Control Freaks
I’ve always maintained that Blizzard are control freaks. Everything about WoW is about controlling the player from the perspective of a single-player game mentality. Even the title “cruise director” implies that you the player are on their ship and you are just a tourist that needs to be given a full set of activities to keep you entertained.
Jeff Kaplan: What this means, and this is kind of a weird one, but you show up to a quest hub, and your minimap is lit up like a Christmas tree with quest exclamation marks.
The weird thing is, if you ask our fans, they love this. This is to them a good quest hub… They go in and vacuum up the quests. But we’ve lost all control to guide them to a really fun experience.
Did you notice that? He said “we’ve lost all control”. The thing is, the player is never really in control when they play a quest directed MMO. Yet the very fact that the player is choosing to load up on all of these quests at a quest hub seems to infuriate Jeff. Why? Because the player is not supposed to do this. This is unintended. This is wrong. It seems that he’s saying that the player is thwarting their own potential fun by being *in* control. The horror.
Question: Is it bad to let players take control of they way they play your MMO?
While I do sympathize with Jeff at the fact that players nowadays seem to load up on quests like a fat man at an all you can eat buffet, can you really blame them in a MMO where efficiency and min/maxing are the order of the day? WoW teaches players to behave like achievers, why then should they not “grind” quests in the same way they do everything else? Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Too Much Text in Quests
Jeff laments that there is too much text in quests:
Jeff Kaplan: I actually wish that the number was smaller. I think it’s great to limit people in how much pure text they can force on the player. Because honestly… if you ever want a case study, just watch kids play it, and they’re just mashing the button. They don’t want to read anything.
Yet how can this be when WoW is a quest based MMO? Quests without some form of text can’t exist can they? It seems he’d rather just have a laundry list of things you need to kill and/or get.
The problem here is not that there is too much text to read, it’s the fact that a typical MMO interaction with NPCs is a very boring and uninteresting one way conversation. Think about it. You aren’t allowed to speak or reply. You have no input. All you can do is press either accept or decline. NPCs have the emotional depth of a vending machine.
The solution is that we need to get away from the WoW quest pane opening up where the NPC gives you a speech about how he needs your help. We need to have quests and interactions with NPCs that are challenging in their own right and more like the exchange you’d see in a real conversation. So Jeff, the text isn’t the problem rather it’s the sterile and unimaginative way the text is delivered. Maybe you’ll ponder this for your so-called “next gen” MMO. We need a revolution on how players interact with NPCs. Is anyone listening?
It’s Not a Game, it’s a World™
See if you can count how many times Jeff uses the word “world” in his lecture.
Despite the fact that it’s the “World of Warcraft” and not the “Game of Warcraft” Jeff to my knowledge never refers to WoW as a world, instead he calls it a game. I find it fascinating that one of the former lead designers of the most popular MMO in existence has an apparent aversion to calling WoW a world.
Some MMO designers are afraid of using the term virtual worlds. They feel it’s too experimental, too weird and too pretentious. It scares them because it’s a heavy responsibility making a world even a virtual one. It’s much easier and safer to make a game because if the world goes all wrong you can say “it’s just a game…” There’s also a lot of machismo involved with the competitive nature of gaming, so creating a virtual world is for sissies. Real men make games not virtual worlds.
If there was any doubt as to why Blizzard has been willfully negligent in fully developing the awesome potential and possibilities of a virtual world we have no further to look then the attitude of people like Jeff Kaplan. He’s been the “man” all along keeping WoW down. It’s a well known fact that Blizzard has given veto power to all of its key people. So it’s very easy to see why typical virtual world features like player housing and guild halls have never made it into WoW given Jeff’s disdain for the notion of virtual worlds.
If it’s Broke then Fix it
After reading that Jeff authored the infamous Green Hills of Stranglethorn quests and other problematic quests I have to wonder why they just don’t go back, fix them and make them better. Why do they knowingly let people suffer through these quests for 5+ years? There’s a certain arrogance at Blizzard that once content is “finished” it’s finished for good.
I guess $500+ million a year in profits isn’t enough green to hire someone to fix old quests or update old content. I know this cool guy in Washington that may be able to help out Blizz with some stimulus money. 
Conclusion
I have to respect Jeff for being honest enough to admit that there are some problems with the quest system in WoW. His frankness and candor aside, we should not let him off the hook for failing to address many of the systemic problems inherent in quest driven gameplay. Longasc a reader of this site made a great comment that I sums up the feeling that Kaplan didn’t go far enough in admitting the shortcomings of the WoW quest system:
Longasc: I unfortunately miss the part where he says “Now we need to get away from quest-guided content delivery”.
I suppose we should be thankful that he finally manned up and made a partial confession. There is hope for him. It will be interesting to see what if any lessons Jeff has learned from WoW when he creates the quest content for Blizzzard’s unannounced next gen MMO.
-Wolfshead
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Damn right on the wall of text crits, I’d love to see more interactivity from the NPCs. It doesn’t have to be an EQ style chat dialog (aka guess the magic word that unlocks the quest, n00b!), it could start with something simple like every time you pass by some NPC he calls out and asks if you’ve got those ten wolf tails yet.
Then, if you click the NPC he could offer more info, replacing the current flavour effect (click once = cheery greeting, click again = less cheery, click multiple = getting irritated).
“It’s Not a Game, it’s a World” got a chuckle out of me. It’s certainly misleading marketing, but I’m not convinced that quest-based content delivery as a whole needs to be scrapped. For example, WAR’s public quests were a nice idea, but that idea needs to be further refined.
In a single-player RPG the developers carefully control all aspects of PC-NPC interaction, even in a game as open-ended as Oblivion (and its predecessors). Imagine playing Oblivion and walking into a town and suddenly ten people within sight say “Hey! Come over here! I need some help with this!” Better yet, Imagine you are a butler and you show up for work and suddenly all ten members of the family are demanding something of you. This overwhelming amount of information would be totally unprocessable so you would have to break it down into a (did you see this coming!?
) laundry list of objectives. You wouldn’t know why they wanted these things done, or what their significance was. You needn’t be a butler though I suppose- so we can avoid the “WoW is a game not a job” thing -you might just come home and find your entire extended family making demands of you.
In real life you would ignore all of their “quest text” (reasoning, motivations etc.) if you decided the “reward” (impressing them with your generosity or avoiding their potential wrath) is worth the “task” (task) because you’re having so much thrown at you at once. I think all he was trying to say is that they can’t effectively put any legitimate lore into their quests in their current state because it’s so readily bypassed by players overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
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They want to tell a story, but they’re realizing that their chosen medium is inflicting some unintended consequences upon them. They want to “control” players the way a professor guides their students through the class material. They are trying to give the players some specific experience, and that the player is revelling in a perversion of that experience is rightfully upsetting.
Regardless what I think, though, the bottom line from where I can see it is that WoW is not a Virtual World ™, and just like Tolkien was bothered by people considering his work to be allegorical so is Blizzard bothered by people treating its story as less important than the means to the end. They realize that this can be helped through design, however, and they intend on making the change.
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It’s a tricky thing, figuring out the causes of the min/maxing thing. Players partake in min/maxing becasue they want to, however- not because the system demands it. I know some, albeit very few, people that play WoW and read every quest box, and enjoy the little chunk of story every time they find/finish part of a quest. They also enjoy raiding and instances casually, without obsessing over gear. This is proof that the system does not force the player to act in these ways.
I’m going to tie this in, don’t worry: Successful businesses have climbed to the top of the “free market economy” and therefore hold great sway over a lot of attitudes and social norms (it is almost unbelievable how much influence they hold over teenagers and their sense of what’s “cool”)
I think that a parallel can be drawn to MMOs, or WoW in particular, where those able to turn the system to their advantage in the most visible and powerful way hold sway over the way everyone after them will play the game. When people reach the level cap and get all geared up they have power. Those successful players that achieve the most power are held at a higher social status in MMOs (they command far more respect than other players)
Donald Trump can probably give some very good business advice, and we trust him because he has the money to prove he knows what he’s talking about. Because we would like to have a lot of money like he has, we may listen to his advice and become heavily inolved in financing a business of our own.
Max-level characters can also probably give good advice about getting to the cap, and they have the gear and ability to crush things effortlessly to prove it. Because we would like to be respected like they are we might listen to their advice and min/max and powerlevel our way to the top.
To believe Mr. Trump and get involved in the same type of business that he is, however, we have to decide that we believe he is at a better place than us. We have to sell out to the idea that he is better off because he has money, and that the way he obtained it is acceptable.
In the same way to trust in and become a part of the min/maxing and grind-as-fast-as-you-can-to-reach-the-end system you have to believe that it is an acceptable means to a desirable end.
Having said that, it’s a far more complicated issue than I am capable of tackle all by myself- but there’s lots of things involved in how MMOs present themselves and how the min/maxing asserts itself in their systems. These are a few examples:
1. Social Pressure. There is a generally accepted idea that being a “noob” is bad, and that “pro’s” are better than other people. Ascending the levels and gearing up is a way to solidify your reputation as a “pro” so that you wont be seen as someone inexperienced. A similar thing can be found in the idea that having had many sexual partners, and thus being experienced, is a superior state of being. Just because someone doesn’t agree with that principle doesn’t mean that they will not be hurt by the chiding and taunts of others, but even for people that are secure enough not to be hurt by such ridiculous taunting it is still annoying, and conforming to the proposed idea is often the easiest way to put an end to those vocal assailants (especially when you want to conform for other reasons anyways).
2. Competition. I have a standing debate with a friend of mine on whether competition is instinctual or indoctrinated by society, but it is very evident in MMOs, especially (more or less specifically) in MMOs with a very PvP-heavy focus. I put WoW in this category because 1/2 (ideally) of the other players on your server are 100% cut off from playing the game with you unless you are interacting in a competitive setting. The nature of PvP is to best your opponent, and the hp-war setting where everything is simple mathematics lends itself almost innately to the min/maxing system. The only skill we see there is avoiding your opponents LOS; everything else is just knowing the right ability for the right situations
3.Experience, as in experiencing the game. A virtual world is meant to give you and immersive and open-ended experience, while a story-driven game is meant to give you an immersive and guided experience. I would consider raiding and pvp to be separate experiences altogether, and as you can see there are many different experiences of WoW all vying for your attention. Partaking in one experience, such as raiding, may make you more powerful in other experiences, such as raiding, and so there can be a lot of motivation to succeed in one experience offered if you value success in related areas.
4. Personality. As a community gamers are always looking for a very different array of games to suit every persons needs. There is no such thing as a universal game- and no, WoW doesn’t even come close.
Different types of people will always play games differently, and so you will find min/maxer types trying to analyze fighting games, and lore enthusiasts picking apart the intricacies of a grind-fest.
So we should sit back and think about, and think hard about, the motivations behind our play-styles before we start blaming the game.
What I’m trying to get at is that the min/maxing “nature” is a reflection on the community, not the game itself. Players removed from the community but still in the game may not feel like they need to min/max (in fact, I think they wouldn’t). It’s all about how you approach the game. Naturally everyone would love to live in paradise, but create a raiders paradise and your lore-lovers will find no satisfaction (and everyone gets bored and wants to try something new once in a while, so there’s no sense in pigeonholing them unless they want to pay two subs)- and so we are left with a mish-mosh of styles of play that can be explored. To be a part of the community you have to find a way to fit in. You can’t find a group if you’re unwilling to chat (before the aut0-join LFF que) and you can’t keep a group if you want to roll on everything. There are social norms you MUST conform to- and others that just make life easier. If everyone else is playing a grind game and you want to group up and roll on a weapon drop because it’ll be fun to play with even though you don’t need it you will be met with hostility from the person that sees themselves as NEEDing it. You will either conform or be exiled! So whatever WoW is now we can attribute to its community, the developers can only go so far in improving/harming that aspect of the game.
Imagine if there was an online version of pong released and everyone that played was extremely competitive and cutthroat competition was the norm with extremely hardcore and much-too-serious players. People that just wanted to play pong online might find some occasional enjoyment but generally speaking they would stay away because they would be unwlecome.
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Imagine if you wrote a very long and involved D&D campaign over the course of a year and when you presented it to a friend to run with his group he just took out the maps and they fought their way through the dungeons, ignoring the story. Many more people have worked on WoW for far longer than a few months, and while making an enjoyable game is a priority (as well as making money), it also seems to me that creating a “campaign-like” setting that anchored players in a very involving story where they play the hero was also a very important thing to them- and that being ignored is legitimately distressing to them.
By all rights I shouldn’t be awake five hours ago. If you think I’ve got something wrong then call me out! If what I said made no sense at all, then call me out!
That’s it! I can’t take it anymore! The first thing I do as soon as I can think straight tomorrow is writing on the separation of Virtual Worlds and MMOGames!
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I’m not so sure we should write off quest-based systems in general. Theirs certainly has its issues (at least 9 of them that they’re aware of
) but is there really no hope for anything remotely similar? (I don’t know, there might not be)
I’ve been one of those people often negative towards Tigole / Jeff Kaplan. I have to say, even though I can still rip this speech apart, there’s a certain honesty in it, especially the name of the presentation itself:
Cruise Director of Azeroth probably describes his time at the reins of WoW the best. Too often people have given him credit for the entire game, probably because he’s the most outspoken of Blizzard’s devs, plus he doesn’t usually seem in a hurry to correct the assumptions (and occasionally feeds them IMHO)– but with this title alone, he sums it up, almost disparagingly. It makes him a lot more human to me.
Everything from raid leader as game designer, to the mistaken credit many give to him for designing the original game (which, considering he was hired at the tail end as associate designer / quest
You are right about cloak and dagger, Blizzard being very very secretive.
“Tigole” Kaplan pointed out some flaws of the Quest system and how to optimize “Cruise Control”.
But he never got to the meat: Why did I and my friends decide to split up in groups of two for levelling, because having a group of 3 or 4 players was totally awful due to different quest progression levels (one quest ahead, two ahead, not qualified…) and making collection quests the more awful the more players do them. We only met for instances and prefered to solo or duo 95% of the zones!
Levelling up in WOTLK had an early choice: Tundra or Howling Fjord? You could fairly easy switch between them and levels were similar, so you did not make the whole east or west of Northrend gray to you, but I managed to level through Fjord, Grizzly Hills and parts of Zul’Drak plus some Borean Tundra/Nexus and, while doing only few instances, ending up over-levelled for the whole Dragonblight. I did the quests in the hub below Naxxramas though.
Zul’Drak was probably the worst collection of christmas tree questhubs that I have ever seen, btw.
The other zones were VERY enjoyable, despite being totally pushovers and guided. They were all super casual, i.e. dumbed down, as were the instances. AoE nuking is way to go even in heroic instances in WOTLK.
I think this is also part of the reason vehicles and raid encounters featuring riding dragons or using vehicles are so unpopular. People got used to dumbed down gameplay and do not really want to try ANYTHING new. My friends dismissed the new vehicle-ideas so quickly that I almost felt offended, they did not even bother to give them a chance.
Regarding PvP in Lake Wintergrasp: I played WoW on a very balanced and active server, I wonder how it plays on the “ghost” servers where one faction totally dominates the other. Despite their buff to the weaker side, I have asked people of the Alliance playing on EU-Taerar, heavily in the hands of the Horde, if they got to raid Archavon after Wintergrasp. No, not really at primetime, later and earlier sometimes.
The problem is not killing the raid boss, it is more about which ZERG won Wintergrasp. Battles were ALWAYS decided early, I never ever had to do much, we stormed the Fort or well, the Fort crushed the attackers and people left. Vehicles were used in small numbers at times.
The best battles in Wintergrasp are between the official battles! People fighting for Titanium Ore Nodes, this is the real Lake Wintergrasp. I killed more people while mining there than in the battles…^^
But Kaplan was not talking about this… clever choice of his talk topic.
I wonder in which direction he will be taking the “NEXTGEN MMO”: Carebear, Casual, PvP, Hardcore-Raiding, in form of a guided bustour or as a sandbox?
I would pay money to hear what the former boss of “FIRES OF HEAVEN”, Tigole Kaplan, really thinks about Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and his fellow lead designer co-workers making WoW an extremely casual game. So extremely casual that I just cannot help to say it is dumbed down to the extreme, which puts off a lot of people, giving “casual” the rather negative connotation “dumb”.
BTW, I just love the irony of the “It’s not a Game, it is a World” pic versus Kaplan’s own lingo!
I so wonder if the next Blizzard MMO is a guided tour or not… and if the next WoW expansion tries something new or just perfectionizes the WOTLK-bus-tour,
dumbing it down even moremaking it even more accessibleBTW, Jedi, we both make a mistake: Too much text, did not read!
I enjoyed reading the interview and subsequent break downs. I only have two small points amid all the great discussion.
1) green hills of stranglethorn is my absolute favorite quest. I hate levelling, I am an “end game” player. One trip to the AH and I can get half a level of xp.
2) without further bashing the silly wow quest system, if you are in a group and anyone completes a quest all group members should get credit, regardless if they have it or not, or even if there are prereqs. It further kills any immersion that may exist in the game. If I’m given the ultra important task of killing some special mob, and three friends help me that mob is dead – for all of us – and all should reap the reward.
This would enhance grouping ad well, which is why I love mmos in the first place.
“That’s it! I can’t take it anymore! The first thing I do as soon as I can think straight tomorrow is writing on the separation of Virtual Worlds and MMOGames! ”
I was being a little dramatic, 2AM makes me a little whacky, I DID write that post here: http://jedioftheshire.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/virtual-worldtm-vs-mmorpg-they-are-different-and-ill-tell-you-why/#comments.
But chris you have a great point about immersion and quests remaining player-specific. I feel like I should throw out there as well that the special mob your going to kill will be back and terrorizing the locals 10-15 minutes after you kill him, and it wont be a different bandit chief. It’ll be the exact same one.
MMOs have a lot of room to become more immersive. The flip side of immersion though is that it’ll kill your casual gamer. MMOs already demand a huge amount of your time, especially if you want to run instances/raids, and if you have to go pick up the kids or go to work right before your group goes to kill the bandit chief then, in an extremely immersive game, you will just miss out on that little bit of adventure. Static worlds do a very good job of letting everyone experience the same adventures, while a deeply immersive world would be rather unforgiving. Just a thought.
It is time for a change.
Bartle once classified gamer types as a mix of 4 preferences: Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, Killer.
I am a very heavy “ESak”. (besides that: the Bartle Test should be modernized, it has and had some flaws and is a bit dated nowadays)
WoW caters almost exclusively to the “Achievers”. Heavily.
Killers are not really present, they had their claws defanged by game mechanics, even on PvP servers. And I hesistate to extend the “Killer” scheme meant mainly for the no longer existing PK-players to the e-sports style Arenas of WoW.
This was already obvious in February 2005, as WoW was released in Europe. I went back to my own forum entries in 2005, and read those of other players, and well:
All criticism we re-discovered was already there.
And still nobody came up with an alternativ to WoW so far, to make me and other guys happy who would prefer another kind of MMO.
There is no point to copy WoW’s guided experience, there are for sure more than just me and a few discontent ex-players who yearn for something new and different.
BTW, I just took the Bartle Test again… ESAK, as I said:
“Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.”
Games People Like You Play:
No Games Found
… *CRIES*
Heh, Longasc you made me curious so I went to that site and found out I’m an ESKA (73/67/40/20%) and not-so-oddly enough I scored negative 100% on the “Reward-Driven” trait. The trait description read: “who needs another cookie?” I tried to be as honest as possible, but I feel that I should point out that WoW seduced me for a time with its nearly endless trail of cookies to the cap back during the first expansion. Maybe the test just managed to pick up on how jaded I am with the achievement-driven system.
I have the odd feeling that the test generates too many Explorers, but nobody bothered to make a better one so far.
Agreed. I enjoyed the other quizzes as well too. Their RTS one was spot on for me (Strategist all the way: You approach RTS as a thinker more than a doer, so you may not put much effort in “ubermicro.” Is me perfectly) so the website was a good time
Thanks for reminding me it existed!
The main trouble with the Bartle test is the binary nature of the thing. It tends to skew the data for all those questions that could be answered “it depends”.
Even so, I suspect I’d be closer to a 160/20/20/0 EASK if it was tuned a bit differently. *shrug*
I understand where Blizzard is coming from. However they must realize that MMOs are not single player games where the game designer can “tell the story” in a predetermined and sequential fashion.
I remember when I started playing MMOs, the point for me was never to play them so I could find out the “story”. The story if any was subservient to the stories and social interaction of the community. Blizzard has it all backwards and this is what explains the disconnect that they are experiencing. Their egos will not let them relinquish control to the players — they must be in control much like a film director controls the content, pacing of a film.
The fact that most WoW players are now grinding quests (as Muckbeast has said) is delicious irony as quests were supposed to be the panacea of mob grinding. This is a problem of Blizzard’s own making. I find it hard to feel sorry for them that players are not experiencing the content in the way that they INTENDED. Again it’s all about control.
Blizzard designers need to come off their high horses and realize that the true strength of MMOs and virtual worlds is their ability to bring people together socially and let them tell their own stories and make their own memories and experiences. They seem to be afraid of emergent gameplay.
MMOs were never intended to tell stories. Sure Blizzard may have morphed MMOs into something altogether different but the fact remains that as long as they continue to tell “their” story their going to be at odds and in conflict with the intrinsic nature of MMOs and virtual worlds: the ability to give players autonomy and let them flourish and experience that world in their own way and in their own good time — not Blizzards.
Someone give Wolfshead and Muckbeast the funds of Blizzard.
I actually wonder what will happen in the next big Blizzard MMO. I would actually be heavily disappointed if it would not be something new, but WoW+ refined.
But hey, they bought “Diablo” by buying the whole company and naming this subsection Blizzard North, Warcraft started out as Command & Conquer style inspired RTS game, and Warcraft 2/3 and Starcraft refined the very same formula. Nobody remembers Lost Vikings or Blackthorne, early Blizz games, anymore.
So we have the Diablo Action-RPG line, the RTS line and WoW as EQ clone with Warcraft-Background.
What is next, oh please, …. please NOT World of Starcraft!
Actually.. Blizzard has both a wholly separate MMO in the works as well as a game that currently uses the WoW engine for testing.
To keep this in perspective, the orc campaign in the Warcraft 3:TFT could be seen as a very early prototype for WoW. You had a semi-persistent world, collected items and experience and could roam around doing quests in instances. In addition, the game disc itself contained a very early teaser of WoW itself.
Whats interresting to me is, that you have roleplaying realms in WoW, and from the content people made there, and uploaded to warcraftmovies for example, by far the most enjoyable “stories” I’ve seen were created by players. Be it machinima movies, RP weddings, or the shooting of a lotr-like movie – those were much more fun than most WoW quests
And if a designer is creative enough, he can introduce content, and “control” the player far more subtly than the way it is in WoW.
The problem I see, is that they are not really trying to control content, they are trying to control pacing.
It is not whether you should choose this or that quest, but how much experience this or that quest should give you. How much time should you spend going through levels 1-to-max. This is the worry of a WoW game designer. Cause they hit a dead end with end-game content every time. Every time the players reach max level, and get max gear…. there is simply nothing more for them to do!
People start quitting the game out of boredom! – there is nothing else to do in this game but to chase the next character level or the next level of gear. The game is designed this way, that is why it is not a virtual world. People dont do PvP, or battlegrounds, for fun – they do it to grind PvP gear. The same way they grind quest gear, grind heroics, grind raid content. Hardly any of that is enjoyable to anyone in the game – ask anyone!
It has been stated many times by players, that they want open world PvP – the devs answer was the new level of grindable Wintergrasp gear.
Releasing patches, new dungeons – everything is done with pacing in mind. If you played the game in the old days, you’d remember the artificial making of raid bosses too hard to beat, so players would not clear the new dungeon too fast, and get stuck with nothing to do again.
Then there is the next-gen artificial pacing with the Sunwell gates system, or how about the grind to open Ahn’Quiraj, anyone remember that? Parallel to that there was the insane PvP grind of becoming Grand marshal/High warlord – more than 10 hours a day of Bg grinding for a month or so.
So yea – it is a flaw of design. The game is not a sandbox, it does not have content width, it has content depth, content layers.
Instead of giving you a huge choice of fun things to do, it gives you a huge depth of tiered, repetitive chores, everchasing the constant carrot of next level gear.
The flavor of the game – new abilities, fun things to do, social interactions… this is what keeps player in the game, but it is all in the background.
Whats the most common social interaction two players have in WoW?
It is who deserves the next piece of gear more, who is allowed to raid or not, who is accepted in the high-end guild, who has the new-fashion gear items.
Another observation – you do tend to have in most towns and cities these big taverns, with huge dining halls, with many chairs a char can sit in, wit barmaids going about, selling a large amount of beverages…. does any1 ever use any of that?
I tried to explain my ideas about the difference between MMORPGs and MMOVirtualWorlds on my own blog http://jedioftheshire.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/virtual-worldtm-vs-mmorpg-they-are-different-and-ill-tell-you-why/ . I agree that MMOs can be BEST served as virtual worlds, but I also don’t want to pigeonhole everyone into the MMOVirtualWorld formula. The WoW teams desire for control clearly shows that they do not wish to create a Virtual World so I think we do the game a disservice by treating the game like it should be one. Do they have a ton of work to do to make it what I (emphasis on that ‘I’) think is a good game, MMORPG or MMOVirtualWorld? Yes.
If you take a single-player RPG, like Neverwinter Nights, this is also technically true. There isn’t much to the game except killing mobs, leveling up, and getting loot. What makes the game so incredibly enjoyable though (Original only, I was disappointed by the expansions and I can’t stand the sequel) is the rich storyline and plethera of lore that sits around in the form of readable books that can be found everywhere you might expect to find them in the real world (that’s basically everywhere). You have a real sense that you’re not killing to grind out levels and experience, because everything you do advances the storyline in some way.
That’s the kind of game I think WoW was trying to be. Story-driven (via quests… I, too, appreciate the irony in their failure Wolfshead >:)) simple gameplay where you can party up with your friends whenever you feel like it. Yes, they’ve hit just about every roadbump they could along the way, but I don’t think the game they want to create is so far off the map that they should give up and make it a Virtual World yet.
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This might be a little bit of a tangent, but LOTRO has a solution to the collection-quests == anti-grouping problem. Mobs drop quest items for each player. That means that if we all grouped up to hunt for orc axes then we might kill an orc and he would drop: Orc Axe (JediOfTheShire), Orc Axe (Wolfshead), Orc Axe (Longasc), etc, along with his other loot. Oh, and when it comes to the “destroy 5 of this object that’s sitting around in the enemy camp” everyone gets credit for each one that is destroyed.
The collection quests where you have to pick up items off of the ground typically have two mechanics.
1. You pick up the item and it disappears for everyone else. 10 seconds later it’s back, but you can’t pick up the same one again.
2. You pick up the item and it just disappears for you. Everyone else can pick it up- simultaneously even.
Those seem to me to be pretty darn good solutions to the problems WoW still has with grouping and collection quests- I wouldn’t think it would be too hard for them to implement such systems :/ especially since it would improve the number of happy groupers.
SsandmanN, people usually stand around the mailbox and in the auction house. Except in Dalaran, where they litter the streets because they are so narrow.
There ARE Inns in Dalaran, but nobody sits in them, or goes upstairs to the sleeping rooms or elsewhere, right.
I do not know if it is different on the roleplaying realms, but I wonder why roleplayers really make the effort to make a game that is so ill-suited for roleplaying their home, IMO.
Yes.. and no. I played exclusively on roleplaying servers. And while there are certain hotspots like Silvermoon or Goldshire or specific events, the vast majority of population on an RP server plays, but does not roleplay. Which is perfectly fine as long as they abide by the server policies and do not harass roleplayers.
However, the static world is not ideal for long-term campaigns by a long shot. Nothing ever changes, so eventually WoW roleplaying campaigns start to resemble soap operas: Drama for the sake of drama. And don’t get me started on people who don’t know the difference between rivalries among characters and rivalries among players.
My point was there are the tools in the game for something more than a level and gear grind.
Apparently there was design time spent on taverns – all those tables and chairs, the sheer size of those places. It seems like Blizzard designers intended them to be used, to be like a major gathering place or something. But you can see how this is not enough. Simply those places being there is not enough , when the entire game forces you to just care about what level your equipment is.
Just a quick update: the next version of my WordPress theme called “Thesis” will give posters the ability to reply directly to posts which I think will really help making these long comment threads be a bit more readable.
Thanks for your patience
-Wolfshead
I agree that Blizzard has provided the physical infrastructure of inns, buildings, etc. for people to socialize and gather. The problem is that it’s not enough to construct a building with 4 walls and put a sign up that says:
SOCIALIZE HERE
There needs to be some kind of (achievement) benefit to the player for spending time at an inn. Now Blizzard got it right when they made players log out in inns which has the effect of making inns useful and give them the appearance of being a place where players congregate. (This also explains why they will never put class trainers and auction houses in non-capital cities as it would turn them into ghost towns).
Inns should offer more reasons for players to hang out there such as mini-games like chess, checkers, dice. Also there could be random bar fights that break out in inns among the patrons (NPCs). There also could be special hours when bards and minstrels come in and sing songs and play instruments; listen long enough and you get a special buff.
The key is that social interaction comes initially as a by product of people gathering together usually for some non-social reason. Then people can meet new people and make friends, join guilds, etc. Soon inns are the “place to be” as there are so many things going on there that people *want* to be there.
Blizzard spends far too much time on combat and character advancement content and not enough on the fun/role-play things that could really help their MMO become much more socially cohesive in the long run. Inns and buildings are nothing more then props right now, hopefully we’ll see Blizzard start injecting some like into the major cities soon. In fact I may do a full article on this subject soon.
In short, Blizzard should do more “world building” if they want a better world. I know, that sounds facetious, but I mention it only because I’m not convinced that’s their desire or intent. They put up a barely functional facade for those who will try to to RP, but it’s never been a priority for them. There are no rewards for trying to inhabit the world, but there are ample rewards for playing the game.
Keeping with the “cruise director” theme.. the recurring events like the Darkmoon Faire, the new Argent Tournament, Brewfest and Winter’s Veil are Blizzard’s idea of content designed for roleplayers. While I admit that some of them can be quite fun, they’re like masquerades: Everyone plays a role for a short while that’s discarded as soon as the event ends, if not sooner.
Hirvox, “festival events” are a special case, and they unfortunately are everything, but not a festival for socializiation. They are “daily quests” and some one-time tasks limited to the duration of the festival that give a title/achievement and some items. This is also the same in Guild Wars, I do not know about Lord of the Rings…
… but usually players are asked to grind their ass off during the festival doing this or that for this or that reward. Especially in Guild Wars.
Between TBC and WOTLK, I was drinking (using the bottomless keg from the brewfest) and talking before the bank of Ironforge. No raids in the evening, everything done, I finally had some time to talk to people instead of following the strong lure of loot.
This was actually one of the few moments when I saw some guild members outside of raids and not just as a voice in TeamSpeak.
Hum… do we have too much loot lust and too much content to keep us entertained that we forget that we do not need all that to enjoy a MMORPG? Socialization lost over the stronge urge to improve the char through items?
Because I found no new info about it since late February… could the Argent Tournament be a daily/every X hours player jousting tournament? They mentioned mounted combat. Or just one more daily questhub for a faction?
But sometimes you do need content, especially in a Groundhog Day world that is WoW.
I originally started in a 100% roleplaying guild, and we eventually started losing members to raiding guilds. At the time we could not understand why they left and we said some pretty mean things about them, with “loot whore” being one of the mildest.
..and then I ended up in the same situation as the former members. Because I played on Horde, our roleplay didn’t exactly stagnate into “Days of Our Lives” territory, but it came close. When nothing really changes in the world, all you can really change is the other characters’ perception of your character. And eventually people are going to run out of ideas, making roleplaying as tedious as your average grind. For example, we had several cases of the chronic backstabbing syndrome, where in-character alliances and friendships were broken for the sake of drama. Eventually the rivalries are settled.. only to begin anew later. After all, the hero can never defeat the villain for good, nor can the villain succeed in taking over the world. The nature of the game reflects on the roleplay/socialization as well.
So what do you do when roleplay is stagnant? You stop logging in or play the game itself. And what do you when you’ve completed everything that can be soloed or five-manned and roleplay is still stagnant? You stop logging in or join a raiding guild, even if that results in namecalling. And what do you do when raiding loses it’s flair and roleplay is still the same?
It’s very important to have loot and gear as they provide a fundamental goal and purpose for the social interactions that are the reason that many of us play and keep playing MMOs. Much of the problem in WoW is that there is far too much gear and that the achievement mentality reflected in it’s design has drowned out the socializers and explorers.
EverQuest was truly great because social interaction was woven into the downtime that would occur after you fought a battle. It was the time that people would get to know each other. With new MMOs the downtime has all but been eliminated which has had the unintended consequence of eliminating socialization as well.
Good MMO design would be to weave as much social interaction into your MMO as possible. Of course it must not be forced or people will get up in arms and complain. It should be encouraged gently.
I still find it strange that many people resent and downplay the importance of social interaction within a MMO or virtual world. The fact that there are thousands of other people online at the same time as you in the same virtual world really should be playing a more important role in how MMOs are designed. Yet we don’t see that, instead we see single-player game features that are striving to be more like God of War then EverQuest.
Worthwhile and rewarding social interaction doesn’t happen by accident. It is not “experimental” as designers like Jeff Kaplan would have you believe. It requires a special kind of game designer that has a deeper and more insightful vocabulary then is currently evident at a company like Blizzard.
At the root of the problem is this: Blizzard doesn’t understand social interaction nor do they value it very highly. Instead they hired uber raiders to design their MMO and the results speak for themselves.
It may go deeper, older and more subtly (and even innocently) than that, Wolf. Blizzard made *great single player games* for a long time. It’s hard to shake that mindset. (Which is also why I’m very leery of Bioware’s MMO.)
Precisely Tesh! Actually I was contemplating making that very same statement but figured it was implied all the same.
Without a doubt, Blizzard are known for the quality of their single-player games. Everything about the way Blizzard is set up and organized speaks to this reality. There’s a certain culture at work in Blizzard that has been formed over many years which has an undeniable impact on the kinds of products that they make.
You only have to look at the poor quality of the WoW community both on the official forums and within their MMO for evidence that Blizzard doesn’t 1) understand community and 2) could care less about the community.
Their lack of understanding of the social nature of MMOs is astounding to say the least. The reason they’ve been able to get away with it is because we’ve all been seduced by the sheer beauty of the world they have created and the detail and polish in the deceptive simplicity of the “game” mechanics in WoW.
Hirvox, yeah, roleplaying alone is not good enough for me either. In fact, hardcore roleplaying can be annoying…^^ For most people, actually. As you recognized, in WoW where improving equipment and character is definitely a core part of gameplay, roleplaying alone does not make people happy.
(I really had to kill Kael’thas, he totally smashed us – I was thinking about the encounter for weeks till we finally made it. It was a much greater relief and personal triumph than killing Illidan or Archimonde. I totally missed this feeling in all WOTLK encounters.)
But when content is at an end, you simply need new content. Some change. Something new to the world. There is also the point that people will burn out sooner or later after a long time of playing the same game over and over, regardless which game it is. They might just need a break or another game. For example, I just cannot play Guild Wars anymore, I played it for years and it just does not give me the kicks anymore. And GW2 is scheduled for 2010/2011…^^
The question is, what kind of new content? You cannot create premium content on a weekly basis.
But I think random special events, not necessarily of grand scale, and more options to encourage grouping and socialization ingame, giving the people a bit more to do of their own in a “world” is a better solution than what they are currently doing:
1.) Achievement-to-do-list: Some achievements being rather ridiculous and feeling more like playing intentionally dumb or being an outright chore
2.) Daily Quests for players to increase their faction standing by doing the same quests on a daily basis. Another to-do list, with the appropriate rewards listed in the achievement tab or on the Wiki/Wowhead.
3.) All these activities are basically single-player activities, and in a singleplayer MMO we would deem them to be outright stupid. They are just a means for the company that made the game to keep us playing and subscribing for one, two more months.
4.) Even worse, if you feel like taking a break, and did not get all the benefits of this or that faction maxed to exalted before, you might struggle to keep up in gear and might have to look for another guild or hope that they power you up so that you can raid in the next tiered instance/raid.
5.) The next expansion then makes most of what you did totally meaningless. You can feel a bit special for getting a “time-limited Amani War Bear” ™
, but I guess not many except those who really want it will bother to grind Netherwing Faction for a Dragon in Outland when the endgame, and basically the whole game actually, moved to the NEW EXPANSION CONTINENT that works after the same principle.
You know what is left of Outland after WOTLK release? The daily fishing quest minipet reward is the premium reason to bother to go back to Shattrath.
Note that I am a strong Ultima Online fan/supporter and likely to glorify the past, but I always thought that the problem of WoW and all EverQuest derivates is that they have a real problem when vertical progression stops and the dreaded “endgame” begins. It took longer in EQ than in WoW, but the issue remains.
There cannot be perpetual and ever faster vertical progression, which would also burn out players. Horizontal progression would give them the option to come back to the world at any time without being behind and useless by X levels.
Post is getting too long, so I will stop now.
Regarding 3.) Freudian slip, the “singleplayer MMO”. It should read “singleplayer game”.
What I think they are doing wrong is that they are spoiling the player too much. In the system of “stick and carrot” theirs is “only carrots”. The “stick” is replaced by a “no carrot”.
This ultimately does not help character customisation – it prevents it.
For example – player factions. There are many factions to the game, and you can reach exalted with almost all fo them
A good experiment was the Aldor Scryers faction opposition, but why is this not developed further?
Your character can wear a wide assortment of tabards, but they dont actually represent anything! When everyone can put the same tabard as you, it is like wearing socks – it doesnt say anything about your character.
When you raise rep with the Bloodsail buccaneers, you loose rep with the Steamwheedle cartel. This says something about what your character IS – it makes him choose a side, this is character customisation.
What if you had many factions like this? What if different factions could give different benefits, and you couldnt get them all.
Now the “Represent!” achievement could actually mean something, rather than being just a simple grind. It would add colour to your character – my “character is a pirate”, just like “he has black hair” or “he is a dwarf”.
Now, granted , you are given a choice of two totally meaningless, lowlevel factions to choose from, in WotLK, but they dont matter AT ALL. My character skipped the zone while leveling, so I dont have rep with any of them. This has Zero impact in my game… This is not developing the idea!
Why did they remove the “dishonorable kills” system? Why they didnt implement a penalty system?
Blizzard is just so much set on satisfying every single little desire of their playerbase, that they are killing all the fun!
The struggle to let everyone be equal leads to getting everyone equally bored.
Responding in reverse order.
3 – Blizz have this in already, sort of. In the Shattrath Inn “World’s End Tavern”, L80ETC perform “Power of the Horde” every hour, on the hour. It is not uncommon to see folks begin gathering prior to the event with some sitting down to watch, others standing, and even some folks dancing.
2 – That would be pretty cool. I like the mini-scene that occurs in the Kharanos Inn when you distract Jarven Thunderbrew in order to complete a quest. I noticed recently on one trip into Stormwind that when a Death Knight entered the city the guards at the gate would jeer at them, and pelt them with rotten fruit. Very nice touch, I thought. Most people probably don’t even notice it now.
1 – Are you freaking kidding? Why hasn’t anyone at Blizzard come up with this yet? Is it because they’d have to pay someone for the rights to use a Chess or Checkers engine in their game? Apparently that’s why Facebook first lost their Scrabble game, because Hasbro have the rights to it, and FB implemented Scrabble without Hasbro’s permission. But how cool would it be to meet a friend in an in-game Inn, sit down opposite each other, click the Chess board between you and start up a game? That is truly an awesome idea. Just like challenging another player to a Duel, you could even set the engine up so when you target an adjacent player and click the Chess board you invite them, and only them, to join you. Or you can just click the board without a target, and it would throw up the equivalent of a Duel Flag that anyone could click on to accept your Open Challenge.
For many players WoW is already little more than a glorified chat room, why not take it one step further by adding in some of the features commonly found in MSN’s Messenger? Talk about extending the life of your game for the casual player without including a bunch more Daily Quests.
Because it was horribly broken. In the end, a single civilian could strike more terror into the hearts of an enemy raid than a whole army of soldiers could. If you left them alone, they constantly spawn guards. For every player in the vicnity. If a raid of 40 ran past a civilian, 40 guards would spawn. If you fought near the civilian, you got those 40-guard spawns every few seconds. If you killed them, you negated weeks worth of PvP progress. One of the easiest ways to thwart an enemy raid was to attract the attention of the attackers and then run past friendly civilians.
And to top it off, it did nothing to promote “honorable” combat. You were still free to gank low-level players as long as you avoided the NPC civilians.
Yea, but fixing something by removing it… sounds like fixing a broken leg by cutting it off
There could be a penalty for killing players without a penalty for killing low level npc’s for example
Yes, it does. However, it’s important to keep it in perspective. Blizzard’s first attempt to introduce PvP to WoW failed spectacularly, and removing DKs was akin to giving some extra morphine to a terminal patient.
When the PvP system was introduced, there were no battlegrounds, So players chose Tarren Mill and Southshore in Hillsbrad Foothills. Waves and waves of high-level players clashed, flattening the towns regularly. But low-level players were caught in the crossfire. Even if they toggled PvP off, all questgivers, vendors and flight masters were dead most of the time. That is, whenever the servers were not buckling under the load of 200-600 players duking it out.
Effectively removing all PvE opportunities from certain zones created a very large hurdle for low-level players. Both the battlegrounds and the DK system were attempts to move the fighting away from towns, to control it. To.. direct it. Sound familiar?
The TM/SS knock ‘em down, drag ‘em out, grudge matches of yesteryear were really something else. As Hirvox said and I’ll back him up on this, it was not uncommon to see 500/600 players kicking the hell out of each other in long, drawn back & forth fights that were not only sometimes already going when you logged on for the evening, but were still going strong when you logged out hours later. It was amazing.
Okay, so if you were actually trying to quest in & around Hillsbrad at the time, I could understand the frustration when 250 players kept killing your Questgivers, but that’s WAR for you. And it’s not like anyone was forcing you to be in Hillsbrad; there were other areas where a level 20’s Toon could go to quest.
I find it amusingly ironic that when players were engaging in large scale world PvP, in a game called World of WARcraft mind you, the Devs did everything they could to put a stop to it. Then in both XPacs they introduce their own version of world PvP and it’s a huge flop.
Haha yeah. It is ironic that a nonstop “run-to-the-middle, die, delease, run-to-the-middle” was FUN for players in Hillsbrad, but when introduced in Alterac Valley, it suddenly became a chore
At first, they wanted open world pvp. It had issues. Then they moved it to Battlegrounds.
Then we had TBC, with funny variants of open world pvp targets. People never really fought for the hellfire towers, but capped it clockwise, even waited for the horde to cap a tower, so that they could cap it and finish their quest. Then we had the Zangar Marsh, and I dare to say some players still do not know what they are supposed to do there!
Then we had Halaa in Nagrand, this worked out best. On lower pop servers, the dominating faction had it almost for eternity, which caused problems for the dominators, too: They rarely got enough Horde/Allies to finish their killquests! 
Then we got “raid the city” achievements in 3.0 and a black war bear mount as reward.
I participated in an organized giant raid well after midnight and was in one of 7 full 40 man raid groups.
The Horde knew of the raid and tried to stop it. After half an hour of mass disconnects due to a battle of 7 alliance and 3,4,5 dunno Horde raids before Orgrimmar, the raid leaders of both factions agreed that the Horde should raid Stormwind and Ironforge while we went for Orgrimmar and Thunderbluff.
Of all participants, some formed another raid days later, as they did not credit for all boss kills due to disconnects and sometimes for no apparent reason.
I read Blizzard wants to give us more opportunities like that, but I fear: their servers just can’t handle it.
I think flying mounts killed open world pvp. Basically, pvp of opportunity. Someone passing by, or you getting jumped by someone. I always attacked rogues on sight, as I think Warlock and Rogue have a Snake versus Mungo relationship. There are reasons why people cannot fly in Wintergrasp, not only because they want us to storm the fortress rather than flying in like paratroopers.
Yep, the world server performance starts going down the drain at around 100 players, and at 300 players lag is measured in tens of seconds if the frequent disconnects haven’t took hold yet.
To be fair, scaling up server performance in such crowded situations is extremely difficult. The number of messages goes up exponentially as the number of players increases, because everyone needs to be kept up-to-date on what everyone else is doing. While one can improve message throughput with low-overhead techniques like non-blocking IO or stackless microthreads, the core problem remains intact.
Yeah, open PvP had problems with world server performance, but….
It still does
Wintergrasp lag is so bad, I can only play early in the morning, when there are like 30-40 ppl in the zone. During evening hours only classes with meaningful AoE can hope to do any damage, as you practically cannot target anyone. And I play on a pretty dead realm, cant imagine the lag on overpopulated realms.
Makes me wonder, given the Battlegound-ish look of Wintergrasp, why the hell didnt they make it instanced?
It practically is another battleground anyway, because the way you access it is not much different than a “port-in”. So just remove the population cap, and put the whole thing on a dedicated server, so you can at least fix the lag issues. But I guess you must call it an open pvp zone, for it to be one, right?
Also, flying mounts did kill open world pvp, aaaand… WotLK was supposed to fix that by introducing flying combat.
I can still see the anouncment for that on the cover of my WotLK copy, with screens of cool flying, shooting roflcopters and whatnot.
So… yea, lets just forget that ever happened, right?
Never mind false advertising and such, us working on a major patch, without even bothering to work on a removed, pre-announced feature of the original expansion, is completely justified.
Nothing to see here, move along…
Edit my own comment:
What the hell is an “open PvP ZONE” anyway?
You are free to PvP —->”here”
Thats an open PvP?!
It’s like a free speech zone. An area set aside for an activity that’s supposed to be done everywhere.
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