Preface
Before I get into this, I want to specify what this post is not, so that there’s no confusion as to its purpose.
• I am speaking solely for myself.
• This is not a thread about player conveniences, although some things mentioned could be considered conveniences.
• I am not demanding any changes, merely pointing out what I see as flaws in the game’s current design philosophy.
• There won’t be a TL;DR, but I will do my best to categorize and sort my thoughts in such a way that sections can be read independently of one another.
With that said, I’ll get started.
To begin, having played the game for a while, it seems to me that the single greatest weakness of World of Warcraft’s game design lies in its design philosophy. Rather than designing toward making the game fun, it seems that the design is built as a framework of activities intended to occupy gameplay hours. At its core, fun and engaging gameplay are what drive gameplay hours, and it seems like that core has taken a backseat to the time-spent-engaged framework. A good and fairly easily cited example of this is the cooldown on some of the game’s toys, particularly those that alter the appearance of one’s character. It is no wonder, considering this, that a common phrase that appears in the WoW community is, “Fun detected; fun nerfed.”
And now that we’ve established my position on overall design, I’ll take some time to cover specific examples, particularly the two mentioned in the thread’s title. While the upcoming rearrangement of portals, and outright removal in some cases, is a hotly discussed topic with many threads already pertaining to it, I wanted to cover it briefly here.
Portals
Let’s look at the stated reasons for revising existing portal availability and locations according to the official communication we’ve received.
To start with the first of these, I don’t think it’s true that eliminations of the distances between places diminishes the sense of the world having a meaningful size. Players who have been interacting with the game throughout the course of several expansions have already experienced the process of traveling through those zones, and in due course, conquering them and their inherent challenges. Especially in expansions that implemented the Pathfinder design of unlocking the ability to fly, players who have been playing the game for a long time are already familiar with the size of the world, and the ability to traverse distances quickly does not negatively impact that.
After all, even those portals that brought one closer to one’s ultimate destination didn’t put one directly where they needed or wanted to be. If one was going from Azsuna to Ashenvale, even though one could portal to Orgrimmar or Darnassus as the case may be, there was still a need to utilize a flight path or manually fly the remaining distance. Because of this fact, and the fact that such routing is completed in the heads of players new and old, the idea of convenient portal-based transportation diminishing the size of the world just doesn’t ring true in my ears.
Moving on to the second, I have very little in the means of fact-based argument to contest this. It is largely a question of feeling, and ultimately mine on the subject boil down to this:
Tradition is not a good basis for decision-making, particularly when designing games. Games must evolve as cultures must evolve, and tradition-based decisions are rarely wise decisions. While I certainly respect the desire to adhere to tradition, I cannot respect this specific tradition for what it is and what it feels like to me – an excuse to justify an unpopular decision.
As for the third, while this reasoning is easily the most sensible and agreeable, the means through which the expressed concern is being addressed is a clumsy one. It is undeniably true that, in the Cleft of Shadows particularly, portals are cluttered and not terribly easy to navigate. However, removal of some of the available portals, while a functional solution, is by no means an elegant solution. Goblins and Gnomes have their places among the factions, and there simply isn’t a good reason why Azeroth’s available teleportation matrices (as accessed by Magni in Legion and Battle for Azeroth) cannot be tapped into by Goblin and Gnome engineers to create a multipurpose gateway for player use.
Rather than being a cluster of portals, they could instead be combined into a single teleportation device which, when interacted with, allows the player to select their destination from a dialogue window. As an additional benefit, locations could be easily added to such a dialogue window at a later date as needed for future expansion or patch content. Not everything our characters interact with needs to be fully magical, after all.
Professions
Professions have long since been diminished in complexity from their original form, and although that’s the case, there have been several of what are in my opinion good changes to them over the years. For example, the division of profession brackets by expansion, while reviled by some, makes the idea of starting up a new profession far less daunting. Leveling a new profession during Burning Crusade was not challenging, but it absolutely could be expensive and time-consuming to bring one’s professions up to a useful level. While that separation into brackets creates a few new barriers due to differences in requirements for certain world drop recipes, overall I think it was a positive change.
However, professions are (or were) the core of the game’s economy, and creates a player-driven market that allows one to be fiscally successful based on the amount of time, effort, and market savvy applied to the task. In their current form, because materials like Expulsom, Hydro/Tidalcores, Sanguicell, and Breath of Bwon’samdi are soulbound in addition to the items crafted with them, while gathering professions still eke out a reasonably good income, crafting professions have been hobbled.
The only exception to this are those that create consumables, such as Alchemy, which thrives on crafting consumables. The other crafting professions are relegated to selling stirrups, barding, contracts and vantus runes, etc. Because their marketable products are so limited in scope and potency, the market is oversaturated, and no meaningful income can be generated.
As a result of this, more and more players are resorting to other methods to maintain the income they desire, such as selling instance and PvP carries. Although it’s true that this has always been present to an extent, it is significantly more prevalent now. Those who wish to make money in-game do what is easiest and what provides the greatest yield for their time. With professions outside of Alchemy being largely not profitable, players are resorting to other means to keep the in-game economy moving.
Legion dealt with this in a couple of good ways – firstly, there were only a couple of types of soulbound material, and they could be obtained from gathering as well as from instanced content. Secondly, for characters who were pure gatherers, they could convert these soulbound materials into additional gatherables to supplement their income.
Professions in their current state aren’t just weak – they’re horrible. They function in such a way that they create no economic stimulus. Materials don’t move well in the economy because crafters have no need of them to create marketable products. Because there are few marketable products to craft, the in-game economy has been shifted to services and rare commodities such as BoEs and other world drops, rather than manufactured goods. This fundamentally alters the way players interact with one another, not just anonymously in the economy, but also in guilds and other social circles.
Where before a guild would pool resources for a new member or an existing member’s alt to provide them with enough gear to jump into current content, now, those guilds must instead rely on luck, carrying new characters through content and hoping for drops, or funneling loot directly to them. This in turn creates additional impetus for the sale of carries.
This is not good design, plain and simple. Professions need to be both accessible and potentially profitable. I would not be surprised if a large number of players had changed professions on their main characters this expansion to Herbalism and Alchemy, because those are the only ones that remain profitable outside of Enchanting, which itself can be quite difficult to obtain needed materials for.
Player Agency
So what does all this mean, and what does it have to do with player agency? Blizzard, you’ve created a world I love. I would like to believe that everyone playing this game loves the world. The removal of portals erodes player control and flexibility in navigating the world. The neutering of professions has limited our control over our own in-game finances. Both are an example of control of the gameplay experience being pushed outside of player influence.
This game can be fun. There are things you’ve done very right over the years, and things you’ve definitely done wrong. I don’t think it would be difficult to argue that lately there have been more wrong things than right, though.
I would urge the World of Warcraft team to refocus their efforts on creating a fun experience and then enhancing that experience, removing limits on player agency and freedom wherever possible, and design game systems with those foci in mind. It is one thing for a chosen course of action to have negative consequences, and quite another to restrict the freedom to choose that course of action. Killing too many cows in The Witcher 3 results in a horrific monster murdering your face – but you can still kill the cows if you want to.
Let me kill the cows.
If you read all of this, I appreciate you taking the time.
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