World of Warcraft – Page 103

MMOs Worth Playing – World of Warcraft

November 6, 2015 by Belghast

Changing Course

When I started this segment of my blog the original intent was to highlight games that are not getting a lot of press and talk about all of the things I like about them. That said since the column is called “MMOs Worth Playing” I knew eventually I would have to get around to talking about some of the bigger names. So as a result I am going to have a momentary lapse of purpose here… and go with serendipity. Today’s is coming on the morning that BlizzCon 2015 starts, and as a result it just felt natural to talk about World of Warcraft. There was never a point where I would not ultimately end up covering the game, given that in many of the discussions I end up talking about it. So here we go… my attempt to create an overly positive discussion about the benefits of World of Warcraft.

The Standard

In every industry there is a leader that for the most part everyone gets compared to. In the MMO world this leader is World of Warcraft. Even though this has become the stuff of internet memes… it is by no means the first MMO, or in truth did it invent many of the things that folks attribute to it. That said it did manage to take the model that was burgeoning at the time of its release… knock off the rough spots and sand it to a mirror shine. Blizzard is really good at making games that appeal to the masses, and World of Warcraft is no exception. The problem is… the “appealing to the masses” has been a moving target causing the game to shift and dodge numerous times along the path. Each time it has changed course it has created a set of fans nostalgic for their imagined version of “the way things used to be”. So here we are today, with a legion of fan… some joyous, some in denial, and some begrudgingly along for the ride. Everyone has a World of Warcraft story, and if they don’t… they should. Every so often a questionnaire circulates through the community asking what game you would suggest a person with zero experience in MMOs should play… and the only actual answer you can give is in fact World of Warcraft.

This is the game that takes the complex concepts of an MMO and feeds it to players in bite sized chunks at just the right times to convert them from a MMO gaming neophyte to a seasoned veteran. The problem is that we have seen is that Warcraft is really good at creating Warcraft players, because many of these gamers never really venture out into other games. This is in many ways a failing of the other companies to embrace the same sort of low level educational campaign that Warcraft has. Sure to us long time players we see the Cataclysm revamp of the newbie zones as a travesty, but in each case they just work better… when you view them through the eyes of someone who has zero ancestral knowledge into the way that these games work. Each blatant breadcrumb, or cheese quest designed only to deliver you to the next quest hub… is honestly not for us, but instead for the players that NEED those clear indicators of what they should be doing next. We recently saw the subscription numbers for Warcraft and in part that number is due to the fact that a decade later they can still manage to induct brand new players into the tribe of WoW.

The Paradox

I am naming this section the Paradox because it highlights something odd in the game. When people leave Warcraft it is generally stated that they are leaving because they have “run out of things to do”. The problem that a game like WoW creates is that in order to keep the front edge of players happy, they have to keep cranking out content… something that Blizzard has proven to find difficult in the massive lags between end of expansion patches and the new expansion. The paradox comes in that one of the big reasons why I would suggest this game is that there is so damned much content to experience. Sure it might not be anything a veteran player wants to do… but for a brand new player this is a smorgasbord of brand new experiences and over a decade worth of sights and vistas to experience. World of Warcraft is by no means a gorgeous game at this point, because it feels a decade old at times… but there are still moments that are breath taking, like the first time you roll into Booty Bay and see the giant Goblin statue, or the first time you look down from the top of Thunderbluff onto the valleys below. These are important experiences that I feel like no one should rob themselves of.

So many of my good memories of this game however come from the interaction with the people. Part of my nostalgic chagrin however is realizing that so many of those players are no longer playing the game. Many of my best memories are tied to specific moments in the games history that will never come back. That however is not to say that each and every night new memories are not being made. People are still loving this game with all of their heart, and I have stated this before that I am more than a little jealous of them. I miss the types of experiences I used to have in World of Warcraft, but since many of those were tied to my “first time” doing this or that… I realize those are experiences I will never be able to have again. This is a game I was utterly devoted to for over half of that decade, and still have pangs of remorse when I think about those things I have lost. This game is powerful, and the experiences you have through it are equally powerful. Which is why I feel like everyone should step foot in the game and find their own version of those “first times”.

The Model

As I said many of those moments were because of the other players, but one of the benefits about starting World of Warcraft at this point… is that essentially everything is available to you as a solo player. That is not to say that I do not suggest that you find your way into a really good guild, because guilds make the entire experience better regardless of the game. However there really should be nothing locked from you because you did not bring a legion of friends into it. The game itself is subscription based, but you can get a free trial account to start and dip your toes into the water. If you end up liking it, the base game is $19.99 and will carry you through level 90, with the latest expansion Warlords of Draenor costing $49.99 on top of that. The later comes with a free boost to 90… which I highly suggest you don’t use at least not for your first character. There is a bunch of really awesome content to experience, and part of my frustration in the past is that it feels like these boosts cheapen the older content. Some of the best content in the game, is well below the level cap… so to skip over a Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, or Dire Maul would be a travesty. Then to maintain your account it is an older monthly subscription model of $14.99.

Over the years I have said a lot of hurtful things on this blog about Blizzard and World of Warcraft, and in many case those were about specific problems I had… that most players would never even care about. If I were creating a Facebook profile about my relationship with Warcraft… the only thing I could possibly pick is “complicated”. Similar to my feelings about Star Wars, with all of the hype and disappointment… I also hold in my heart a lot of frustration and disappointment with all of the possibility that was squandered. I’ve also come to realize that I wholeheartedly love Blizzard as a company, it is just one of there franchises that I have some issue with. Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm are both amazing… and what I have played of Starcraft 2 was really fun… even though I am not really an RTS player. I anxiously look forward to Overwatch and seeing how it does… and occasionally I break out a Hearthstone game even though that is not a regular occurrence. With World of Warcraft… I know that eventually I will go back and resubscribe because I always do. This game has a hold on my heart that even though I have tried to purge it so many times… it stays there clinging tightly. No matter what my current feelings are for the game, that power cannot be denied. So regardless of what the current hype cycle thinks… this is a great game and has so many excellent experiences that you would be robbing yourself of it you did not experience them. That is not to say that I don’t also think there are so many other amazing games out there… but when creating a column called “MMOs Worth Playing”… Warcraft had to be included among that number.

Instant Relevance

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.