How Blizzard Open API killed the Wonder of WoW

Community General Discussion
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Ion Hazzikostas had an interview with Wired where he stated:

One of the biggest things that’s exciting about the concept of an MMO is going into an unexplored, undiscovered world. It’s almost the promise of something that somehow breaks all the rules we were talking about when it comes to how players understand and deconstruct systems. We have an incredibly passionate community we couldn’t be more grateful for, but we’re still always chasing that mystery, that fantasy of the unexplored and undiscovered.

I want to dig into why exactly WoW lost this sense of mystery and wonder.

I started playing WoW back in Vanilla and in the first 10 minutes as I set my keybinds in the Valley of Trials, I noticed something that I found disturbing. I could inspect every single player and see their gear. There was no privacy, no room for secret theorycrafting, something I enjoyed in other games.

Nobody else I spoke too saw the link between the values leading to that simple “harmless” feature and the eventual evolution of the game from an art into an exact science.

The Armory and the Open API lead to more data harvesting and performance meters for dungeons and raids, further adding to the quantification of what was a previously mysterious world. So began the trend of “cookie cutter” gear/talent choice and a focus on performance meters (as I predicted).

WoW was no longer a place where I could just log on to have fun. Suddenly everybody was stressed out “grinding something” to meet some performance metric. That was when the phrase “What a waste of X minutes of my life!” became endemic, everybody was on a rush to do something. No time to stop and chat, to help with a quest … nada!

WoW became a world where everything and EVERYONE was quantifiable, it lost the art, the mystery, and the human element. It turned into World of Tryhards where everyone was constantly trying to achieve some quantifiable level of achievement, not because they genuinely enjoyed it but because it was required to be accepted by the community at large.

To make my point clear, casinos do not allow laptops because they understand that the quantification of their games ruins the human element of the game. It turns a game of poker, into a mathematical equation, it has that effect on ANY game for that matter.

THAT is what IMO happened to World of Warcraft. It is no longer a game, it is a mathematical equation.

Gromteragar added a great point that I felt necessary to add to the OP.

Thank you for this comment.

The difficulty of the game is built upon the third party tools that quantify the game – made possible by the open API.

That is to say, without the data harvesting, meters, and simulations – players would not be able to optimize as they do today and the difficulty of all content would be scaled to that of a player WITHOUT all that help.

We have players achieving feats such as soloing Heroic Ny’alotha. That might be rare and you could argue that it is only Rextroy doing it, but if everything he does can be quantified and simulated, it will be assimilated by the community at large.

Even though nearly every player today simulates gear, studies raid logs, and gets on World of Wargraphs to analyze data – that once was the exclusive domain of the elite – what Rextroy is doing today is where the player base is headed tomorrow.

When that happens the difficulty level will be adjusted once again to a higher level, making players depend even more on third party analytics.

Why should Blizzard care? Because the quantification of World of Warcraft has led to a software (this is no longer a game) that is well on it’s way to requiring an undergraduate degree from a 4-year institution to use satisfactorily.

This has been a common argument throughout this thread worth adding to the OP.

The issue is not the player wanting to beat the house at poker.

The issue is the player bringing quantitative analysis software to the casino floor.

Nobody sitting on the same table stands a chance against said player — the house stands a much greater chance of losing than before.

So what is the house going to go?

It’s going to modify the card game such that players with quantitative analysis software have a much lower chance to succeed.

What does that do?

Now the game is ruined for every casino player NOT using quantitative analysis software.

Then another clever player brings quantum computing software to the casino – and the cycle continues.

Eventually everybody at the casino is a Tryhard bringing expensive quantum computing software to the casino floor.

These guys don’t drink alcohol, they don’t joke around and meet people – they don’t even talk to the pretty girls.

Now the casino sucks.

Video games only exist because of the cognitive limitations of human beings – amplifying these with quantitative analysis is not unlike using AimBot on an FPS.

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:thinking:

So. You’ve been playing a game for 15 years where you couldn’t log on to have fun? Fascinating. Tell us more.

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While I see where you’re coming from, I feel I have to correct a few things:

  • Exploring a world is not an MMO feature, it’s more an “adventure” game feature… and by extension, a feature of most RPGs. An MMORPG is just a variation of this same idea.
  • The database, inspecting, and data-mining isn’t the explicit cause of the loss of exploration. They are merely the vectors upon which it was enabled. This is something deeper, more fundamental. I’d like to say it’s a byproduct of the game’s culture, along with the glorification of optimization and lack of respect for discovery… but I can’t say that is the root cause for certain.
  • One of the biggest problems has been Blizz’ neglect of the underlying issues within the community. When they see things diverging from the exploration concept, they are at a loss of how to stop it… if anything, they embraced and accelerated these issues. Possibly because they didn’t see the value in these things originally… or maybe they did, but the current design leads certainly don’t.

Sad, but true. Even worse, it’s a solved equation; it’s not even an incomplete one where you can flex some mental muscle and creativity, there isn’t anything more to figure out at this stage.

It’s just down to raw number crunching at this point.

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The game is what you make it.

Find people who share similar priorities as you do and have fun playing the game with them.

Numbers and the math doesn’t have to matter.

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Ehh.
4/10.

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Well yea, this is a multiplayer game where you work together. Can’t really work together well if all of you guys are wearing the crappist gear their is.

Managing a group in cooperation and making sure their skills and gear are up to par are important if you want to progress.

The open data isn’t Blizzard’s fault, infact, there i say it, it’s a nice feature to have cause it disallows room for error. You’re talking about the players who use it for nefarious reasons, and while their are many, yes, it’s akin to say “there’s non substantial content creators on YouTube, cause google allows everybody to post there”. It’s really not the tool for the job’s fault, but more of the person behind the said tool, and the answer isn’t to take the tool away or restrict it further.

I know it sounds like i’m speaking for the “elitists” here that micromanage every single mundae thing about your toons, but it’s very helpful for casuals such as myself to pull upon, like if i want to take a look on some friend’s rep progress on something, or the inspect gear at a glance.

Leaving it intentionally a mystery or making it harder to know what’s going on with that player at any given time in terms of inspecting, isn’t good. And i don’t know why would you want to do that to keep the “Mystery and wonder…” Unless you want to wonder why your group mysteriously doing way less DPS and dying a lot more and never find out why and never progress much.

You do realize you don’t have to take those cookie cutter gear talent choices if your not doing harder content? Heck, even then, if you can make any talent you have going on work for you, then it will work for you.

What’s wrong with having a good or best performance? :man_shrugging:

Then don’t think about those things and have fun. Why do other people need to follow what you think it’s fun?

Well can i ask, do you stop and chat?

Nobody is stopping you from doing the same thing to other people but yourself.

You think people who are “tryharding” the game aren’t genuinely enjoying the game? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Cause what you find fun and what you think is fun is very subjective here, some people like to minmax like crazy and it’s fun for them, others just play casually and it’s fun for them too. I enjoy jumping off cliffs and using my gliding off the mountains and try punching things in the face in games, cause that’s fun.

Well i would imagine it would be cheating to look up on how to play power the correct way and calculate stuff here and there.

You do realize card games are essentially a game of chance? What you draw next is what you get, and it’s a combination of luck and strategy to get the best hand to win the game. If you want to win, that’s what you got to do. I mean take Blackjack (or 21 i don’t know), you get two cards and it’s a 10 and a 5. What can you do here? Do you Hit (Draw the next card) or Stand (Don’t draw) in that situation? Remember your at 15, and any card higher then 6 will bust you (Make you lose), and theirs 13 unique numbers in the deck (and theirs 4 of each, so 52 cards in total) so at that point, you’re next card has a near 50% chance to lose the game, and that number goes higher as your number goes higher.

Poker is a bit more relaxed in that, but now you have to possibly account into the fact that the opponents might possibly have a flush, 4 of a kind, and so on. The Royal Flush is the best hand you can get, but if your hand is higher then somebody else’s, you will win. Depending on which hand your going for, the chances of getting that hand will decrease if you draw more cards until your at 5.

Point being, gambling games, if you want to win, you really need to take all that in mind, especially since with money on the line.

Isn’t that what Video games are for all intents and purposes really? Mathematical equations?

Well that might be the wrong word to use here, cause that’s even implying that can’t be fun. But Video games if you want to progress far, does require you a level of thought higher then normal then if your just beating or just screwing around and having fun if you want to … 100% it or go for harder content.

I mean lets take Need for Speed Underground 2 for example. It’s not a hard game at all, you take almost any car, slap a couple of upgrades on it with nitro and you can win the races well enough with some competent level of skill. At some point, you do have to keep up with new cars and upgrades cause the opponents will outrace you eventually, so you can’t have the same car for the rest of the game, but you don’t have to get too serious about it to beat the game. I should know that cause i did play it and beat it back in 2005. Currently, it’s one of the games i’m chewing though, trying to win every race while hunting every secret i can find to get the most amount of money i can and heading to the Dyno to tweak the car for specific events to squeeze a bit of speed and tighten the handling. This is really superfluous as i said, i did just fine back in 2005 (and i was a kid back then), but i did it to improve upon what was my first time playing.

To put that in perspective for WoW Players, that’s akin to somebody who played Vanilla at the time and the game was brand new for them and they aren’t awesome at it right off the bat, but competent enough to get into raids and such. And today, that somebody is much much better now then they were back then. Completing Raids under an hour are superfluous. Getting 150k DPS total in Mythic+ is superfluous. You get what i’m saying here, i’m rambling.

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If someone had the option to hide their gear / ilevel, I would never invite them into any groups whatsoever.

I get that its fun to just play the game, but if your severely undergeared for certain difficulties in the game, of course your not going to get invited.

As for the seriousness of things, I don’t enjoy raiding because of it. But mythic + , you can still find people who enjoy the game, and the difficulty element in order to succeed in mythic +.

You need to care a lot less of what people are thinking of you, and just play the game with people who you enjoy playing the game with. There doesn’t have to be a serious element if you don’t create one, or are around others who don’t mind.

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For a while I have been curious about how an experiment where Blizzard obfuscates the Combat Log and the API for a year would turn out. One can dream.

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i’m totally terrified of people now
:frowning:

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We adore MMO how it started back then in old school days, but thats how it started, and while the magic bloomed, it still does,

Change, no matter how drastic, can be upbringing or move you onward to other preferences,

Sure certain state of the game can be upsetting, but so is every game like FFXIV and others,

Like Dr. Seus says “Don’t be sad it ended, be glad it happened”. I am more than happy to have experienced the very early stages of old school MMOs

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We’ve had cookie cutter stuff since the game launched.

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This comment is gold, and it’s a shame more people can’t see it.

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World of Warcraft has had addons and cookie cutter builds since classic. You’ve always had your engame theorycrafting. Yea it’s more common place today because modern gamers are more likely to min/max, but it was always there.

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Sounds like they’d like to stop people from posting on wowhead how to do quests so they’ll have to figure out for themselves how to do those quests that are intentionally misleading and missing critical information for completion. Or more likely, with the worst-designed ones, just give up.

That’s not what a “sense of wonder” is about. If there was stuff worth exploring out there, people would be exploring it. Passing over exact pixels on a checklist has nothing to do with real exploration.

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Borrowed power.

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Maybe it’s the autism speaking, but I think mystery is overrated, and found Classic more interesting than vanilla because there was less obscurantism around the mechanics.

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The reason why this is a thing is cause WoW can be a pretty difficult game. Very High M+ keys. Rated PVP. Mythic Raids. All of which can be difficult content that is not trivial even for the best players in the world.

When there is difficult content, performance matters.

When performance matters, optimization, theory crafting, cookie cutter builds, becomes dominant.

And when optimization, theory crafting, performance matters, the APIs and the math interface are mandatory to support player’s attempt to optimize themselves.

That’s it. If you want to de-emphasis the importance of mathematical perfection, you must make the game so easy that the best player can beat it with imperfect builds on day 1 of release with little if any effort. Then, there would be no point to flex on people because there are literal nothing to do it with.

And WoW is not a game that i want to be able to face roll with no hope of advancement.

This also ties in to people’s pressuring of eachother to optimize for the best content. Because content is difficult, it is frequently required that every member of your team perform at the best level they could. Optimizing your character is something that people can do regardless of physical dexterity and play skill. By maximizing everyone’s performance, you increase the likelihood of the group defeating the said content, and increase the likelihood of everyone having a good time.

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Alright I’d like to address these points.

  1. Why do you want “privacy” from gear inspection? Why does it matter? I inspect people if I see a mog they have on that I’d like to get. There’s nothing to hide with the gear you wear, everyone can get it.

  2. EVERY game has a cookie cutter build for everything - talent trees, glyphs, ect are all “illusion of choice”, you never really had a choice. Also raids required a minimal amount of DPS, as is any other MMO ever…they all have fights and raids where you have to meet a minimum standard or go above it to make it easy.

  3. Did you really expect WoW to be a place where people stop to chat and help out? I’ve never played an MMO with people like these, they simply don’t exist. Everyone is doing their own thing, and are not required by any means to be social for any reason.

  4. After 15 years, its only natural the “the art, the mystery, and the human element” would be long gone, every feature has a lifespan until no one cares anymore for it.

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When you start playing on content that demands actually knowing 1 or 2 things about your spec, you will start to thank those “perfomance meassuring tools” since thanks to them you can play with equally decent people to clear stuff that needs more than 1 braincell, and your hate will shift from those tools to the underperforming people that hold back a group on a 24/7 basis, but until that happens OP, you will firmly believe what you wrote.

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WoW has evolved as gaming has become a more mainstream activity.
That’s just the nature of an ongoing game.

But everything you complain about has been around since before WoW.

D&D had players trying to meta-game before WoW was even a twinkle in Thrall’s eye.
Even a video game as simple as Super Mario Bros. has been analyzed down to the millisecond to eke out better player performance.