A recent report pegged World of Warcraft’s current subscription base to 7.7 million, which means that 600,000 more subscribers have quit. Back during Cataclysm, Blizzard claimed the decline on China being behind in the release. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case any longer and possibly is a major reason why Viviendi no longer is in love with Blizzard-Activision and is seeking a divorce from them.
I think most people realistically will peg the ultimate issue being the game engine’s age. While that part is true, one has to wonder why the game had peaked with Wrath of the Lich King but gradually fallen with the last two expansions? I know quite a few people who were hardcore fans who have no desire of returning. What is it that is driving people away in droves beyond the game’s age? Why is it that the game was able to grow for two expansions but see such a rapid decline in the past two expansions?
Some people might peg the connection to Cataclysm essentially destroying the way the game had become casual friendly with the introduction of truly difficult heroics. The “mindless AoE” (credit: WoWCrendor) races we saw back during Wrath of the Lich King no longer existed and people were forced to employ tactics that utilized one’s cabeza.
Casuals will counter argue that the hardcores were the ones who pushed them away as the more challenging atmosphere of the game caused the hardcore community to essentially outcast casuals and cause a great deal of animosity between both groups. People entering LFG no longer could faceroll through these dungeons and people who were new to these instances and caused issues would get verbally chewed out. The result causing many people to grow frustrated and ragequit the game altogether.
With Mist of Pandaria, the game’s wide acceptance of LFR and lowering the bar for Heroics allowed casuals to once again partake in the end game. However, many people accused the brutal gating of the end game behind the grinding dailies to cause major burn out. Even with the adjustments in the game to reduce these aspects, it seems the damage had been done and recent content patches with the newer epic raid of Throne of Thunder did little to increase subscribers.
Hardcore MMORPG fans will attribute the move towards an individual experience with LFR and LFG making the game less social, especially compared to the Vanilla days where people would use local chats in each area to help each other. Without WoWhead and many other well established resources, people relied on each other to get things done. These days, LFG and LFR do not motivate as much of a social environment and in fact cause more problems in terms of introducing poisonous characters where the lack of local server accountability provide griefers to fully embrace obnoxious profiles.
Others who have been around since Vanilla but do not wear “rose tinted glasses” will counter saying that the newness of World of Warcraft had worn off and that the elements that made World of Warcraft special when it first was introduced no longer had that special appeal. This notion certainly affirms with the MMORPG accusers’ idea but in a different manner. Again, we can point to the game’s age in this.
Also, many people who had started in Vanilla and Burning Crusade even were at different stages of their life. Some people had grown up with World of Warcraft, playing in their teens, college days and young adult life. Now, many have moved on, getting careers, focusing on school and just having a busier life.
I’m certain there are even more reasons than these but typically you’ll see these elements as the major causes for the game’s decline from the viewpoint of the community at large. But beyond these elements, I want to offer another idea of the game’s gradual decline.
My belief why the game is on a decline not only is the result of the above aspects but also the circle of destruction that these elements have created, resulting in the social networks created within the game to slowly erode. In short, people would slowly see their friends leave the game in droves, which in a huge part is what makes an MMORPG successful.
I think that Blizzard honestly does not understand their own game in many ways. The game developers consistently have demonstrated their lack of insight into the gaming community, which has caused them to miss the boat on numerous occasions and being forced to copy other games’ paradigms into their own (e.g. Plants vs Zombies, Farmville, world events, etc.). This is part of the reason why I advocate that Blizzard requires a mass internal purging of their developers since the ones that exist within have shown little ability to provide a successful formula until things occur too late.
I’ve stated this aspect before but I’ll reiterate that World of Warcraft essentially is the Facebook of gaming. The game had at its peak 12 million subscribers, making it the largest MMORPG game base around. The fact that you have that many customers means that you have a very viable platform for so many avenues of development. Why else would a company like Facebook, whose front end sucks ass, have one of the most valuable backends?
But unlike Facebook, I truly believe that the developers of World of Warcraft don’t realize that part of the value in their user base are the relationships created within the game between people. In short, World of Warcraft is its own social network. As with any social network, one of the most important assets is the base relationships between people. However, outside of the “Real ID” and server-wide connections, the game makes absolutely no use of this idea of connectivity. Sure, your friends can run BGs, raids or instances together and you have the archaic IRC-like chat interface, but you would assume that the game could offer so much more with these relationships. For a game that relies on a social atmosphere, it certainly feels more anti-social at the end of the day.
Another thing that I’m not sure if Blizzard is aware of is that the game is a very selfishly designed game. While MMORPGs are meant to be social experiences in the gaming world, World of Warcraft, in its current incarnation, encourages more anti-social behavior than anything. Although aspects like LFG and LFR helped the logistical areas of the game and that Flexible raiding in theory is intended for friends and family members to permit more relaxed raiding compared to Normals and even LFR, these by themselves are not the real cure to the problem. The game actual rewards selfishness and bad behavior as opposed to encouraging friendly behavior.
Take for instance the blood thirsty atmosphere of both world and normal PVP. World PVPers are perhaps some of the worst offenders in the game. However, Blizzard refuses to penalize these players at the risk of discouraging players. Blizzard further justifies their position on refusing to enact upon world PVPers with their stance that “if you’re on a PVP server, you get what you ask for.” PVPers, especially high end ones, are extremely competitive and are notorious for having some of the worst attitudes in the game. If you ever check out where the vast majority of class adjustments are coming from on the forums, you can directly place the square blame on Arena players. If the game was more stable or at least would split the PVP talents and abilities from the PVE ones, Blizzard could alleviate some of the worst headaches with the constant moving target in the game. Yet without curing this element, pure PVPers more often than not ruin the game for the PVE group as a result of their competitive and simultaneously selfish behavior.
As I compose a list of offenders in LFR, I noticed that a fair portion of them thus far hail from PVP realms. Do I think this is a coincidence? Of course not. PVP is all about competition between each other. The fact that Blizzard has allowed PVPers’ behaviors to get out of hand as badly as it has surprises in the sense that they do not have their own case of Justin Carter.
But let’s look at other aspects in this game. What about loot? Although the random loot table has improved the loot ninjaing in LFR somewhat, the core controversy around loot is that it’s still the core thing people are after in LFR. Hardcore raiders claim that loot isn’t their primary concern as they prefer the prestige of being server first or handling the feat as their reasons for raiding. Yet why is it that so-called raiders often are the ones who cause some of the biggest raucous on the forums? Why would they care about the ilvls or even the color of drops if the main issue of raiding is the achievement?
See these are just some sample problems about the way the game is constructed, which makes it a horribly selfish game. There is no incentive for trading nor helping people. There is no reward for good behavior. The game thrives on this cutthroat environment, which in turn has generated a huge stigma in the game. It’s a massive turn off that I think is a disease within the community, the company and the game itself which will slowly destroy itself. Sure, the game prides itself on being all about strife. However, the long term cost at having such a thesis is that the game will eventually behave similar to a black hole and just collapse on itself as you can see it imploding right now.
From a platform/technological viewpoint, World of Warcraft is horrid when it comes to the social elements that have made other game makers in this area more cutting edge. They attempted to bridge some parts like introducing guild leveling and achievements, but the fact that nothing has been done since Cataclysm to improve on the guild aspects demonstrates that this idea was a miserable failure. Again, in this case, all one has to do is merely ask, “What does the individual get out of this?” There is nothing beyond the benefits of a level 25 guild. But any smart player will just flock to a level 25 guild rather than attempting to create a new one, unless they have their own agenda. Doing guild achievements provides nothing at the individual level. Worse yet, the way a guild master can covet all the gold made from guild members can be a real turn off.
Upcoming we’ll see Flex Raiding, which supposedly will bring back the joy and memories of Wrath of the Lich King ICC days. Of course, we have to wait to see how this turns out. You still have two problems at large: 1) people able to make the schedule for raids; 2) whether or not the difficulty will be adequate to encourage people to use this on a weekly basis. But again we can see the internal issue at stake here when it comes to Blizzard’s mentality wit World of Warcraft: the dependency on raiding and grinds as a key in keeping the game a success. However, we still see that the awful random loot from LFR is being retained in an environment that supposedly targets “family and friends.” Why would non-tradeable loot that is generated from a slot machine mechanic be introduced in an environment for “family and friends?” Why did Blizzard state that the loot mechanism is being used to prevent loot ninjas when the environment target is for “family and friends?” Doesn’t this just scream selfish intentions? What would happen if the game was made easier such that “family and friends” could trade loot? Wouldn’t that mean that they could gear up faster and better than LFR so that once again Blizzard would feel threatened by theoretical subscription loss once people received all their gear? Isn’t this the basis of Blizzard’s poisonous mental paranoia?
Yet what happens when the “family and friends” decide, “Hey, this seems like a good thing for me!” and gives Flex Raiding a try only to not receive drops for several weeks in a row? What happens when “family and friends” decide to give up their busy work week or whatever to try and progress only to wipe continuously for an entire night and only receive 500 gold deficits in repair for their efforts? What happens when the slacker “family and friends” ask to be carried, receive their loot then show off? What will be the mental state for those that might have bad luck streaks for weeks on end?
I problematize loot as a major factor in all of this not because people are inherently greedy (which they are) but that it’s Blizzard’s silly methodology for dangling a carrot in front of our faces. The thing is that the people who already quit realize that the carrot is still dangling and this new system is just another form of dragging out the game without providing anything substantiating for the individual. Yet Blizzard continues to focus on this model of business, even though more than likely it can be cited as a major reason for burn out.
What I would like to see are more mechanisms in the game to reward “social behavior.” In short, the game needs elements of “sharing” from social networks and to de-emphasize the competitive nature of the game so that people collectively are rewarded rather than individually. Let’s take a loot at some aspects that do work. I think part of the idea in Rare Elites on the Isle of Thunder was one of the few in game elements that are a positive. The fact that the Rare Elites are not faction tagged and can be looted individually with some worthwhile items (like the key, lesser charms and valor points) is one of the few positives to come out of Patch 5.2 and the Isle of Thunder. It’s not going to be a factor in getting back the game’s subscriber base, but it’s a simple example of the direction the game needs to head towards.
Achievements alone aren’t really great incentives for anyone except the most competitive gamers. But as WowCrendor has stated, Achievements are “nothing more than minor self esteem boosters.” Who cares about achievements at the end of the day? Most achievements really aren’t achievements but just another method of hazing for Blizzard (especially when it comes to raids) Neither individual nor guild achievements really offer any great incentives besides a little boyscout check mark and brownie point system. But imagine if the game did things like give you bonus loot and experience while slaying monsters in a group. Or bonus rolls to loot in LFR (or Flex raiding coming up) if a person receives an item they already have and want to give it to someone else that really needs it. Maybe that aspect could promote better behavior from people and encourage a little more cooperation since there’s a mutual incentive at the end. What about providing percentile bonuses to loot drops in LFR, etc. based on guild participation? For instance, a 2% increase per guild member that participates with you in LFR? Maybe for super casual guilds, that might encourage more people in guilds to either create bonds or group together and make LFR more social viable.
I’ve mentioned in the past that I would like to see Blizzard either purchase or work more closely with voice and video providers like Raid Call, Skype, Twitch, etc. World of Warcraft’s horrible ancient IRC service needs to be thrown out completely in favor of something cutting edge. We’re in 2013 and yet Blizzard still continues to use an ancient technology for handling most of the social activities. Having a real person on the end of the console would improve the game quality immensely just by the fact that you can both hear and see the person you’re playing with. It’s more humanizing and would allow for more accountability. I mean, imagine if you saw some kid who started verbally attacking people. You could easily record a video capture of the kid and send it to Blizzard so that he’s banned permanently. Heck, Blizzard could in turn send the video to his parents so that they could enact more disciplinary measures.
Another thing that needs massive upgrading is Blizzard’s website, especially the forums. Their forums are nothing more than a massive public commenting system that Blizzard monitors in a very Orwellian fashion. More than that, it’s a cesspool that rivals 4chan and Reddit for the number of trolls and useless content which becomes something along the lines of a complainer’s haven. However, just the forum technology is horribly outdated. Anyone with some tech background can do better just putting up a PHPBBS site with a better skin. Doesn’t Blizzard employ top end programmers? Isn’t there a reason why they have such rough interviews? Or are these interviews just ways for Blizzard employees to retain their spots and prevent hopefuls from making true changes needed in their company?
That said, the forums is just primitive crap. I really expect a whole lot more from a company that prides itself in hiring the best in the world. Really, you can’t create a more innovative CMS? And why isn’t there more from a technology point of view to integrate the game on the website with elements like groups? Why does it require 3rd party developers to create scattered sites with no unified front in order to correct simple problems?
For instance, Blizzard’s technological response for handling guilds is a forum dedicated to guilds as well as a real shitty guild finder tool. All the high end guilds have their own websites or use tools to provide mechanisms to get applicants. Wouldn’t you think that a game that is socially oriented and makes heavy use of guild systems to have something better within the game to handle something as simple yet fundamental as guild recruitment?
Next let’s talk about the whole game grind. People who favor the structure of MMORPGs will cite that game grinds are what make MMORPGs what they are. But does the formula that exist within the MMORPG world mean its still successful? There is no rule book around which suggest that an MMORPG must possess elements of a tedious grind in order to be successful. Companies only use elements like raid bosses, low drop rate loot and daily quests as repeatable content because it’s cheaper than creating new content that the vast user base can consume.
However, let’s look at the real issue here: creating new content for consumption that the user base can consume at a reasonable level. This is a corporate level and game platform issue rather than a consumer issue in reality. I think that companies feel threatened that players will quit if they are not actively engaged within their game all the time. Ghostcrawler himself admitted something similar where he stated that “they want you playing in the game.” Meaning that they want you using your membership, which is why they attempted to create grinds like dailies and suggested that the patch 4.3 was a failure in the end. With history behind us, we can with absolute certainty remark that Ghostcrawler’s theory of “being actively engaged in the game” to be complete bullshit. The fact that the daily grind is one well publicized reasons for the burn out from Mist of Pandaria demonstrates why Ghostcrawler is just 100% off base with his uninformed statement.
I mentioned that the engagement level for a subscription based game like World of Warcraft in reality is irrelevant in the scheme of things. From a pragmatic point of view, Blizzard will receive $15 no matter how you play the game nor how much you engage with the game. Enforcing draconian internal game policies where people must constantly be engaged within the game to progress is delusional thinking. What matters is how much incentive per month you provide to return to the game for that month to continue subscribing, not the exact amount of engagement required for someone to want to continue within the game.
This is why I believe the idea of cheap, repeatable content like raids, dailies and low loot drop rates are more endemic for causing burn out and that Blizzard must start re-examining how it can churn out content faster for customer satisfaction as opposed to focusing on what Blizzard internally has perceived to be success stories in the past. My personal suggestion is that Blizzard should look into opening up the World of Warcraft to 3rd parties. Game maps have traditionally proved to be concepts that helped prolong the life of games. Warcraft 2 and 3 spawned off companies as a result of their map editor.
Another problem that the game is facing is determining what the end game content actually is. At the moment, there’s a few methods such as making gold, professions, pet battles, raiding, dailies achievements and various forms of PVP. These elements are low hanging fruit type of end game content. But for people who dislike like the idea of farming/grinding and doing the same things over and over, the game does not offer a lot of options. Part of the problem is that RPGs are about the notion of progress. Level capping pretty much forces one into one of these avenues but the actual progress that a person can see for their toon slows down tremendously. Some of it becomes too group dependent, which can hinder the individual (which again suggest how the game is designed to be selfish). So Blizzard needs to re-think how self-progression works as well as group progression.
The loot progression model is realistically one of the few ways that people feel as though their toon can improve. Unfortunately, this model is something that I think is slowly destroying World of Warcraft because now the grind is completely randomized. People want to see fast personal progression; they need to feel as though they are moving forward in a meaningful way. If they don’t feel like this, they will ultimately come to realize that they’re wasting time (and this is why a lot of my friends eventually quit). Ghostcrawler’s poor theory of “enjoying things like wine” does not apply to games. Games are about movement and where the individual is. A game like World of Warcraft at the end of the day is about the individual and the group comes as a secondary expense. Some people might like the slow progression and prefer earning their stars and stripes but I argue that it’s not reality.
The truth is that everyone wants to be the rockstar. It’s why we have capitalism. It’s not about earning things; it’s about taking things, showing off and feeling good about one’s own dick. No one cares if some other dude’s dick ejaculated today. They only care if their own dick is nice and hard and enters into another woman’s vagina. That’s how the world works and why people playing a game need to be constantly rewarded for their efforts.
The long drawn out loot system is one of World of Warcraft’s main Achilles Heels. But I think people don’t find the structure of loot as the mechanism for progress as enticing as before. People who accomplish heroic raids these days are nothing more than something like 15 minutes of fame. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people really don’t give a shit. So just showing off one’s heroic loot and expecting to be worshiped is something that Blizzard needs to ditch because again it caters to a select few.
I’ve argued in the past that one of the chief aspects in the game that Blizzard must re-evaluate is whoever does their number crunching for determining the time requirement in the game. That’s one of the first person, if I were head of Blizzard, I would fire immediately. The time requirements must be shortened so that people get their time back. You don’t want people spending all their time in the game nor feel horribly obligated to log in on a daily basis to make any accomplishment. You want flexibility with people’s schedules rather than focusing your efforts on people who essentially have no lives outside of the game (not to mention that mentally this probably is a very unhealthy part of the game). I would much rather have people log in 5 times a month to accomplish everything and renew their subscriptions rather than gamble on long term sustainability in grinds for my revenues.
Again, I must emphasize here that Blizzard does not for whatever reason view how World of Warcraft is nothing more than a platform rather than a game by itself. The games peak of 12 million subscribers make it ripe for exposing the internals of the game to 3rd parties. Although the company may be scared of how the lore of the game might be affected as well as balancing issues, these are all simple matters that really just require an approvals team at most. Heck, the company ought to reward new developers who can create top notch content real money a la Kickstarter. I mean, no one wants to have level 100 Ragnaros, Death Wing, Onyxia, Lei Shen, etc. clustered in a room where people die in one second if they can’t burst them down with a gray spoon. But the thing is that the company can’t realistically continue to keep the game going indefinitely. Yet at the same time pulling the plug all at once would merely alienate World of Warcraft’s entire subscriber base and possibly cause Blizzard to lose all their customers from bad faith. So opening up World of Warcraft to 3rd parties really needs to happen sooner than later.
The thing is that I don’t hate World of Warcraft. In fact, quite the contrary. Otherwise, I wouldn’t blog so passionately on the subject so much. Like many people, I am very much emotionally invested into the game. And that’s one of the saving graces for Blizzard as a company with regards to World of Warcraft. Just like how I mentioned in that the relations for Facebook and World of Warcraft are highly valuable, the emotional and time investment that the 12 million subscribers had at one point committed to the game is what makes World of Warcraft the perennial MMORPG above most others. It’s the reason why there has been no social network to have taken over Facebook at this point and why no true World of Warcraft killers hold any success stories to date. The work people enter into a game like World of Warcraft is something very personal; it’s a self-asset that Blizzard, whether they want to admit or not, is something they cannot take away.
At the same time, it’s something Blizzard has been quite cruel about and it’s a constant threat. When you unsubscribe, it’s almost like a friend or family member dying; your toon(s) is(are) very much a part of your life because of all the effort you put into him/her/them. This is why many of us don’t exactly want to see the death of Blizzard nor World of Warcraft and put so much criticism against the company. It’s a very personal relationship.
That said, Blizzard needs to move away from the DRM model of gaming entirely. While the game is trademarked and owned by Blizzard, the effort that people put into the game should not be. The way Blizzard treats ownership of the game is too greedy and selfish on their part and they must slowly start to relinquish the game because it’s aging poorly at this rate. The game must become part of public domain somehow to revive the relationship with the customer base.
As I mentioned before, Blizzard can’t perpetually keep World of Warcraft going. Any product must be superseded by something superior if a company wants to remain viable in these markets. They can’t continue to dedicate all their resources and expect the returns on something where the initial designs probably are hindering them in so many ways. Yet this is part of the dilemma that Blizzard faces in owning a property as massive as World of Warcraft. It’s also their responsibility to its customer base to provide better corporate goodwill by doing more than what sardonically people have mocked them of in recent years in their so-called corporate greed. They cannot escape this stigma without giving back to the community just as hungry groups with the public’s good will are being backed by numerous Kickstarter projects.
Thus, the overall technological design of the game would focus more on the game as an open platform rather than on content. Content is just too hard to scale these days by corporations in employing full time employees. This is why models like Demand Media have changed online publishing models. Good consistent content these days are crowd sourced and socially produced. This is also why tech platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. have become so successful as they opened up their technologies for others with more creativity to build on top of. This is the direction that Blizzard ultimately must swing towards in order to survive and is my highest recommendation.