Found an interesting article recently where Mike Morhaime explains the continual decline of popularity in World of Warcraft (i.e. subscriber drop): increased accessibility at the cost of decreased social features. I will go on to explain his side while offering why I believe this is an over-simplification of the trend in decreasing popularity of the biggest MMORPG in history.
The initial design for World of Warcraft focused on social features as opposed to accessibility. First, I want to define accessibility not as those features focused on disabled people but that which enable people to experience more content in the game. Social features focus on creating experiences that force people to play with others.
So social features would be group content such as dungeons, raids, questing, PvP in the form of battle grounds or even to a lesser degree large scale world PvP. Older raids would be designed with up to 40 people in an instance. Over time, those raids would shrink numbers to 25 and 10 man and even 20 man raids.
Accessibility features would be introducing things like raid finder, group finder and less group oriented quests. Raid finder itself has been a touchy subject in the WoW community as it allowed the “casual” player to enjoy gated content normally reserved for dedicated teams while decreasing the difficulty level and offering more rewards.
Morhaime argues that allowing the average player to have features such as raid finder effectively nullified the need to play with friends as one would not be forced to use their local communities to find people of similar interest.
However, I think Morhaime looks at World of Warcraft with near similar rose tinted glasses that OG players might have when it comes to the experience of World of Warcraft. I think the introduction of those accessibility features were a natural progression to an aging engine that people wanted to experience without having to deal with the problems of variable personalities in the community.
I want to offer a counter example to where Morhaime’s perceived blame falls upon by re-examining another game that had similar yet supposedly “updated” features that focused on the class of player that Morhaime believes were the ones that World of Warcraft has been losing over time: WildStar.
WildStar was built up as another WoW killer. In fact, it supposedly had many of ex-Blizzard employees and the aim seemed to target those favoring classic WoW, except with an updated combat system and a hardcore raiding edge even boasting 40 man raids. In the end, it failed to live up to expectations despite the hype. Why?
It’s simple: nothing was changed. There was no paradigm shift and from what I read, the 40 man raid was reduced in size requirements. In the end, the studio fizzled and the game ended up closing. So does increasing the number of people necessarily imply a better social experience?
The raw answer is that it does not. In fact, it does the opposite, which makes the situation more frustrating. At least, in the way that I believe Morhaime envisions how huge masses of players can defeat a dragon.
The real answer to why WoW has been declining is far simpler: it’s an old engine that does not add anything new to the actual MMORPG experience. The decline in popularity is a natural one as people mature into adulthood. Those that were probably hardcore advocates early on probably have families and other responsibilities that prevent any form of gaming these days.
More than that, WoW is a huge time commitment and probably without those accessibility features, it would have died a painful death long before (cf the so-called resurgence of classic servers).
I think the continual charm of WoW is the lore and the world that people have come to love. But truthfully, there really isn’t much of a need anymore to login to the game and experience that since you can just watch YouTube reveals. The remaining part of the game is just re-hashes of itself with minor tweaks called expansions.
The other thing is that the shift in gaming has been to mobile and the idea of classic MMORPGs have been on a decline overall for a while. There simply is no good reason to attach oneself to a stationary rig when one can play a game for 10 minutes and still receive the same buzz while doing other things.
For myself, I haven’t paid much attention to WoW since the end of Warlords of Draenor. I will peak in periodically to see what the current raids look like on someone else’s stream or check out YouTube videos to see all the major lore clips. But the game itself long lost its luster for me since I felt like I was going in a circle when it came to being enjoyable.
I have a feeling that I’m not the only one. There really isn’t much depth to the game beyond hitting maximum level for the expansion, grouping up to get gear to do end game content and waiting around until the next batch of content comes in. That practically summarizes what an MMORPG is in a basket.
Morhaime would be delusional in my book if he believes content gating is the solution by forcing people to group up. Again, this just would fall into the category of what WildStar attempted to do. He would be correct if the mechanics of grouping up were changed such as the increase of world bosses.
For me the most fun I had in WoW group-wise was during Mist of Panderia where I could participate in World Boss fights. I loved those just because you could mix healthy PvP and grouping without the stupid instance politics that make me hate WoW.
I think if the designers for WoW had focused on eliminating instancing (which I believe is their method for promoting esports, which is what I truly believe has been ruining WoW and gaming in general) and making it so you can join boss fights ad hoc, then whatever remains with WoW would be more enjoyable.
The other thing Morhaime seems to conveniently forget is the carrot-on-the-stick approach that turned WoW into a crack-level addiction for many. The social aspect that I think he believes made WoW successful was complimented for the ever present RNGesus approach where people required others to unlock content (i.e. gear). I think over time, people just would see through this gimmick and ultimately leave because no addiction is worth the byproduct it creates.
And you can’t convince me otherwise that WoW at its peak had a very unhealthy effect on people. To say that a person is required to login every day is a terrible game design decision. That’s not positive on a person’s mental and physical health so it’s better that WoW faced a decline rather than promote this type of lifestyle.
The only people who would want to retain such a design (beyond those making money off the addicts) are those that can make money without producing it (i.e. content creators). I have found that part of the industry fascinating yet dangerous on a whole since there’s a bad motive for game designers to use them as a dedicated target audience.
Either way, I think Morhaime is pretty out of touch when it comes to what has lead to the decrease in popularity for WoW. He needs to look at it from a fresh perspective, not one from an internal person biased by his tenure as CEO.