So…this is going to get long. But hang in there, I’m gonna get there.
People have been saying for a while that it’s pretty clear that Blizzard is purposely designing the game around lengthening how long it takes to do things on a daily basis in little increments wherever they can. They point to things that frustrate, accumulate and ultimately drive away players towards this end like:
- Purposely difficult to navigate terrain with unintuitive paths, dead ends, widely-spaced resurrection points and winding, looping flight paths that rarely go directly to where you need to be
- Delaying flight (at first entirely, and then until as far into an expansion’s launch as could be done without provoking open riot and sharp subscription loss)
- Open-world iLvl scaling, where even trivial mobs in the open world get stronger with you as your equipment gets better
- Making many types of content depend on reputation grinds
- The removal of long-standing portals that enable quicker access to many areas of the game
The theory behind this goes, Blizzard has stopped reporting the number of subscribers for Warcraft (and specific player numbers for many of their other games that have seen significant player loss) but that they need other metrics to show shareholders that the company is still worth investing in because they have steady, reliable users, so they started reporting not just MAUs (Monthly Active Users across the entire Blizzard franchise) but also “engagement”, a.k.a. how much people liked the game. Now, correlating how much someone is enjoying something and is likely to stick around directly to how long they take to do something is a bad gauge, since people could be engaged in unenjoyable slogs that would wear down their tolerance over time, and the metric can be “gamed” or affected directly by putting useless, un-fun time sinks in tiny increments everywhere. Which…happened. Once the metric went in, so did all of the things above with increasing frequency.
I’ll give an example. During a Horde Nazmir incursion, the endcap quest involves getting on a plane. Launching out to a flight carrier where the vehicle inexplicably circles around some kind of structure on one end of the ship at least once before landing. Getting in another flying vehicle and flying to the other end of the zone, and then finally being able to actively play again. After painstakingly shooting and bombing things to fill a slow-moving bar for several minutes, you fly to yet another area way out in the water, kill a surprisingly infrequently spawning boss in an area full of other random hostile mobs, and then you finally get to fly back to the other end of the zone, at which point there is no turn-in, it just marks your quest complete. The final long flight can’t be skipped.
Each one of these delay-tactics doesn’t add a huge amount of time. Some just 5-10 seconds, some a minute or two. But cumulatively, across everything, it adds up. A minute here or there adds up to maybe fifteen extra minutes a day, maybe an hour a week, maybe a handful of hours a month.
But why would Blizzard care? How long people spend in game has no direct relationship with how much money people spend, because it’s not a FTP game where you can pay cash for faster travel or to skip around grinds. Subscribers don’t pay for their subscriptions by the minute, the monthly rate is the same if you spend ten seconds or a hundred hours a month logged in. And once people see that they’re being frustrated and delayed on purpose for no actual gain it would probably make them mad and more likely to give up on the game all together, wouldn’t it? Because the payoff for the time invested would be getting steadily lower and lower, and as the lives of the aging playerbase grow more complex they have less time or tolerance for that specific kind of nonsense.
And so people say that the theory that Blizzard is intentionally making things longer to accomplish isn’t true. It implies a depth of fundamental misunderstanding about why and how people play video games, particularly ones with unlimited playtime for ongoing monthly subscription fees, that surely no triple-A game development company would have. And to back this up, they’d go on to say that Blizzard only cares about and reports Monthly Active Users, and they’ve denied doing this on purpose, so that solves that, right?
…right?
I’m just gonna direct everyone’s eyeballs to ~https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-first-quarter-2019-financial~
In particular, the section labeled “Deep Engagement”
In particular, the first bullet point.
- “For each of Activision, Blizzard, and King, daily time spent per user increased year-over-year. For the Company overall, average time spent was approximately 50 minutes.”
So to all the people who insist that Blizzard couldn’t possibly have implemented a widespread design directive at every level of game development to lengthen the time that players spend in game even if it’s done to the detriment of player’s patience, tolerance and ultimately subscribership for no monetary or profitability gain for the sake of having a metric to report to shareholders that looks like it might, but ultimately doesn’t matter, I say…
Nuh-huh.