Admittedly, I’ve fallen out of love with MMOs. After 11 years of being passionately involved in this pursuit and having the patience of a saint, the same old predictable formula of endless DIKU MUD/EQ/WoW clones has failed to keep my interest.
This situation is akin to a personal relationship where one person keeps growing and the other person fails to grow. In the case of MMOs, they are stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence. Refusing to mature into adulthood. Refusing to reach their potential as exciting immersive interactive experiences. I feel like I’m living in an abusive relationship. I want a divorce.
As each year passes MMOs have become more infantile and simplistic in order to pander to the lowest common denominator. This alarming trend has been caused by the need for companies to grow the demographic in order to placate shareholders. We’ve known about this problem for years now thanks to the insight offered by virtual world prophet Richard Bartle. Somehow we never thought that day would never come but reality tells us we are watching this apocalypse unfold before our very eyes.
The FarmVille Curse
To make matters worse, this past year we’ve had to endure all of the hoopla about Zynga’s social networking wunderkind FarmVille. Why? Because for many in the industry FarmVille has become a beacon to the promised land of milk and honey. Purposely crafting an addiction so you can squeeze bags of money out of your players has become the noblest virtue in the video game industry. What a sad and tragic fate that has befallen a genre I used to love.
FarmVille is a despicable, worthless piece of anti-social rubbish that has no business even being called a video game let alone an online world. Yet it is being hailed as the savior of the video game industry by the MMO intelligentsia.
But there is lots of blame to go around…
Shame on You Blizzard
I put the sorry state of MMOs today squarely at the feet of the technicians who sold their souls at Blizzard Entertainment. For years they have been carefully and methodically concocting an addiction that is designed to keep you playing and paying long after there is any legitimate reason to do so.
Year after year they have squandered billions of dollars of revenues and have failed to advance the MMO genre in any meaningful way. Let’s be honest here, what earth shattering innovations has Blizzard introduced into the MMO universe?
- NPC’s with exclamation marks above their heads?
- Solo to the level cap?
- Instanced dungeons?
- Arenas?
- Daily quests?
- Overpowered hero class?
- Achievements?
- The Dungeon Finder tool?
In every case, the addition of these features has created unintended consequences that have caused far more problems than they’ve ever solved. In the past I’ve written extensively on most of these issues and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself.
The End of Community
Perhaps the greatest sin of Blizzard is their legacy with regard to the erosion and trivialization of the notion of community. The caliber of the player community has hit an all time low. The WoW of 2010 is a MMO where community barely exists if at all. Players don’t even talk to each other anymore as they mindlessly farm so-called heroic dungeons. Players are happy to use each other like cheap whores in order to farm more emblems in order to get more shiny purple pixels.
The current state of community in WoW is not what massively multi-player was supposed to be. Blizzard has given the notion of community lip-service as it has become a marketing talking point instead of something that should be a fundamental tenet of a real MMO. Just visit the official Blizzard forums or your local trade channel to experience the sophomoric angst for yourself for evidence of the abysmal state of community in WoW.
Regrettably the importance of developing relationships with fellow players has been minimized in the WoW reward scheme that is the underpinning of game design at Irvine. Using their bag of Skinner box tricks, Blizzard has willfully programmed selfishness and avarice into the psyche of the modern MMO player via the mechanics of WoW. I’ve seen good people lose their souls and morph into ruthless Jason Bourne robots because of WoW.
I remember people who I used to play with back in good old days of EverQuest who migrated to WoW with me back around 2004-2005. Within months they had changed completely. They were too busy soloing to care about grouping. Why? Because they could — because Blizzard promoted it.
Don’t Be Fooled by Blizzards Bogus Cataclysm
I hate to be the bearer of bad news to those of you those of you that still play WoW, but the upcoming Cataclysm expansion is not the cure for the sickness that plagues MMOs. All it will do is put a fresh coat of paint on a tedious and predictable MMO that is painfully years past its prime and is sadly plunging the rest of industry into oblivion with it.
If Blizzard had any courage they’d unleash a real cataclysm in Azeroth — not the phony one they have planned. WoW needs a complete and total flood-like cleansing that would make Noah proud. A complete and total server wipe would do it. Everything gone. All your precious epics, characters and bank mules. That’s exactly what WoW needs right now. If we want something better then we need to have the conviction of the pilgrims leaving their restrictive homeland and arriving to the freedom of America on the Mayflower. We need to start all over.
Do you think that anyone at Blizzard would have the guts to do it? Not a chance.
The problem is that within a few months everything would be back to normal. You see the problem with WoW is a systemic flaw inherent in all of today’s MMOs — they are basically a numbers game heavily disguised by lots of polish and eye-candy. How many people do you know that played WoW 6 years ago are still playing? Most of them have figured out the equation and moved on. And therein lies the heart of the problem.
You Get the MMO You Deserve
Blizzard has seduced and fooled us with their Hollywood polish. We traded in the important exhilarating virtues of being part of a virtual world — community, camaraderie, danger, player interdependence, role-playing and player freedom– and instead opted for a safe and scripted amusement park ride.
There’s an old saying that goes like this: people get the government they deserve. This same logic applies to MMOs: players get the MMO they deserve because ultimately we vote with our dollars.
As long as is there are copious amounts of reward with almost no risk, as long as content remains static and non-dynamic, as long as players have no sense of ownership in their world, as long as players have no need of other players, as long as player freedoms keep getting curtailed, as long as extracting money from subscribers is the end all and be all of game design — you will have the disease that is World of Warcraft.
The only explanation I can fathom for the lack of evolution in the genre is that Blizzard is purposely withholding all of their innovations for their upcoming next gen MMO which I predict will be announced at this year’s BlizzCon. Until their new MMO is released, they are going to milk the WoW cash cow for as long as possible by expending the least amount of resources to get the maximum amount of return on investment. Thank you Emperor Palpatine.
We Need a Real Cataclysm
When I survey today’s MMO scene I wonder what God must have felt like when He looked at the mess that humanity had gotten itself into. It’s no wonder He decided to create a flood that would reboot humanity and start fresh.
As it stands today, I feel the same way about the MMO industry. They’ve been serving us the same unimaginative crap for the last 11 years and putting a colorful bow on it. And you know what? We keep paying for it.
This industry is caught up in a vicious circle. Every new MMO company grovels and trembles in the shadow of WoW. They are prisoners of the Blizzard success formula. So instead of things getting better, they’ve gotten worse. We need a real cataclysm. The time for excuses are over. It’s time to start over.
Conclusion
Back in the early days of MMO, the player community was intelligent, passionate and vocal. I recall Woody Hearn’s May 2004 boycott of EverQuest which for a few fleeting weeks galvanized the EQ community and put lazy and corrupt MMO companies on notice that we’re not going to take your shoddy crap any more. The lethargic MMO community of 2010 doesn’t have the courage, maturity and will to carry out that kind of public boycott today. They are like the glassy eyed, brain addled denizens of an opium house. They are just too stoned to care.
Almost every major WoW website is in some way beholden to Blizzard lest they lose their precious press access and junkets to Irvine. No one dares boycott or take a stand against them. Just like in the real world, for the most part we have a lazy video game press that are cheerleaders and enablers of the status quo. Has anyone in the press seriously questioned the lack of innovation coming from Blizzard?
In the absence of a legitimate video game press the responsibility falls on us the MMO community. Maybe we are the real problem.
We need to stop playing the same unoriginal MMOs out there and cancel our accounts. We need to stop supporting lazy companies that refuse to innovate and reinvest adequate funds into their MMOs. We need to stop playing MMOs until something worthwhile comes out.
Let me close with another relationship metaphor, we all know a friend or family member that absolutely needs a man or woman to get by. Perhaps we too need to be single and independent for a while and take a break from the MMO hamster wheel. What I’m going to say will sound trite but it needs to be said: read a book, take up a hobby, plant a real garden, walk a dog, spend some time with your family and friends, seek out the meaning of life. Get some perspective and open your eyes. At least for me, maybe I need to realize that there’s more to this life than looking at a computer screen and hoping for salvation from a virtual world.
-Wolfshead
Well said!
I do not think there is any need to go into specific details about what they have done, because we all know what they have done yet some people will choose to ignore it. Even if all the evidence is placed in front of them (which it is, all the time), they will still choose to support Blizzard fully.
This is a good post, but I think it is somewhat exaggerated for putting blame on Blizzard. All the company did was make a MMO for the masses, a good clean fun game, and they brought in another 5 million players from Europe and America. In doing so, they swung the doors open to the MMO market. Back in the days of EQ, you’d never start a chat about playing that game because it was such a niche. But it seems everyone has played WoW these days.
Blizzard was, fundamentally, a game company that did not know anything about MMOs, so they simply researched existing games and tried to figure out what made these games good, and repackaged all of the content in an extremely polished format. At launch, they had what every other MMO had except raids. So they hire Furor and Tigole to tell them exactly how to make a good raid game in WoW’s mechanics, and now raids are the baseline for the game. In April 2005, guild wars came out with instanced battleground-type play. Two months later, Blizzard takes this design and launches their first battleground. They also took auction houses from FFXI, instant-click mechanics, and so forth, that have animated a lot of the MMO games.
The whole industry has taken the direction of making things extremely convenient and easy to do in every way. There’s no more travel, everything is instanced, you can just post stuff to the Auction House like it’s ebay. But that drains the “world-like” aspect and also the community-like aspect of the games.
I do not blame Blizzard. They opened the market up in a big way with their powerful brands and high quality standard. I think they’ll have helped the MMO industry because now nobody is a MMO newbie and there’s a big market just waiting for the truly great MMO experience.
Wow… on this ENTIRE PAGE there is only one mention of EvE Online.
Have you even played it?
Great post. As a fellow MMO vet over the past 15 years, i feel your pain, but i would suggest giving EVE a serious look. I personally prefer fantasy based rpg games but WoWs success has heralded in the dark age for these types of MMOs. EVE puts the massively multiplayer back into MMO.
I’m agree with almost everything but not with your opinion that wow is a solo game -.- for me it isn’t enought solo play because I have never finished the story of any expansion…. bacause the most of wow players are only kids who play for epics and achievement only… and this isn’t interesting for me..
I’m amazed that anyone can point to the community pre-WoW as something to be emulated, which has gone downhill.
Have you blocked out the reasons why WoW is the way it is? EQ was pretty much pure PvE, because UO proved that an open PvP game would be dominated by complete asshats. DAOC and WoW locked XP and loot because EQ was full of kill stealing ninja-looting asshats. Mobs ignore everything around them because jerks in EQ loved to train massive mobs to the rest areas of zones, or into newbie areas.
WoW’s community and gameplay may be horrible, but any “It was so much better in the gold old days!” is pure nostalgic delusion. There have ALWAYS been idiotic jerks in MMOs, and they’ve always been the dominant visible face of the game.
You’re not wrong on a lot of things, but this whole thing seems far more about your well-known dislike for WoW and Blizzard than any neutral analysis of the games or their communities.
I don’t think there was a community because of trains, asshats, and kill stealers. Those were simply flaws of the game. There was a community because the game required a lot of cooperation and it wasn’t just a constant button-mash.
@Buhallin
EVE is doing well and is constantly expanding, despite of the fact that the game leaves considerable room for “asshatness”. More recently two new games, Mortal Online and Darkfall Online, have come into existence. Both games allow for maximum freedom of playing style, including the possibility of being an “asshat”.
Some people on the other hand prefer the antiseptic, corporate streamlined world that WoW created, with batteries included and build in no-worries-insurance.
Sorry I’m way late for the discussion, but I just ran across this.
I’m an “old guy” i.e. anyone remember the text game “forgotten realms” . . . I think that’s the name? I think I played on a 9600 baud modem. Good grief.
Anyway, there’s lots of good discussion here. What I gather is that the main complaints on MMO’s in general is that a) the other players aren’t friendly (over simplistic term) and b) it’s all “the same” and/or “too easy”.
As for a), crap, there’s not much you can do about it. Basically, you have to find a decent guild or, hehehe, be evil and get your R.L. friends and family to play. I play with my family and some friends. That solves lots of issues. I’ve found that if you can keep 4-6 people as close friends in the game (and R.L.), there will always be enough “yeah, they’re cool, too” people to help with questing and raiding. The more people you add, the more group dynamics change, but it’s not the game that does that . . . it’s the people.
Not, for b). Speaking as a WoW player, I’ve found that every player’s experiences differ. A guy who “grew up” on a high pop PVE server may see things as too easy. We (my family) have a different perspective as we started playing, ignorantly, as ally on a low-pop high horde percentage server. It was, in no uncertain terms, amazinglying hard. I got ganked one time at the login screen. Yeah, it was that bad (:D).
On our server, AQ20 was attempted a few times. AQ40 was a pipe dream. But we kept playing till deep into WOTLK. When it got to a point to where it was OBVIOUS that any progression would mean we’d have to quit our jobs and dedicate our lives to doing it, we all quit.
About 6 months ago, we got bored and started playing horde on a medium pop PVP server that’s 50/50. IT’S VERY DIFFERENT! It’s fun again, so maybe it’s not that the game is “bad” but we as players are just stale.
So, what do you do? We say we want something different and innovative, but we’re short on specifics. Speaking just for WoW, how about this to initiate some discussion:
* Make portals in Shat City that allow an L80 character to go back to L60 or L70 “areas” and quest/raid/PvP. Want to farm MC like “the good old days”? Go for it! Want to relive AQ40 with other people who REALLY WANT TO DO IT for the fun of it? You’re free to! Want to PVP with your “old gear” that you love? He’s your spot. Maybe that will serve the casual and “hardcore” player alike? If you’re short of players, heh, why not let the horde and alliance raid TOGETHER?
Everything you said is true.
The only people who disagree, are the same people who, defended Blizzard’s cash shop, by deriding the “slippery slope” arguments made by concerned players, in favor of sucking up to their beloved Blizzard.
Then, completely supporting Blizzard’s decision, to cancel cosmetic cloaks, due entirely to Blizzard’s own slippery slope argument of not wanting players to look however they like. Which is a huge problem when your ego, is a large as Blizzard’s developers.
Blizzard will always be right and will always be perfect in the eyes of your average WoW player.
Wow players play to glorify themselves. Obsessed with achievements, titles, alts, loot…the list goes on. These are the virtues Blizzard has programmed into their game and these are the virtues its players consciously or subconsciously strive to fulfill. I’m sure as you seem sure that this is no accident.
I play Wow to see the story I’ve read in so many engaging books and online as somewhat of a living breathing world and to take part in it — that’s what kept me playing for so long. I’d love to become part of a raiding guild, to see more sights and sounds and to experience the content, but there are too few self sacrificing individuals and too many leeches to make it worth the time. The amount of sacrifice one needs to make in order to progress is just compounded by a lazy selfish player base. I learned this and am happy playing through the expansions to level cap, and then very quickly canceling.
I think this expansion Blizzard has done a good job at giving us engaging content to play through that was full of great and memorable story elements and sub-plots, to that end I say job well done. But it also has the dark side you write of above. The people who play Wow are largely obsessed with in-game commodity; as such they are (somewhat justly) doomed to never-ending desires.
Art imitates life. Thanks for the well written post.
Back in 2006, as a new player i was constantly surprised at people throwing the word N*gger, C*nt, D*ke, F*g around, Blizz tells us to put the player on ignore – and i have always believed this does not remedy the problem, it only exacerbates it. why? because those players believe they can get away with it – something that they cant get away with in real life. The scary part is, once they have realized this they will exercise this behavior in full strength each and every time they have a chance.
To be quite honest, most of the rude players are the older ones, the younger ones are bad and ignorant but the really rude ones are the ones who threaten you in real life and even go as far as ruining your reputation as well as your guilds reputation in the game so nobody will even wanna play with you or join your raid.
Even if you do so well and try hard to be civil in this game, you will come across these people. It just has gone so bad because Blizzard, for a long time, has refused to do anything about it.
In all my 5 years of playing, it seems to me they only took this issue somewhat seriously in 2010, because some players began to threaten developers in real life on the general forums.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2016083724
In my years of playing I kept my gender a big secret, only a handful know im female and if its a pug, I do not talk on ventrilo at all.
The females in my server are constantly called the B word, and sadly some of them also act inappropriately and they send out pictures which – as you guessed it- finds its way on the server forums..
follow up
a) the players on horde and alliance are VERY VERY different. you should know that in the beginning, horde players roll that faction in order to pvp – gank- , raid for hours on end
b) people on alliance back then are just the ones who are laid back and do whatever and not take anything seriously
i learned this by playing horde for 6 years, thinking the rudeness was just a normal thing that i had to get used to. i rerolled on cataclysm and guess what? it was not as bad, and i even go to my ally toons to “breathe”.
you will see what i mean when you join a horde bg. this is what i saw that happened several times
player1: woo..nice to be a horde..i just faction changed yesterday
player2: f*ck off scrub
player 3: shut up f*ggot
player4: you’re the reason why we have been losing
player1: wow i didn’t ..i was just..
Now they say Aion comunity is just as bad as WoW community. When Aion came out most of the pvp arena people in my server bought it and played it ..guess where the bad community came from? WoW.
WoW clean since for 2 out of the last 3 years. Last played seriously in BC.
I was brought to WoW by community and promises of WARcraft. There was community in Vanilla, and every expansion Blizzard has done their very best to kill it.
ITS THE COMMUNITY, STUPID.
People watch sports when they can share it with their community, and can cheer for a team. Without community, basketball is a bunch of tall dudes shooting at a net. Football is dudes trying to get 10 yards and baseball a bunch of morons with bats trying to hit a ball. Ever watch cricket as an american for more than 2 seconds before switching the channel?
Do people love College or High School because of the amazing educational opportunities? The beautifully, kept campus and quads? No, it’s the community. It’s the friendships, it’s meeting people your age with common interests and goals.
Do people go to bars to level up their music knowledge or grind beer? No, they go to hang out with friends or get laid.
No activity on earth is fun enough to be fun for a prolonged period of time without community. Every LFD type move Blizzard ever did that made you rely less on your community and more on yourself is what killed this game.
I feel sad because I came into this game with visions of PvE mixed in with micro-level RTS orcs vs human type gameplay. We got a light taste of it in Hillsbrad and it was forever banished by Queuecraft. This game was fun when you knew, longed to fight against or along with or feared people on your server. Now it’s “Im going to AFK until my queue is up” and “Sorry I can’t help you I need to random queue to get my daily points/etc”.
This MMO would’ve built such an amazing community if they made zones capturable and if they would’n’t have made mechanics operate so much around selfish behaviour. I would’ve loved seeing a Wintergrasp/TB type mechanic in every zone and capturing zones up and down…. and the community built around it.
The first two years of WOW were really fun because of world pvp, battle grounds eventually ruined that though. I played horde on Laugh skull and we were out numbered at first, and I liked that. I also liked the fact that people talked smack because it angered others to want to play harder or switch factions to gank them. World PVP was alive and well.
Fast forward to 2011, and now everything is just so easy because no one world pvp’s anymore. No threat of being killed on a simple quest. At this point what makes WOW any better than any other MMO. It sure isn’t the 2006 graphics. As a matter of fact I think they’ve gotten worse. Tier two rogue and Paladin gear is still the best looking.
That’s OK though because I don’t waste my money on Blizzard kiddie games anymore. Enjoy.
mmos feel like they have no community these days xD i remember playing ffxi in 2003 and people being friendly and actually helping. i also think they made the grind too easy..eq, ffxi was a grind if i ever saw one. theres no pride in classes these days either. i miss the holy trinity of a tank, 2 dps, a debuff/offheals and a designated healer. every class in almost every mmo now can fill all roles.