Is WoW structured and built BACKWARDS?

Community General Discussion
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A bit of an interesting philosophical / design question for your Sunday forum madness, let us ask a curious question about the design objectives and focus of WoW.

Is WoW structured and built backwards?

… and that probably needs a bit of context to make sense.

More specifically, is WoW’s focus on the putting the endgame first and building everything AROUND the endgame doing things the wrong way – in other words, is built backwards by doing so?

The big part of the argument here isn’t that endgame itself being a problem to WoW, but rather how it is handled.

It would appear that WoW has, for probably a decade if not longer, has been solely built around the endgame; more specifically, around raiding and to a less extent rated PvP. These aspects of the game are given the primary focus of the game throughout the majority of its lifecycle, with the only real diversions from being the 1-2 months after an expansion launches as everyone is focused on leveling up again… so that they can jump back into endgame as soon as possible.

To put it as a sequence, it seems to work out like this:

  1. Decide on what the endgame is going to focus on and build that.
  2. Figure out the systems which will be working within the endgame and build those.
  3. Build the systems which are meant to expedite the player’s route to the endgame and provide them the best access to it.

The one catch? The player progresses through this process backwards, and it also automatically assumes that the endgame is what they’re interested in.

This is probably fine and dandy for those who are primarily interested in the endgame, as the “good stuff” by this process is what they’re working towards… though quite arguably they’re somewhat relieved when the tedious aspects are done and over with. The nature and generous addition of various catch-up mechanics also seemed to be focused on allowing players to get over the “boring parts” done and over with quicker as the expansions go on so that they can more quickly hop into the “good stuff”.

… which brings us to the next problem, what about those who aren’t interested in the endgame? It would seem they find themselves in an unusual loop and end up asking this question:

“Why am I doing this boring and poorly designed content? And why is the game constantly pushing me into the endgame content that I don’t want to do?”

Not the best situation to be in, to say the least.

But we aren’t here to just complain, let’s look at how the alternative approach could work out… and why many would think it better.

This would be the different design approach:

  1. Try to build a fun and engaging leveling experience which players can enjoy from start to finish, only getting better and building upon itself as they get deeper into it.
  2. Endgame exists as a capstone and extension to leveling content, being a natural extension of the leveling and progression curve. Just as the leveling got better as it went on, the endgame just continues to build on this as well even though levels and abilities are no longer being granted.
  3. Don’t implement catch-up mechanics, so players have to progress their way through all the endgame content and there’s more to do than just the most current content.
  4. To avoid the prospect of players being left behind, add a system (constantly active) which allows veteran players to go back into older content and allowing players who are behind to catch up naturally; and a suitable reward/incentive to encourage veteran players to go back into this content. This would also open up a wider pool of content for everyone, to avoid the tedium of doing JUST the most current content. A variant of the current timewalking system, perhaps?

The first three steps of above process was pretty much how Vanilla WoW worked.
The fourth is just an idea for how to keep all levels of content active.

Being the initial launch of the game, the leveling process NEEDED to be well-structured; it certainly had a few faults (not enough quests initially), but the general process and progression was enjoyable to the vast majority of players. The endgame was there, but you weren’t forced into it; it existed as an optional capstone and extension of the leveling content. This trend largely held true for the first two expansions… but there was definitely a slow shift towards the endgame being the “dominant” aspect of the game at those points.

Following the release of Cata (I skipped the expansion, but did go through the leveling process during my return to the game during MoP), the old world was revamped into a whirlwind experience designed to fly you through an adventure… then just drop you into something entirely different, which was the endgame.

This, by itself, may explain why there’s such a strong demand for Classic WoW. It was, almost literally, designed in reverse compared to the current process that goes into building modern WoW.

Looking at one of WoW’s main competitors, I’d argue they too are following that “reverse” process of building upon of what came before rather than starting from the end objective and figuring out how to get there.

Care to share you thoughts and opinions on the matter?

This could make for an interesting discussion.
… provided we don’t burn the forums down in the process.

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The game is built around E-sports more than anything these days. You want a fun MMO again, they need to remove all the Diablo 3 crap the D3 developers brought to the game the last 2 expansions.

Overwatch has the same issues too, their focus on E-sports has really alienated their casual audience. Wow is doing the same thing.

E-sports should have stayed a niche activity. Trying to reshape a MMORPG into an E-sport has done serious harm to the game.

Edit: I think WoW needs to take a few ideals from ESO. They add content to their game that enhances the already existing world. They don’t invalidate huge swaths of content when they add new content to the game.

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The idea that the game was ever about anything other than endgame is a misconception perpetrated by players who were children until around wrath and cata.

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They do need to do something with leveling, but the end game has to take priority since it’s where people will end up spending most of their time. Even if they came up with some epic 4 month long journey, that would still leave people with over a year and a half sitting at the level cap until the next expansion came out.

This leads to problems with guilds poaching from other guilds. The current system isn’t perfect, but it’s better than what we used to have.

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I would agree with that, and that particular motive of the developers would explain why it has been particularly egregious the past couple expansions. However, I’d argue that the trend did start considerably earlier.

Vanilla was the only point of the game where the endgame wasn’t a driving force, though it was certainly around back then. TBC and WotLK pushed it towards that direction, slowly, but it didn’t become truly dominant until after they were over.

Must you resort to disparaging comments so quickly instead of presenting a counter-argument?

Please, we’re not children here.

I disagree, but some significant structural changes – “complete overhaul” would probably an understatement of what would be required – are needed to the game as a whole for the endgame to no longer be dominant.

This is why I introduced the fourth point to cut back on this known issue. Guilds poaching players would certainly be a problem if no system to assist in progression was added.

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I think these catch up mechanics keep a lot of players from joining guilds. Why do I need a guild when I can get gear that is on par with heroic raiding from doing world quests, dailies and LFR type content?

The entry level content along with the catch up mechanics need a sharp jump in difficulty. Blizzard needs to force players to, you know play together again.

That is why the game feels so crappy now. A lot of players don’t like socializing and when you give them easy content and awesome catch up gear for solo and easy group content. The bulk of them won’t bother joining guilds and doing higher level content that actually requires socializing.

WoW is a mess anymore as far as it’s community goes. Everyone is just fragmented into their own little comfort zones. Blizzard has done a terrible job creating content that brings it’s player base together.

They are way too focused on creating a game for everyone instead of actually making a MMO that fosters all it’s players to interact.

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Sorry, was a harsh word choice. Reworded to be less offensive, but still retain my original point.

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I disagree heavily. Endgame needs to stay dominant since that’s where people are naturally going to spend most of their time. I don’t want to be forced to reroll alts constantly in order to have something to do.

Except your idea doesn’t help with poaching at all. Back in TBC guilds didn’t want to wait for someone to catch up, they wanted to refill that slot as quickly as possible, and that meant poaching from another guild closet to their progression level.

Tell me how “catching up” will help when you lose your tank to another guild and have to wait for them to go through everything to finally be able to fill that tanking spot. Or that second guild can poach from a third guild and so on and so forth.

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If they don’t want to join guilds because they can get gear more easily, then they’re not going to be willing to spend time learning heroic fights. What this will do is just drive players away.

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I think the bigger problem with WoW’s design isn’t the endgame focus, but rather an overt focus on inconvenience - slow the player down so everything takes as long as possible. This is a problem because the best way to keep people playing would be the opposite - specifically a focus on convenience and multi-character synergy and interplay.

WoW has nothing to do with the romance of the first experience, and everything to do with the replayability of content. Content is NOT consumed when a player does it once. Oh no. No, content is consumed when a player refuses to do it a second, third, or five hundred thirty fifth time, whatever that content and whoever that player may be.

So how do you keep players going? …

Maximize the motivation for alts by increasing the number of Account-wide options, bonuses, and benefits. Account wide storage, shared currencies, making reputation easier to transition, making professions meaningful and impacting again, and more variance with how the world works and interacts with every character, race, and combination therein.

WoW should focus on not making every experience breathtaking to see once, but insufferable to do thereafter - it should make sure to focus on systems and design that a player feels they can do a hundred times on different characters for as long as it takes to get the next batch of content out. Not holding the players face down in the worst parts of content and demanding they “enjoy” it and be thankful for the privilege.

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I firmly believe endgame is what makes an MMORPG last.

The game should always be built around end game. Otherwise its just a game of making alts.

When an MMORPG fails, one of the first things I often hear is “it had no end game”.

Warhammer Online? Age of Conan? Lack of end game were major complaints, and directly led to their eventual failure.

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We don’t need catch up mechanics anymore. The reason we needed them is because finding people to run older content was tough. LFR feels this void quite well and should have stayed 1 tier behind the current raid and operated as a catch up mechanic. Gear rains from the sky now from all the content.

The older versions of the game had much slower progression and a very limited player pool. The current game suffers from none of this, so invalidating your content every patch with catch up mechanics has been a huge problem for the team. This is why we are stuck with all these horrible time gates and endless rep grinds.

With the modern systems in place minus the catch up gear, people wouldn’t have any trouble catching up to current progression. Plus, it move people to actually help out people to catch up and force people to join guilds again.

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You wrong here, trying to get gear was a huge driving force for people to join raid teams. This idea that people only raid for fun is just silly. Why don’t we just take the rewards away from raiding and see how many people will run it.

Rewards motivate people to do content. The problem with WoW is that they give away so much of their content on a mode that is just insulting to anyone that plays video games as a hobby. A lot of people will take the path of least resistance. This design ethos has been a plague on the game for a long time.

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TBC suffered heavily from poaching and had a much higher player pool than we have now. Things would be much worse with a more limited pool of players.

The catch-up gear is still needed because those other systems aren’t going to shower you with enough gear to be able to replace someone very quickly. And it needs to be very quick or poaching becomes preferable and that leads to drama and guilds falling apart.

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For once, I agree with you.

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The people who want better gear are still motivated to join guilds and raid teams. So I am completely right here. The people who are content with catch-up gear aren’t going to want suddenly develop a love for doing harder content. They’ll either fall further behind or they’ll just quit.

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TBC didn’t have cross realm grouping, LFR and automated dungeon queuing. Your pool of players was limited to your server and server transfers. I’ve been playing WoW since beta and people exaggerate player poaching so much. We caught people in TBC all the time. It wasn’t a big deal either since we ran the older content because A we still could use gear from it and B we would run our alts on off nights.

Gear still comes fast. Poaching still happens too. You are never going to eliminate this from the game. Throwing away all your expansion content so someone can just play the patch is just a waste of resources.

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RTS is it’s foundation, the first taste of the MMOrpg genre came with Classic that brought in familiar questing, and overall feel of past MMO’s with their twist. While questing took a long time, the focus it seems was more dungeons, more raids, and things like attunements to slow you down even further.

Every company kind of tries to find the miracle formula to keep people busy, engaged, and playing for longer and longer.

That said, I think their main idea was to have an end point to work towards, and eventually grind. They focused on that, and have ignored the open actual World. Designing for it the basic of basics formulaic systems just so that there is something to quest.

It hasn’t been 'till a few expansions ago that they’ve tried to introduce other areas of play and really putting an emphasis on that this expansion but I have always seen them designing the game for end-game first, putting the rest on a backburner.

Don’t forget the emphasis now on repeatable content that they don’t really have to do much with but maintain. (I.e. Islands, Warfronts… )

Is it built backwards? Maybe but seeing as how a lot of people focus on the end game stuff, I can’t blame them. Though a little attention and love to the leveling and open world couldn’t hurt.

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I didn’t read it all, but probably yes. The main concern right now seems to be making sure that every player is geared like an endgame raider and is killing endgame raid bosses; because to these current devs, that means that the content is a peak accessibility, which is the best kind of accessibility.

There’s a good reason as to why players who talk about their vanilla experience describe simply stepping into an endgame raid as a big deal regardless of what was cleared. That reason is the immense build up to qualify to set foot into the raid. Is it less accessible? If you measure based on time investment, yes. If you measure based on skill required, then no. Somehow, time investment has become taboo for earning anything in this game.

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And nor do I want to run the same small selection endgame content for months on end until the next content patch is added… only to run ANOTHER small selection of content for months on end.

There has to be another solution to the problem than just doubling down on particular aspect at the expense of another, which would be the current “endgame before everything else” approach, and building something which is better for longevity of the game as a whole.

Then remove the point of poaching players in the first place, which comes about from guilds being stuck on certain raids and bosses for a long period.

Maybe cutting down on stupidly high difficulty and focusing on smaller groups would make it easier for those small teams to progress. And a big thing required to take the focus on the endgame is to kick it off the pedestal it’s been put on.

… you do realize that attitude is a big part of what drove away the larger WoW community over the years, do you?

And yet you mention nothing of other MMORPGs which are surging in popularity DESPITE their lack of focus on the endgame.

Nor the fact there’s a bigger demand for Classic WoW than the current game… again, DESPITE the lack of focus on the endgame.

That may explain why many higher level players are so unpleasant. When players are solely motivated by gear and rewards, they tend to view others as “transactional acquaintances” in their own progression and will drop others at the drop of a hat if it is to their benefit.

… which actually comes back to the “guild poaching” problem, as there are those who WANT to be poached and abandon their current team if it means getting ahead.

Let’s ask this directly then:

Why is “harder content” put on a pedestal in the first place?

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