I feel like the iphone effect is what we have now. I think you can have actually exclusive content, the key is just to have progression elements up to that point that are accessible. So let’s say there is this very difficult end game raid. You will have a hard time finding a group without the right ilvl, and even if you do it’s pretty hard to pug, so set raid groups have a much better chance. So how do we resolve these gates?
Rep gates: What? You mean I have to get revered with X faction to even step foot in raid? True, that could come across as a pointless grind. But what if you brought back head and shoulder patches like in WOTLK? You unlock your blue patch at honored, unlock the raid at revered, unlock epic patches at exalted. The rep grind is not a pointless attunement, it actually makes your character stronger and has implications beyond just raid access.
Guild incentives: there should be incentives outside of just raiding to join guilds. I mean beyond just a guild bank, heirloom gear, and having money for repairs, there is not a lot of reason for people to guild up. Blizz largely abandoned the guild cosmetics/achievements/consumables after Cata. The key is to make guilding up feel like an integral part of the game experience. And I don’t mean do stuff like throw in crap loads of group quests. I mean create fun activities and goals that just are enjoyable to every type of player and encourage guilding up whether or not you plan on being hardcore.
If you have to trick people into playing a game, its not a very good game. Exclusivity is divisive by definition and business tactics designed to increase profit margins based on peoples big ego are not the way I would go if I was trying to build a good community
The big difference between vanilla and now is the amount of time it took to outfit a raid of people. Between multiple difficulties, less wasted drops and the smaller raid group sizes there is so much more loot to go around now then there used to be. People ran multiple tiers in vanilla because of legendary mats and simply because people were not done with collecting sets for bonuses and the like. Most people I know took alts into farm raids if they were done gearing their main. The only people bringing mains were those that were after legendaries, those that still wanted a specific elusive piece and those that didnt have alts.
You are welcome to your opinion but I disagree on pretty much all points. Tricks can be allot of fun and being tricked into something can also be enjoyable (the knock knock joke is built on it). At its base elements, the concept of any game is to have winners and losers. When everyone is a winner its a boring game because there is no risk in the game, no excitement (thats my subjective opinion).
In terms of divisiveness and community building, you are aware the central premise for this game is to pit half the community against the other half right?
This game is far more about co-op than being pitted against someone. Other than pvp which has never been the main focus of the game, competition is never directly against another person.
This started in TBC with Badge gear, my dude. Badge gear made old content irrelevant from a challenge standpoint; the only reason the old content existed was to farm badges. No one was running Kara/Mag/Gruul because they needed the gear in there to progress. Wrath only exacerbated that by making each raid tier irrelevant when the new one came out. All you had to do was get to 70 and farm Emblems for a day or two to hop into Ulduar/ToC/ICC.
Vanilla WoW was really the only iteration of WoW where truly linear progression was the norm all the way through.
Not gonna lie. If there is not a high amount of exclusivity - even if I’m not a part of it, I won’t play. The feeling of “there is so much more out there” is very important to me.
It’s one of the turnoffs of retail. Everyone is transmogged, LFR gear looks similar or decent compared to Mythic. As far as I’m concerned, LFR should look like garbage and only the top tier gear should look amazing.
What this does is give the people doing LFR, the illusion of achievement. When in reality, they have so much further to go.
It started in the end of BC/beginning of Wrath. (At least for PVE) In Burning Crusade 1-2 percent of the population was seeing content that took up a large percentage of their time to create. The expense wasn’t rationalizing the participation, so they needed to modify it so the metrics started making sense. So, they removed attunements (which usually required you to complete previous content before moving into new content), started introducing gear vendors, allowed for varying raid sizes, and in Wrath, introduced a new differing difficulty system.
This access to all mentality, like it or not, continued and is why most of the things people complain about are in place today. WoW, as a business, chose to offer more to the ‘average’ player (not saying casual, that is too subjective).
I think using the word “divisive” is a little misleading. I mean competition has been a strong source of of motivation AND enjoyment since the beginning of time. People enjoy competing and climbing ladders. That is in general a positive thing. Just because WOW is an RPG, does not mean that it should not incorporate that element of competition and prestige, which in traditional sports and esports actually DOES help build the community. Heard of League of Legends?
The mistake here is in treating wow as if it’s a traditional solo player RPG like Skyrim or early Final Fantasy. It’s an MMO, and as such that multiplayer aspect should be an inherent part of the game. And where you have multiple players, they will find ways to compete against one another just by human nature. And this is not a bad thing.
Most people enjoy the winning not so much the competing. And while you can certainly build communities based off that kind of structure its not actually the kind of community that people always talk about when they are fondly remembering communities they have been a part of (unless of course they were part of the winning side). Co-op is just as much multiplayer as head to head, and the best head to head communities I’ve ever been part of are the ones that had no rewards for winning.
I would argue that that the idea of you being part of a guild or raid group to compete against another group is Co-op no? Or you me pure PVE with no system for comparison or rewards?
I find that statement interesting because the time when I felt most connected to not only my personal community of guild members, but to my server and my faction as a whole was when I was a very competitive raider in a top 4-5 on server progression guild. I think trying to decide whether people prefer a competitive community vs a pure co-op experience is too general, people will have vastly different preferences and thus we cannot make general statements. I’m simply pointing to the thousands of years of history we have of competition being one of the primary, if not THE primary, form of entertainment for civilized cultures.
Let me tell you, seeing all those high levels with stuff I couldn’t get got me hyped to try harder and put in more time and effort. Exclusivity is a good thing for the game provided it isn’t “the first 100 people get this and then we are NEVER having anything like this ever again” as that does the opposite.
This. Something more to work for is good, something you won’t be able to get not so much. Although the occasional item like the AQ tank mount is ok, having a series of such things would not be good.
I agree with the sentiment, but in truth…the same concept holds true if you look at MMORPGs before WOW. Ultima Online & Everquest were niche gaming experiences that were deeply satisfying for their player base, but had game mechanics that turned most gamers off…which is not efficient from a business perspective.
Blizzard steps in and lowers a lot of barriers to entry for PC gamers with pre-expac WOW, thereby broadening the playerbase of the games before them. (UO set a world record for MMO pop in 2000 with 200,000 users!)
Since then, Blizzard (particularly after merging with Activision) has made changes to the game to continually remove aspects of the game that could potentially turn players away…which they approach by making more of the content accessible…despite cheapening those experiences for the core playerbase.
It’s the natural evolution of things…someone comes up with a great service / product, titans of industry get a hold of it, change the service / product in a way that attempts to min/max monetization of it, and thereby fundamentally transforming it to something different than what made it popular in the first place (See demand for Vanilla WOW)
Totally agree with you on pretty much every point you made. So here’s the question then:
If Blizz is just trying be as efficient as possible financially, they why would they not stick with what originally brought the huge influx of players? If they are min/maxing monetization, then it follows that they would essentially do just whatever would attract the most players. But back in the day what Vanilla had WAS what attracted the most players no?
So the real question is what has changed about the player base to make them less open to the true MMO experience and more open to the serialized version that retail WOW has become? Why was Vanilla through WOTLK era WOW so able to bring in new players, but now that game is just not appealing to the majority of people who haven’t already played? Or we just at a point where Blizz has moved past trying to provide what the majority of players want, and are just trying to be as financially efficient as possible by massively downsizing the scope/complexity of their projects?
The numbers (that have steadily been declining since early Wrath) suggest that the players preferred the older version to the “new and upgraded” version but the stubborn devs just keep doubling down on their track of making changes antithetical to the original game…
It’s not as simple as a 1-to-1 post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc dynamic. There are a ton of reasons why the game started to slog off at that point in time. That timeframe also lines up with WoW’s brief dalliance with pop culture (South Park, celebrity advertisements, product cross-promotions, etc.). WoW was hot for a minute…and then it wasn’t. That had zero to do with the game itself and everything to with the pop culture zeitgeist moving on to the next “thing.” This happens all the time.
Think about the video game market in general. Since mass production of video game hardware became a thing, how many paradigm shifts have we seen in that 30-year period? Too many; there’s always something newer and cooler less than five years away.
I do believe that design decisions played a small role in people leaving, but not nearly as severe as people seem to need to believe. Too much other stuff matters more. Hell, you know why my raiding guild ended during the Wrath years? Because most of us finished college, got married, had kids, got jobs and moved on with our lives.
Edit - I would add this: most of my former guildmates who left around Cata ended up coming back at some point, seeing what the game had become and promptly said “Uh, no. Not interested.” If you want to say that design decisions have played a major role in scaring away returning players, I’m right there with you. Most of us don’t recognize the game at all anymore.
I can agree with most of that. I myself got married and have a 9-5 job and a kid. But I still play WOW and raid.
One paradigm shift that I definitely think has come about is the idea of “maining” a particular game. Back in the early 2000’s id say up till a few years ago many of the most hardcore gamers specialized in a specific genre if not a specific game. As an example I myself enjoyed playing many games, jumping in to Starcraft, Halo, turn based rpg’s, etc…but I dumped at least 90% of my overall gaming time into WOW, and then later did the same thing with League of Legends. So despite being a lover of games in general, I always “mained” one. And I was definitely not the minority in that.
Why do you think that kind of gaming style has gone out the window over the past 5 years or so?
Also why do you think WOW recoiled from pop culture exposure?
There are a couple of challenges retaining your player base…
There will be a certain number of people that will get board with game…regardless of how good it is. In this case, changes keep it fresh and introduce new challenges
Your player base is getting older and are incurring additional responsibilities that make it hard to devote the same amount of time and attention to continue playing. There are a lot of old WOW players that like the fact that they can now jump in for 30 min and complete a dungeon, BG, or knock out several quests
You’re looking to other demographics to replace the losses, which means you have to compete with the other forms of entertainment they are into.
The Activision CEO made a public comment a while back about World of Warcraft having to compete with Farmville. People thought he was crazy, but didn’t realize what he meant was that the people they were looking to expand the game to were casual consumers of entertainment…and WOW had to match that.
So essentially we’re saying that we are at a point technologically now that we will probably never ever see a top production studio create and support a game primarily geared towards a true “gamer” ever again?
Guess I’ll have to rely on passion projects like Pantheon to restore my hopes.