I’m going to post a lengthy reply, try to focus on each point you’ve presented. Please bear with me.
Player engagement is the desired effect, with an emphasis on ‘longer term.’ Any data one might parse to gauge which development knobs to turn, none of them really match up with ‘concurrent subscriber count’ or ‘box sales.’
Yet, these two figures are now difficult to find for even Blizzard, who no longer reports complete metrics with these included. Unfortunately, Blizzard chooses ‘participation metrics’ as their tool to design with, which leads to the problems you see here today.
When a player logs into wow, particularly as a new player or after a long absence, the content they will do will not be something from long ago, something with nostalgia to help keep the player engaged for a longer term.
They will encounter new content, largely truncated and disconnected from anything they did before. This content will have very little staying power for any player, simply because it’s quantity over quality, pushed out at regular intervals, rather than polished and synchronized with meaningful game changes.
Players will engage with whatever ‘work’ needs to be done to complete the new grinds, or get bored in the process, rarely ever finding long term play value in this design. Then Blizzard must recapture some level of lost players to increase annual revenue numbers to be able to continue operating a game studio able to put out something new.
Because these temporary events are being developed by a separate ‘live update’ team who can jump in and help bridge the gap between content, typically working on smaller features and holiday events. They produced Plunderstorm, Remix, and helped facilitate the SOD development with the Classic team.
The main issue with this design methodology: Temporary game states are not a valuable potential long-term time commitment for anyone with self respect and other activities competing for their time.
The grinds are meant to generate player participation metrics. More numbers > less numbers when you have no other method of making design choices (no coherent leadership). People who make arbitrary design choices that break precedent and create unreasonable paradigm shift in moment to moment gameplay opportunities, are the ones who steer development at blizzard.
Because they think that will increase player participation metrics, where they think learning something is the thing they do at Blizzard… as if it’s hogwarts for game design. Rather, they should have spent all those precious resources redesigning professions to include new and different game modes that add functional gameplay to otherwise empty profession design.
By ‘empty’ I mean ‘I clicked a button in a UI and the game spat out a finished product’ rather than ‘I played through a fun activity where I crafted a shirt and went through the actual steps of measuring, clipping, and sewing fabrics and other clothing elements, and it was fun!’
Instead, adding more progress bars, rep grinds, and things you babysit while you watch netflix, is what they did. How Fun. Much Engagement.
In their quest to generate player metrics, they forgot to add activities that are better aligned with ‘fun’ and lesser aligned with ‘work.’ Often times players will talk about how much ‘effort’ or ‘work’ it takes to accomplish a task in game.
Games development is meant to be an exercise in generating meaningful play opportunities, not generating work opportunities. Any change you make as a dev needs to be parsed through the lens of ‘play opportunity =/= work opportunity.’
This is where they continue to misstep.
They are making an effort this time around to try and do exactly this… add evergreen content and respect players time. The only problem with that is you can’t really push out another new expansion (or 3) and accomplish the desired effect. Not unless these expansions break from the precedent set by the last 6 and establish a new paradigm that actually results in an evergreen game.
This is unlikely to happen during TWW or World Soul, due to the point we are currently at, combined with the lack of apparent paradigm shifting game design. Prepatch is live, expansion is around the corner, and we get:
- New continent.
- New raid zones.
- New dungeons.
- New questing hubs.
- New leveling Cap.
- Additional profession cap.
Looks like every other expansion to me, with zero regard for anything that exists in the game, currently, or was developed prior.