I find it interesting that a lot of people think some of the time sinks and grinds make the game anti-casual, but those time sinks and grinds provide casual players access to gear they never had in the past.
Before M+, you either raided, or your character progression ended in dungeon blues.
I agree. Too many activities have been built around âgetting players to participateâ to the degree that they have been considered âtimesinksâ by definition, rather than âmeaningful play activities.â
So many things about this game are done to sink your time intentionally (to scrape those participation metrics), the activities become the determining factor in how players spend their time, rather than the other way around.
If you put a fun, unrewarding activity in the game, players will engage with it as long as it remains fun. PVP activities tend to remain fun long term due to the dynamic nature having different players matching up tends to create.
This also reduces opportunities for designers to create more content, since players are creating the gameplay in pvp, vs interacting with the game environment itself in most other forms of gameplay.
Explains why pve participation drops significantly once power creep is attained - no longer a meaningful reward to chase through the boring timesink - players stop participating, unsubbing when there isnât any other appeal to the game.
(Consider for a moment) Battle Pets represent some of the most perfect game design in World of Warcraft. Since their addition to the game, the feature has avoided power creep, avoided resets, avoided seasonal anything, remains a feature of the game that players can define their own time sink, and there are limitless play opportunities, all of them meaningful to the activity.
The balancing points donât change, there arenât any major reworks, and expansions to the game add new pets alongside all the existing ones, with the same level caps.
If one were to examine metrics on battle pets, I can speculate they would see peaks at times when new content for battle pets comes out, dips down to stable levels shortly after, and then experience pretty consistent player engagement regardless of what else is happening in game.
If a sudden rework happened to battle pets, you can expect to see a sudden shift in the participation, maybe high at first, then a sudden drop later on, coinciding with other aspects of the game that see major reworks during patches.
Adding new things to a game should always be a good thing. When itâs not, you need to question why, instead of continuing the same behavior of adding things trying to iterate until the âadding thingsâ becomes good.
Thatâs why you have alpha and beta testing, internally. Go back to the drawing board when the thing youâre about to add isnât actually fun.
My concern, and the reason they donât do this: World of Warcraft would be a much smaller game (not quite as epic!) if every aspect of the game were designed to be an activity people are willing to sink their time into (fun), rather than an activity Blizzard wants people to sink time into for the sake of rewards (work).
The play aspect of this game always needs to be the priority, because we are always playing this game. Designers work at Blizzard, I think they have become too disconnected from âplayâ to recognize they are designing work as a video game.
If you donât spend 40 hours a week playing Wow, you shouldnât have a job at Blizzard, and any changes to the game should be 100% approved by a player council (no exceptions). These should be bare minimums for us to be willing to continue to invest our time and money in this journey.
Rather than treating wow like an iterative experiment, treat it with respect and dignity: this game is the hobby/pastime many people consider a second home. You gonna come to someoneâs house, start knocking out walls and hanging curtains?
Why would you do that to an activity they are paying you to play? Development⌠in bad-faith.
Theyâre just not good at their jobs. Finding enjoyment in this game requires you to accept that and find what you can settle on for now. They throw in ideas that wouldâve been in the trash a decade ago. But when itâs their best ideas now, itâs what we get. And to maximize minimal bad content, itâs ridiculously timegated.
Recently, they announced theyâre going to do some pretty huge changes to the model they chose to release. Either they donât test or theyâre bad at their job.
The blizzard job isnât some job where only the most experienced and competent go to work. Stop expecting them to be. The best go elsewhere.
It is what it is.
This right here is why they should stop raising the damn level cap every xpac. Stop wasting time with garbage leveling zones and just inject the good stuff right into our veins. How much development time is wasted just so people can level up AGAIN to re earn the things that were taken away in level squishes and ability pruning? Max level should just stay 60 and only ilvl increases beyond that.
Its an mmo? Their designed for the grind? Want something more casual go pet battle or play a different game.
MMOâs were not designed, and havent been designed for solo casual content in thier history. Granted, Iâm going all the way back to Ultima Online, Asheronâs Call ((/Apache!)) Dark Age of Camelot, LineageâŚ
The fact that some people want this and keep pushing for it is why we have the content we do now.
I personally do not understand why people go into a game that is known for doing teamwork to overcome problems and suddenly want it single player. I could go on a rant about how I feel about this, but it serves no one. I just think there are better games for people who want solo content.
The fact that people wanted a more casual experience is why WoW took off in the first place. It was always a more casual experience than other options at the time.
I mean, for the most part, if the job is to make this game something people play long-term, yes. You are correct.
This is how every video game ever created, functions. The difference lies in the expectations most games set. Usually, itâs âtake it or leave itâ and when you spend time, you can find enjoyment. Sometimes, so much enjoyment it becomes a favorite game.
Blizzard game design aligns with the work of B.F. Skinner, and World of Warcraft acts more like a skinner box, than a video game. Iâll let you google the work if youâre curious about it, but it amounts to understanding the input - output relationship related to task completion and rewards.
Skinner defined this relationship as âoperant conditioningâ where a reward was used to shape behavioral outcome in a laboratory setting⌠usually with rats.
The sinister aspect begins with a field of work called âABA Therapyâ which uses Skinnerâs work on children, primarily disabled minors, to help reshape maladaptive behaviors for school/home settings.
Again, without getting too much into it, Blizzardâs game design uses the same operant conditioning to offer rewards for participation. I can guarantee someone within leadership is acutely aware of BF Skinner and his work, is using it to guide development of wow content.
I disagree, I was in a hardcore guild at release, and in beta, playing on the pvp beta servers. I never saw the QoL solo content levels we have now & in TWW.
Edit - Even in TBC, it was more group content than solo.
COUGHS IN TBC, MOP, WOD, DIES COUGHING
As someone who jumped from EverQuest to the EQ killer WoW back in 2004, you are 100% correct.
You can disagree all day, the fact remains that for its time at release WoW represented an absolute shift in MMOs toward a more casual design philosophy. Instances kept questers away from roaming group content (an issue that STILL crops up in Everquest 1), death is a minor minutes-long setback instead of potentially hours of lost progress, or worse.
And you could effectively level to max entirely alone. You can technically do this in older MMOs as well, but itâs a pretty ridiculous grind.
Itâs a simple question with a very complex answer. Short version is - it wasnât at the start but as communities died, and cross server play rose, and even LFG/Group Finder rose in popularity people drifted away. Iâd suggest some fo MadSeasonShows videos on the topic - he usually hits the pulse right on explaining what happened and why.
Brand new players wanting a solo experience in WoW? Iâd be real curious what percentage of real new players there actually are (besides botfarms).
Old returning players to retail wanting a solo experience - Personally Iâd say that their IRL friends no longer play, and itâs just nostalgia to even play with mounts and pets and toys that they accrued back when they played WoW more sociably - those players usually (in my opinion) drift towards classic servers to try and recapture the community spirit that is gone from retail (not dooming here, just keeping it real).
And sadly the current state of teamwork in retail is random Pug groups where no one says anything but GG Guys before disbanding the pug or joining guilds where no one posts anything for hours just for the quicker hearthstones. EDIT: I get more of a sense of community from the various class discord servers than in WoW retail.
I never experienced those things in those games, but I did deal with death penalties a lot, and I understood them then. The current MMO gamers would flip out if they ever got any real penalties for death.
I do understand the point you are coming from, but I just am going to live in this bubble of roses and keep meditating on that.
The first day DAoC was active, I helped invite 2500 players from Everquest into 1 guild. What a mess that chat channel was. LOL
What a glorious moment that must have been to witness, though.
It was crazy times, on a crazy server, with a crazy game.
Reminds me of my own struggles within the smaller niche communities of Wow. Patch 3.2⌠/shudder.
Nothing since has been quite as impactful⌠negatively, there was a massive server migration within wow, once they added the feature of âearning XP from BGsâ to wow along with a âXP Off feature for players who donât want to gain XP in BGs.â
When the OG design was⌠BGs donât reward XP. Basically saying âhey if you want to play the game the way it USED to be, you gotta do something extra first,â
Wouldnât you know it, the XP off feature was bugged and players who had their XP disabled spent 2-3 months unable to get into a single BG⌠they wouldnât get a queue pop⌠Not even by forcing a BG pop with 20 players q synced and waiting, in the same Battlegroup.
So we paid Blizzard for the privilege of condensing our population to specific servers to ensure weâd avoid any issues trying to queue when most people are automatically being put into a separate queue system.
Day 1 of 3.2 patch, there were actually people with XP off being put into the same BGs as people with XP off. At first we thought that was how it was supposed to be. Next day, after a maintenance and some hotfixes, players with XP off were no longer able to get games for months.
Blizzard only acknowledged this and fixed it when we developed a 3rd party app to have players log into so we could actively track the metrics of players queued at any given time, then used this data to be like âhey guys, fix this bug please.â Took them months longer, but they finally did.
They didnât even acknowledge the bug or the fix.
I miss 30 min BFD raids⌠its what we all want 1 hour max raids
I NEED EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW! MY FOMO REFUSES TO LET ME ACCEPT NOT GETTING EVERYTHING I WANT BECAUSE MY MOMMY SAID IM SPECIAL!
Thats why