World of Warcraft – Page 103

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November 4, 2015 by Belghast

King of Match Three

Yesterday morning was the Activision Blizzard earnings call for investors, and much of the focus has been on one particular tidbit of information. They announced that they are acquiring Candy Crush maker King Digital for the sum of $5.9 Billion dollars. The reaction to this announcement has been pretty varied, because in truth… many “core” gamers loath the concept of games like Candy Crush. First off there is some confusion to clear up. Activision Blizzard is not the same thing as Blizzard Entertainment, so early reports I saw talked about Blizzard buying King Digital… which caused some outrage. Activision Blizzard is the big parent company that pulls all the strings of the various products from Call of Duty to Skylanders to of course the Blizzard franchises. At first I have to admit I was taken by surprise by the announcement but that pretty much went away immediately when I thought about it. In doing this deal ActiBlizz is essentially buying instant relevance in the traditional mobile gaming market.

Now you might be saying to yourself… But Bel, Activision and Blizzard already doing mobile gaming. Sure they do… but they do it in a way that attempts to appeal to “core” gamers that are wanting something on their phone to play when they don’t have access to their normal gaming platforms. This is a vastly different market than the one that King Digital generally focuses on which are for lack of a better term “casual” and “mobile exclusive” users that would never in a million years… consider themselves gamers. Essentially King Digital targets people like my wife, that spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad but does not in any fashion think of herself as a gamer. So in essence with this one… albeit expensive acquisition, they now cover a market that they did not serve in any fashion. Sure Hearthstone is a great mobile game… but it really only draws in people who already are in the fold of “gamers”. The big thing is all of these “non-gamers” have prove time and time again that they are in fact willing to spend money on micro-transactions.

What This Means

In truth I doubt for the short term it really means anything. Activision will continue releasing big budget shooters like Call of Duty and Destiny… and Blizzard will continue flirting with e-sports while still not quite certain what to do with World of Warcraft. Another big chunk of this earnings report was a note that the WoW subscription numbers have more or less stabilized from their post Warlords of Draenor free fall. I feel like there is some fuzzy math at work here, but according to the official figures they have dropped from 5.6 Million to 5.5 Million. There was a strange little definition that was released to explain what they determined a subscriber.

Subscriber Definition: World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This makes me think that these subscription numbers are in fact counting WoW Token players… seeing as how that would count as “prepaid” access. So the actual month to month subscription numbers would be a bit lower. To some extent I wish they would have broken those numbers out separately… since a monthly sub is semi-guaranteed income, and a token is a one time purchase. The other big news however is that they plan on this being the last month they actually announce subscription numbers. Instead they have a new sort of engagement number formula that they are working on to determine the health of the game.

At first glance this sounds a bit odd… and maybe like they are trying to hide losses within the cloak of mathematics. However… we are just days away from Blizzcon and it makes me wonder. Will this finally be the year that they announce World of Warcraft going to a free to play model? Cutting the ties of relying on subscriptions to convey the health of the game… would at least be one step in that direction. If I were Blizzard I would be seriously considering it… because honestly Free to Play seems to work. With the recent high publicity relaunch of Wildstar… that game is doing significantly better now than it was, and the same was essentially true with Star Wars the Old Republic went to the model. Free to Play has been the salvation of otherwise dying games… and even though World of Warcraft is far from dying… I still think they would benefit from the switch. It would be a massive shift in methodology and would probably change the way content is delivered, but it would also bring back a bunch of players that want to dip their toes in the game every now and then… but not feel like they are chained to a subscription. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are both wildly success as Free to Play experiences… and with Overwatch starting to ramp up and following that same model… it just seems like Blizzard has wrestled with how to make it work.

What I Hope Happens

So while I don’t think anything will change for a bit… my hope is that through this deal there is some cross pollination of skillsets. I would love to see better integration of mobile platforms and traditional games. As you know I have been playing a lot of Destiny… and quite honestly the way that game works is just not as clean as it should. There are a lot of things that you can do through the website… slightly different things that you can do through the mobile app… and even a different set of things through the game itself. The entire process feels cludgy as hell… but an attempt to move in the direction of giving players access to tools outside of the game. Now if you take that basic desire and match it with a company that has proven that they can spin the same old match three schlock into infectious gold… you can maybe create really interesting experiences that span traditional platforms and mobile gaming ones.

What I would love to see is a better mobile app for World of Warcraft. Why can’t we fish on our mobile phones and have it grant skill-ups and materials for our characters in game? Why can’t we do the normally tedious action of Archaeology in a mobile mini-game? Garrisons themselves were essentially the same sort of thing as a tiny tower like mobile game… why didn’t exist on mobile platforms allowing people to do the upkeep and maintenance activities when they couldn’t otherwise play the game? Why can’t we have a significantly better auction house integration system? Essentially… give players a reason to stay in the game by making them feel more connected to it.. on their own terms. A big part of my frustration with Garrisons is that I knew I had a one to two hour ritual waiting on me every time I logged into the game, before I could feel like I was free to do interesting things… like slay internet dragons. If I could do Garrisons while walking to my car at night, or on my lunch break… it would take some of that burden away so that I knew once I got home… I could do the fun stuff without having to worry about the “paperwork”. Essentially we live our lives on our phones… and the games that integrate better with how we live our lives are going to feel more “real” to us.

AggroChat #80 – Limited Game Events

May 21, 2019October 25, 2015 by AggroChat

This week we continue our adventure into this new topic focused format, this time with the full AggroChat crew. The big topic of the night we take on which is not specifically a single game… is limited game events like holidays or other expiring content. We dig into the things we like about them and dislike about them, as well as provide some ideas in how to make the concept work better.

On this show we talk about…

Seasonal Events
Limited Game Events
Wildstar
Everquest 2
World of Warcraft
World Ends with You
Star Wars the Old Republic
Final Fantasy XIV
Tales of Zestiria
Destiny
Marvel Heroes
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Space Team
Magic: the Gathering

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The Mission System

October 15, 2015 by Belghast

Angst and Frustration

Yesterday World of Warcraft released an announcement about patch 6.2.3 and the twitters collectively lost their shit. Essentially the patch felt like a thinly veiled batch of carrots to try and string players along for a few more months. It also sent the sign that maybe just maybe Legion beta would not be ready for Blizzcon, and more than likely players are going to see another significant lag between expansions. I even joined in the frustration for a bit until I realized… that it no longer effects me. World of Warcraft is like a bad breakup, that you can still get upset over years after the fact. I am not playing the game any more, so honestly while I still have “disappointed parent” moments over the game that has not really lived up to its true potential in years… in no longer actually has any effect on my play time unless I let it. All of that said… it did start me thinking about a problem that most MMOs have. When a game gets to be as old as World of Warcraft it has just silly amounts of content available to the players, but most of it is largely invisible to players. I’ve talked about in the past how MMOs are horrible at telling players how to get to new content, but they do an even worse job of directing players towards “old” content.

Unless you have been playing since November 2004 and have been a rabid completion-ist… chances are there is still a lot of old content that you have never seen in the game. The problem being that there is no real way of notifying players other than the achievement system that this or that area of the world exists… and might be worth looking at. Additionally most companies have this problem of trying to pretend that the past is behind them, and that only the new and fresh parts of the game matter. If this were not the case we wouldn’t see quite so many “boost to level cap” schemes out there. The problem I see with this is at least in the case of World of Warcraft… their best content is ALL from the past as far as I am concerned. Trying to till it under to plant new seeds does a great disservice to the awesome experiences that could be had doing past content. The problem once again is there is no really good way of letting players know what they are missing.

Exposing Old Content

There are some games out there that try really hard to wrap systems around this. For example in Rift you have the Instant Adventure system, which will port you to somewhere in the world, scale your level down, and give you a mini quest chain to follow along with a bunch of other players. This is an insanely enjoyable way to level, and they even introduced a version of this that allows for the exploration of raid content. It is something less like LFR and more like a world event that just happens to take place in a raid zone, and the bit of it I have played has been ridiculously fun. That said… this system is super limited in scope and still misses out on some of the quest content that happens in these zones and other things to do. Essentially we have all of these systems around grouping, but no real time has been devoted to helping players come up with things when they aren’t grouping. Sure you have facebook game like systems of the Garrison or the Shipyard, but eventually you reach a point where you realize that you are only playing the game to log in and fiddle with your house for a few moments before logging out again.

What I propose is a new kind of system that essentially takes a look at all of the content a player has completed and then suggests something that they haven’t. No game on the market does not have a robust system of tracking player achievements and most of them even go to the finite level of tracking every single kill the player has gotten… and occasionally even what they have gotten as drops. What I am proposing is a join between the list of “what is available in the game” and “what the player has completed” and then packaging and presenting literally anything the player has not done… in a quest form. Now I remember a time when there were threads on the Blizzard forums that you could post your profile, and someone would “assign” you an achievement that you had not completed to go and work on. What I am essentially suggesting is creating a formalized system for just that. Now since Blizzard still does not have a level scaling system, that is going to harm some of the enjoyment… because in a perfect situation it would scale you down to a level equivalent to the content. My idea would be to have a series of checkboxes in the UI allowing players to particularly avoid things like PVP, Raid or Crafting items if they don’t want to do those.

Interesting Baubles

The really important thing about this however is that players need to feel like there is a reason. Ultimately I think that is what players are saying when they say there is “nothing to do”. At least for me when I say these words what I really mean is “nothing I want to do, that has any bearing on my modern game play experience”. There are ALWAYS things you can do, that has never been the problem, but there are often times a loss of things that you want to do that give you some sort of reward that you actually care enough to chase. The itemization of this “Mission” system would need to be right, and my theory is that we could do something like a loot bag upon completing the mission. Maybe even make it so that when you get a mission, it is being given to you by one of the old world factions relevant for the content you are being asked to do. The loot bag would contain rewards equivalent to the sort of achievement you are being asked to do… and most likely for 90% of the bags opened would just be a little pocket money and maybe some consumables or crafting materials. However there would need to be the chance of obtaining some ultra rare items, like mounts or cosmetic items in order to make it worth the players time.

Sure it is rehashed content, and there is no denying it. It does however give players a way to essentially mine more enjoyment out of content they have not completed… and get rewards for doing it. Largely this idea hit me while thinking about the events of yesterday, and the problem of having a decade worth of content but no real way of getting players to go back and consume it. Additionally I have been playing a lot of Destiny, and that game is the master of giving me little mini-quest sand events, largely in the form of patrol missions that give purpose to what is otherwise a bunch of wandering around the shooting random shit. It struck me how much more enjoyable for me it is to kill a dozen Vex when I have a quest asking me to collect items from them, than it is just to kill a dozen Vex on my own. The act is the same, but in one case I have a false sense of purpose. Ultimately I think that is what most unhappy customers lack, is a feeling of purpose in the things they do. After all you can only log in for so long without doing something meaningful without realizing that you are essentially paying for an expensive chat client. I am not saying this is a system to stop games from hemorrhaging players, but it is something. I absolutely think I would use something like this because I would know I am working toward two things. Firstly I would be slowly inching up my achievement score, which give me a bit of a false sense of satisfaction. Secondly I would know that maybe just maybe there is a chance that upon completing one of these many missions I would get awarded something really awesome and special.

Better Faction Systems

September 29, 2015 by Belghast

Loss of Nuance

I had this topic that I wanted to talk about this morning, and jotted it down so that I would not forget. Then last night I suffered from a bout of insomnia. So my hope is that even without much sleep I can still make this topic work, and devote the amount of attention it deserves. For years I have talked about my dislike of the faction wall system that was first popularized by Dark Age of Camelot, and then carried forth into the modern genre of MMOs thanks to World of Warcraft adopting it. For many players they know nothing different than picking a red versus blue faction and living their entire gaming life’s within the confines of it. I think I struggle against this concept because I remember a time when this wasn’t necessarily the case. Lately I have been spending a lot of time playing my smuggler in Star Wars the Old Republic, and yes I realize that game is a very faction locked experience. However if you think of the Smuggler itself in the Star Wars mythos, it has always been a character that skirted the lines trying to exist in Republic, Imperial and Hutt space at the same time, carving their own path balancing between them all.

The problem is, other than the original Everquest no game really supports this notion. You cannot live between the faction lines making your own choices, instead you are asked to choose an allegiance that is about the most impersonal experience imaginable. The problem is that I feel no personal responsibility for choosing Horde or Alliance or in many cases Red or Blue. They don’t represent me as a person, and as such I have no real loyalty tied to them. However in Everquest you were assigned essentially a default template of allegiances based on your racial choice… but from that point on you could blur the lines at will. I remember spending copious amounts of time hunting Kobolds in the Warrens off of Toxxulia Forest, for the purpose of gaining faction in the otherwise aggressive city of Paineel. Why did I do this? Honestly for no real reason other than I could, and that I thought the city of Paineel was extremely cool in its layout. Sure I could have simply banked and quested at the far end of Toxxulia Forest in the already friendly city of Erudin, but instead I made the conscious choice to hang out with the Necromancers.

Sapping Creative Expression

The problem with the faction wall system is that it forces all of the players to essentially be the same person. Later games started throwing in optional faction grinds, but those grinds are always connected to “things”. Gain this much reputation with this faction and you will get a nifty sword, or a pretty mount… but otherwise once the current expansion is over they will be utterly meaningless from that point on. The problem here is that these tertiary faction choices don’t actually effect the players game experience. They don’t unlock new areas of the world, or more so close off other areas that the player did have access to. Granted in the early days of World of Warcraft they did manage to create a few of these Factions that did actually do interesting things. Namely I am talking about the back and forth seesaw of the Bloodsail Buccaneers and the assorted Goblin factions. If you were truly insane you could skirt a thin line between gaining faction with the Bloodsails but also doing faction repair work with the Goblins to make sure you were not ever hitting “Kill On Sight” status.

The problem here is… this was an isolated example that granted players access to a handful of boats in the ass end of the world. This area was made immediately irrelevant as soon as the Burning Crusade and subsequent expansions released. Instead as an Alliance player I always wanted to figure out a way to gain factions with the Tauren. They were the only Horde race that seemed to cling to any ideals I could get behind, and I thought it would have been so interesting to be able to gain faction in a way that would allow you to enter the town and do commerce there. Things are never completely black and white, and even in the lore there are characters that skirt the lines managing to be friendly to two different groups at the same time. The entire World of Warcraft experience would have been so much richer if it allowed players through sheer will to grind out their own niche that lay somewhere between the predetermined choices. I think it would have been interesting to allow players to create the ultimate “diplomat” that was friendly to essentially ALL of the races.

Fear for the Future

The problem with games being iterative is that once a feature set becomes common, it essentially stays there forever. This past weekend when we talked about Tron 2.0 in our AggroChat Game Club show, one of the lines of discussion was how the cultural norms for shooters have changed over the years. What used to be representative of most of the shooters that were out in 2003, is no longer recognizable through the lens of the basic feature set that we now have come to expect. World of Warcraft borrowed heavily from the games that came before it, and since it chose to go with a walled off faction system, games that have borrowed from it have essentially followed that mold. Red and Blue factions with their own walled off areas of play have become the template for how to build a game, and right now the only real evolution has been a return to three factions instead of just two. Sure games like Rift have torn down the wall and made faction into “fiction” but they have not really gone anywhere in the struggle of making faction a personal choice.

Now going back to the original thing that spurred this topic, Star Wars the Old Republic. How much more rich would the smuggler have been if you quite literally could have been a freelancer in action and not just name. The game does a decent job of making you feel like you live somewhere between the red and blue lines, and then when the second chapter happens it essentially rips all of that forcing you to align to the Republic faction. Sure you can still play a dark side Smuggler, but these aren’t “real” decisions with any sense of “real” lasting consequences. You can’t decide to say screw the republic and opt to live entirely in Hutt space or Imperial space. You can’t decide to say on Alderaan or Balmorra and improve your faction with one of the leaders, opening up new questing opportunities that are unavailable to the average player. Everquest is a game that I could never really play again, because I just can’t handle the essentially “primative” game client. There however are still things that the game got right, that no other game that I have played have really tried to copy. The problem is… right now I cannot see a game adopting a more real world faction system, without somehow turning it into a marketing focus and losing sight of all of the other things that have to be in place to make a game enjoyable. Essentially I want real factions… but still be able to keep all of the things that I have come to expect from an MMO to this point. Unfortunately I fear that the era of MMO experimental-ism is over… and at this point our feature set is locked in place just like the feature set of shooter is locked as well. In the meantime however… I will still carry a rose colored torch for this features that I wish I could have in modern games.