With the upcoming expansion on the horizon, it is time to take look on WoW as it presents itself now, and analyze it's strenghts and weaknesses compared to other MMORPGs out there. Doing this will perhaps allow us to infer the impact of TBC on community perceptions of the game (how will the new WoW feel; what will be the premiere activity to pursue after TBC: still raiding or more PvP or even tradeskilling; how it will change the community etc.) as well as make an educated guess on future developments beyond TBC.

Sandbox vs. Guided Experience.

Very generally MMOs are defined by the sandbox or the guided experience model. The sandbox model strives to be a world simulation. It offers very little on premade content to experience but rather provides the players with the tools to organize their own experience and thereby define the world. Sandbox games tend to have a strong PvP and tradeskilling component to it and rely very heavily on socialising.
A premiere example for a sandbox MMORPG is EVE Online. EVE Online offers only very rudimentary premade content in form of quests and Dungeons (called deadspaces there), but brings a plethora of tools for the community to play with. Market tools, guild mangement systems and tradeskilling mechanisms are of an astonishing complexity. Content in EVE is almost exclusively playermade and revolves heaviliy around PvP (from piracy to fullscale interstellar wars) and trade. Sandbox games have drawbacks though:
1. You may quickly feel lost in a world where you are free to basically do anything but with no predifined path to follow.
2. A simulated world has (like the real one) more chores than adventures to offer. Spending hours hauling ones stuff across the universe may be an appropriate simulation of interstellar logistics, but excitement is something else ;)

WoW on the other hand follows clearly the guided experience model. From the very beginning the player is guided by premade content. It beginns with the very first quest in your local newbie area, from which one is lead to the next higher zone until you enter the "progression game" from MC to Naxx. WoW really excells at this guided experience model, as it always offers a quest or a follow up dungeon to do. A player never feels lost, not knowing where to proceed next for character adavancement. Though one never is lost in WoW, one has only very limited possibilities to stray away from the pre-designed progression path. This becomes a problem, when, for some reasons, the player isn't able to follow this path (has no access to raid content e.g.). The primary way of progression is this path and therefore all other activities are subservient to it. The majority of tradeskill items and services are a means to help one to advance on this path. They are no end to itself. PvP is also not there to create player driven content, but confined to certain spaces (BGs and soon Arenas) an alternative path of progression to raiding. Guilds do not have an impact on the "world" as they have in EVE Online, but more something like organizational units to access certain parts of the progression path (raiding or PvP).

Despite these very well know drawbacks WoW is still very sucessfull. I attribute this to two things:
a) The premade content in WoW is generally of very high quality.
b) Sandbox games sound better in theory than they turn out in practice. EVE is the only succesfull sandbox game on the market. The vast majority of people want to replay pre-made adventures and not simulating an alternative life.


WoW is an extreme example of the guided experience model, so, imho, we can safely assume it will always stay this way. Those looking for guild alliances fighting over a piece of virtual real estate, or tradeskillers being the premiere source of quality items, shouldn't expect this from WoW. WoW's mainstay will be quests, dungeons and loot, as well as PvP as a sports like competion event. So those who have raided in WoW so far, will probably also do it in the future, as raiding (or more generally dungeon crawling) lends itself excellent to the guided experience concept, simply because you can create exciting content for it. Those that have no access to raid content or do not want raid, will engage in PvP sports as they also have done so far.

The only uncertain thing that remains is: how wide reaching will the casualiztion (or the denerdifacation, depending on your point of view) of PvE content be. Will there ever be someting a like Naxx again, that only a very, very small fraction of the playerbase will ever experience in it's current state. Or will all future PvE content be more to something like ZG and AQ20, entertaining though not all too hard. What about future consumable requirements and timesinks in general? This will make or break it: too difficult or too costly and your customers run away because of frustration; too easy and they run away because of boredom. The future of WoW is a question of balance, not of kind.

Without a complex social/political PvP endgame, WoW offers little to the serious gamer outside of the PvE context. Does this mean that Blizzard will continue to develop challenging PvE content? Not necessarily. If the readers of this forum were ever a reflection of the kind of gamer that Blizzard was catering to, this is not likely the case today; however, I don't see a radical shift in direction taking place. The carrot on a stick model has worked well for them so far. The steady introduction of content that is to the "casual" player always just out of reach has proved to be a fantastic marketing ploy.

I doubt Blizzard will suddenly open up Illidan to the masses, if that's what you're thinking about. The exclusivity of 40 man raids is gone, but they will chuck a whole load of timesinks in the way of endgame content to both provide incentives to the more driven crowds, and to extend the lifespan of the content. Don't think for a second that the Black Temple key won't be a 19-quest monstrosity starting with collecting Larval Acid and a full Uldaman clear.

In my personal experience the opposite is true: my casual game playing friends finished Dire Maul, had no desire to have to "schedule their life around a video game", as they often put it when I was trying to talk them into raiding, and quit World of Warcraft. The steady introduction of content that was out of their reach just confirmed to them that the game was not for them.

Most of them will be back for the Burning Crusade - I hope Blizzard doesn't repeat the same pattern at level 70, because I'd like to continue playing the game with my good friends instead of having them leave again.

Yes, many people have left the game due to the requirements of raiding, and this is a very vocal group, but they are a minority when compared to the numbers of people who continue to play in the vain hope that they will one day find a successful raiding guild. I've encountered many, many players whose gaming experience is defined by the lamentation that they "just want to raid".

One major issue in WoW's lack of casual-friendliness at max level is that it must evolve itself according to the state of the playerbase and it does not, perhaps cannot. A specific example. A casual hardcore player, which I define as one that can spend a large amount of free time playing WoW but doesn't have the opportunity to raid and reach that content, can grind in Silithus endlessly and get a very nice DPS ring. It should and does take a large amount of time, effort, and money to acquire it. This ring is comparable to a raid boss drop (ring reward from Nefarian's head), which to kill and acquire takes up to 40 people and time/effort as well.

However, the rub is that times change. Naxx is the current high level paradise. Naxx-raiding guilds spend 3 hours a week in simplistically easy clears of BWL to get through Nef, and even tend to just bring alts and friends. Yet despite the forward progression of the playerbase, Mr. Casual Hardcore is still spending the same exhorbitant amount of time to achieve something comparable to what someone's alt can get off a 3 hour time investment.

This example is used to illustrate that Blizzard attempted in the past to add elements that make the game maintain its interest value to the non-raiders or more casual players to whom the levelling-up experience was so interesting. The problem is that they do so statically. Times change and Blizzard's work in providing for this group takes far more time and is far less rewarding than it has been for the upper echelon of players.

They appear to have taken strides in the expansion, with providing many (albeit difficult) smaller size dungeons that players can access, hard mode settings, more PVP and craftable rewards. The key, however, is what happens to the game at 70, when the deeper raids and detailed dungeons, bosses, loot, stories, etc. are unveiled further for that echelon and everyone else remains in the dust of their static offerings. Blizzard must either seek to provide the long-lasting and rewarding entertainments for both types of players through either dynamically improving certain characteristics or creating new ones to replace the old. It remains to be seen whether they can manage this effectively, or at least moreso than they have until this point.

7.5 million customers don't wait in line and pay for nothing. My understanding was that EQ was a little uncasual, as it goes, and didn't they cap out at 500,000? Right, wrong, or sufficently inspecific to make people want to reply, it's a fair executive view of the situation. When your goal is to make money, the question becomes - do we care about the 15% of players that are hardcore raiders (and we are a minority), or the ~51+% who are so casual that they do not have a level 60 yet?

Raiders are the advertising wing of the WoW universe. Hardcore raiders are loss leaders. There's no sense in not bulking development towards bulk customers.

MC required a quest, and running BRD (in theory, a five person run of an incredibly long dungeon just high enough to not be trivial, just low enough to not be run once the end game got into swing). Onyxia required the really long questline. Approximately the same age.

BWL required an UBRS run.
AQ40 required commodities spent collectively, with a ceiling after which everyone was covered.
Naxx required commodities.
Experience with having to key latecomers to the raid game suggests that this trend may continue.

Barlett had an essay, "MMOs are being designed by noobs," although he may not have used that term - virtual worlds, or MMOPPMGOGS, or something. His theory (as best I recall) is that the best design is to have always on PK, where players are lootable, thus creating a massive sink to combat mudflation (if I have a brutality blade, and you have a brutality blade, and I kill you, I'm going to destroy mine and loot yours - pretty cool way of making MC raids infinitely recycleable). However, that doesn't get the customers (as many a game has had that), and you get more customers the more cuddley and fluffy you are (viz., WoW and never losing your gear).

If 50% of your customers don't have a 60 at all (and therefore don't *care* if new content is aimed at them - they haven't yet exhausted available content), and 20% of your customers raid (and therefore want new content to be non-casual raid content for them) - unless 2/3s of the people with 60s who don't raid are dissatisfied enough with the available content to quit, targeting new content at that hardcore 15-20% makes sense. And from my observation, of that 30% left over, a good portion *are* satisfied with available content. In a way, developing raid content *does* make sense - of the people you're likely to lose from a lack of new content, the way to keep the most of them for a given amount of development time is with raid instances.

50% of your customer base, not having a 60, can be cut out of the "who should we develop new content for?" discussion off the bat. "Casualization" of new content, as a result, is still probably not in Blizzard's interest.

The problem with that design is that it presumes players have a tremendous amount of tolerance for repetition. Sometimes I ask myself why I play the raid game because personally I have a pretty low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again. Call me fluffy but if, in a PK world, somebody killed me and took my Stormrage gear which forced me to run BWL over and over again to replace it - when yesterday I was in Naxx - I would pitch the game disks out the window faster than you could spit.

Maybe this is the wrong thread for it - I should be in the thread where we are discussing how disappointed some people are that Kharazan is not insanely difficult on beta - but I think you are missing another subdivider on your list. Of that 15-20% who raid, there is a large number for which Naxx is insanely difficult. What provides a "challenging raid" for the top 20% of the raiders is "too hard" for the other 80%.

In other words, "casualification" would satisify a lot of the raiders too. Certainly not all of them, but a lot.

Am I the only one not taking this "50% of customers don't even have a level 60" shit at face value? Also, how many of the 7.5mill "subscribers" are goldfarmers? And how many that aren't goldfarmers are actually active at all, and being paid for? Not directly relevant but I've always been somewhat skeptical of how accurately the numbers we've all seen tossed around reflect the reality of the playerbase.

I've very often wondered just why on earth a lot of people keep playing this game, because for a lot of people I know (myself included) the game itself really isn't what keeps people coming back and paying for another month. The proverbial carrot on a stick appears to be the biggest draw for most people. I know at least that when I "quit" this spring (with no plans to come back, and it took me 4 months to renew my sub again) my biggest lament was that I didn't get to finish my AQ gear setup, and all my effort put into gearing my char and building up my guild wasn't gonna keep earning interest (such as it is). Not that I was gonna miss the game and logging on for raids. I suspect I'm not unique in that regard.

As far as the challenge level of max-level (raid) dungeons go, the game definitely needs an AQ20/ZG with decent loot. ZG's biggest failing was how it compared to MC. I remember, way back in the day, I saw MC loot and couldn't believe how awesome this stuff was. The gear jump from UBRS/DM to MC was colossal. And MC is and was easy. It's not harder than ZG, and I'd rate Hakkar far higher on difficulty than anything in MC sans Ragnaros, who is still not a big step up. But not everyone can get 40man raids going and working, and the logistics and people management to get started is not encouraging, although that's been alleviated by ZG it seems (speaking from experience). Population growth has played a part but the rate of new guilds forming and at least clearing MC and starting on BWL has gone up significantly since ZG came out. Going from rather pointless leveling/social guilds to a 50-70man roster for raiding guild seems to have been probably the biggest obstacle. A strong (loot and challenge-/funwise) low-pop dungeon will do a lot to keep the semi-casual crowd playing. But the bad-ass, hard as hell max hardcore dungeon with the next batch of really rather small upgrades need to be there as well. A single full-Bonescythe Rogue with Gressil hanging around the mailbox does a better job selling the game to newbies than Blizz' entire marketing department probably does. "If you keep at it, this can be you." Ranting a bit cause it's late, but yeah. :)

Interesting post btw.

I see to recall a certain DnT front page post about C'thun...

[Edit: Whups, it submitted a post for some reason. I don't have time for a reply now :s Will post one later. Gah!]

Really? Then what of the Dire Maulers who quit?

The design does imply that with such a high turnover in gear, getting it in the first place is a bit easier. It's a completely different paradigm, but yes, that is the idea. That you repeat the content. Just like we do now, but instead of on a weekly basis to slow down our accumulation, on a daily basis to maintain the status quo.

It's a Blizzard number, and the people who track these things believe Blizzard's metric for "active subscriber" certainly smells a lot less than the PR inflated nonsense their competitors spew. Goldfarmers would be level 60, they do have to actually make the money, and while at any given moment they may be releveling in a snapshot, given it's about 6x24 to get 60, it's reasonable to presume Blizzard takes longer to ban them then they spend farming... on top of that, it's also reasonable to suppose that the service market is only a fraction, because even if everyone buys gold, once one farmer has fulfilled one person's lifetime purchase, they're done and that goldfarmer is useless (which, in a cutthroat business like they're in is a nonsequitor).

I think there's - let's call them the 20%, the raiders that aren't hardcore - of the playerbase for which this is true. But I think for the majority, raiders as a whole are viewed as rockstars - sure, many people idolize them, claim they want to be them, and have the groupies... but in reality, they're never going to take step one in that direction. They follow the exploits and have some vicarious fun, but none of it is, really, for them. Maybe, maybe, they'll spend a summer following them on tour, but that's really an exception rather than the rule.

I'm not really convinced this is true, just going on personal experience. Yes, there are a lot of wannabies. But I've also met/come in contact with an amazing amount of people who couldn't even name the big raiding guilds on their server or identify more than SM level drops if you linked it to them.

There is also a huge disparty in servers. I have an alt on a lower pop server (Blackhand is a release-day, heavily queued server), and it is like a completely different world there. The few raiding guilds (who I identify by gear and simple /whos) are basically nonexistent in the community, versus Blackhand where I would wager anyone with a level 60 at least knows who the top raiding guilds are.

I'm not sure raiders are really that great of marketing tools to anything but other raiders. Yes, the guy in a new BWL guild may want to gear up to get into the Naxx guild, but you're still talking about the same raiding population, which is a small number. Even Tigole speculated only what, 25% of the playerbase has killed Ragnaros? I think there is a huge body of nameless players out there who may inspect a raider to see their gear, but that's about it. I don't think they have any aspirations of raiding - if they had, they would be doing it, even if it was in a very casual guild. I suppose my point is: raiders only advertise to other wannabe hardcore raiders. It works as a nice carrot within the system, but I don't think it does anything for the bulk of the populace.

I have no qualms with making things easier for the casual. Hell, I want something to do when I'm not raiding. 5-mans, solos, PvP, etc content I thrive on just as much as raiding. So bring in more of these to give us something to do based more on individual accomplishment...

...Just don't nerf it to the point of being too easy. I always want to see content rewarding for players that go above and beyond in one manner or another. From skill based encounters like the Rhok'Delar quest, to grinding quests in Silithus, to Naxxramas...we must keep content in the game that allows those willing and able to play at a higher level to gain rewards for doing such.

If the most difficult content in the game was Scholomance, and everyone had all the drops from Scholomance, and everyone was good enough to do Scholomance it would get rid of the whole point of progression. Yes, there is a desire to be better than your fellows, and the ability to do so currenly exists.

Keep it that way in one form or another and I'll be happy.

I am sceptical of the "snapshot" nature of the figures bandied about for non-60's and raiding populations - I'd suspect there is a large transient population who buy or are gifted the game and never make it much beyond level 50-odd before deciding it isnt a game they want to persue.

There are many reasons for people who have no aspirations in raiding, not least of which is their age (WoW has a large proportion of very young players and probably just as many with families and too many RL committments to invest the time in raiding). Let us not forget also that WoW is an attractive Christmas/Birthday etc present with its low entry requirements and the ability to pre-purchase game time in substantial chunks via the card system. There's a lot of people whom for WoW is their only "online" experience beyond email and MSN.

Having said this, I have noticed a growing trend. Raiding only really comes into its own when you as an individual have reached the limit of what you can do, either solo or 5man. There are now a growing number of guilds who raid - not 8-bosses-deep-into-Naxxramas but a once a week ZG/AQ20 run or similar. From my experience it's not always desire to raid that drives them to this, but the desire to complete something meaningful in terms of character progression in a progression-oriented game. To coin a term you could call these "casual raiders" - people who for whom the social interaction of a group setup is more desirable than soloing thousands of mobs in Silithus for quest rewards and therefore small scale raiding is more attractive.

On the contrary. I had friends who quit the game as a portion of that 50% we seem to not want to believe in (everyone must be like us!), and talking to them, what did I hear? "Oh, well, we don't get to group much, and I don't want to sell my soul to the game." Well, yeah, because if I'm level 60 and he's 44, I can go hang with him because he's my pal, but it's not as meaningful a grouping for both of us as if I was level 45, or - and this is the important bit, he were 59/60. So the next statement is, "Well, dude, you know, give it another month, you'll hit 60." The argument can be made more convincingly, but let's let that roll.

He'll be like, "Yeah, I looked at the webpage... Dire Maul, Scholo, and Strath look cool.. but that's it dude. That'll get old you know?" What do I say to him? "Well, good news! Then you get promoted to 6 hour stints in Molten Core, three nights a week at the minimum, and Johnny tell him what else he's won! That's right, it's a no-expenses-paid trip, so think about how often you're going to HAVE to play to farm stuff so you can make your scheduled MC visit!"

So instead we didn't have that conversation at all, because I knew it would've been disingenuous from the beginning. But if there had been - what are we looking at in the expansion? about 15 or so wings of various dungeons that are 5 man, and get recycled into 30 with hard mode? I'm just throwing that number out there, I have no honest idea. But it's certainly a fair shake better than 5 (DM getting triple feature for fairness's sake).

It's certainly an end game goal I could have honestly convinced him to stick it out for. And it's hardly a unique situation. Five manning with pals - how often do you do that? how much do you enjoy that? - versus how many posts have we ALL seen in raid guilds saying, "Sorry, this feels too much like a job, bye," or the various varients, such as, "I've been doing this for 7 years [over other games, obviously], time to retire."

It is the quintiessential WoW worry. It is a social game despite all jabs contrary, and if those DMers hadn't quit, they'd be around as role models for the 40's for what to enjoy come 60, rather than raiders for what to quit and avoid suffering. http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html I know it's a crazy hypothesis, but I believe raiders are the rock stars of the WoW game, not the advertisement everyone seems to buy into, but rather... the casual 60s are the stars of WoW, the advertisement.

As for not believing the numbers themselves, EQ capped out at 500,000 subscribers, right? WoW is more than an order of magnitude larger, and vastly more casual friendly. But I'm sure its continued success is entirely brand recognition rather than a huge casual player base.

Then they wouldn't be active subscribers, from which these numbers are taken, and their decision is exactly the issue at hand. Well, the pathogen, if you will, for the symptom that is the issue at hand.

The number of 5-mans at release in TBC (and then heroic mode, and then the token rewards to guaranteed-reward people for doing many runs of heroic mode instances) is far beyond what exists in level 60 WoW as we know it. The "Dire Maulers" market will be satisfied; many of the more casual raiders may drop into this category, satisfied with 5-man gameplay mixed with some pvp.

The difficulty of the raid game will be the trick. If it starts off more difficult than Naxx, people will be locked out of ever getting into level 70 raids. If it doesn't, the current endgame guilds will blow through it all within a couple of months. Blizzard may have upped the learning curve too fast- I suspect they're relying on the massive mechanical changes (25 man upheaval, getting paladins/shamans levelled up and used to having them in the raid, +heal changes etc) to slow the progress of endgame guilds so they don't need to up the dactual ifficulty too early.

I take your point, but where's the definition of "active" though? You could buy the game, 6months of play time and gift it to your kid brother who plays it for a while, then takes a break, logs in again a couple of months later because he is bored etc. There's no info on how an "active" subscriber is defined. Logging on once a day? A week? A month?

Well, all non-asian accounts are on a pre-paid service, correct? So that would be easy to work out.
(Yes, that means an account could be in-active for 5months, and still be considered active.)