The Smoking Crater

Oh geez, World of Warcraft. Such a huge topic, lots of shades of love and hate from people about this game. Everywhere you look, everyone's got OPINIONS OPINIONS OPINIONS OPINIONS, and for good reason. WoW has a lot of polarizing features. I'm not really one to give my personal opinion on the subject, though, I'd much rather simply state the facts and state both sides if there is any dispute. I will touch on the love/hate with WoW... eventually. First, however, I'd like to talk about what WoW was, is, and what it has done to the genre.

King Slayer

It was a simple enough idea, really. Blizzard of Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft fame wanted to take the MMO genre and put its own spin on it. At the time, Everquest was still the reigning king of level grinding, to dethrone such a game would be quite a feat. How did Blizzard do it? I'll tell you one thing, it wasn't WoW's content. EQ far outclassed WoW in every way when it came to content, even a full year into WoW's life. WoW became the most popular MMO for the same reason many WoW vets hate the game now. Three words: Ease of Access. That's right, WoW dethroned EQ by being easier. Is that to say that WoW was not hardcore? Of course not. WoW's raiding and PvP communities are certainly hardcore, but the leveling and questing were simple and pain-free by EQ's standards. To properly explain the stark difference between these two games, though, I have to tell you about EQ.

EQ was made while UO was still in its heyday, which meant that the big thing to copy when you're making an MMO is to make a detailed world that feels real. Making the player feel like they are actually a part of this world was the number one design philosophy in those days. To this end, EQ's questing was, well, not assisted. What does this mean exactly? No hints from the game itself, no golden punctuation marks, no giant circles on your map. The majority of quests only helped you in their quest text, which was usually cryptic at best. Now, this actually worked in EQ, since you didn't quest to level up. Leveling in EQ was a straight grind, and quests were something you did for a reward that wasn't XP, which was extremely common in MMOs pre-WoW, games like Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI.

Now, to compare EQ leveling with WoW leveling. In EQ you would only kill mobs for hours on end to gain XP and level up. The style in which you killed mobs varied of course, depending on how many people you had. Common tactics included soloing, group AoE farming, and kite killing. Barring leeching and power-leveling, which require you to know people of high levels who are willing to invest time into your character, killing mobs was the only effective way to level your character until you hit end game, which usually didn't even start at level-cap (since damage level-scaling didn't really exist until WoW. Generally speaking a level 80 of class X wasn't that much different from a level 85; it was an advantage, sure, but nothing game-changing). See, other MMOs often used soft-caps to keep their players interested. A soft-cap, for those of you who don't know, is a point during a progression where the time required to progress further increases exponentially. If a game had skill X at a soft cap of 50, but a hard cap of 100, the time to get from 1 to 50 is a rather steady progression, but the time to hit 51 may take double the time, and 52 double the time of that, until it gets to the point where only 3 players ever may have hit 100.

In WoW, hitting cap was actually very fast compared to any themepark MMO that had come before it. Questing was your primary source of XP and leveling gear. Quests took you from one questing location to the next, which was rather slick for its time. In fact, because hitting cap was so relatively easy, it meant that lots of players who couldn't experience endgame content in other MMOs could in WoW. Of course that only really applies to the MMO veterans that switched to WoW. Due to WoW's ease of access, it gained a massive popularity with the casual market. The casual market, of course, had no interest in investing the time in the game to obtain raid-quality loot. The unwillingness was understandable, as many people simply don't have the time, dedication, or willingness to invest so much time raiding. There was a problem with the system as it was, though. In MMO's, you are rewarded much more by time invested in the game than personal skill. This is no less true for WoW. Casual players who wished to participate in PvP stood no chance against those who simply had more time to invest in the game. While this made sense from a mechanical perspective and from the MMO vets who were used to this format, the new players were not happy that they could not have fun in these aspects of the game because they choose not to play it as often.

Time Slayer

Because WoW was a game where the casual players could exist on the same level as the hardcore with the only difference being gear, this caused a very distinctive split in the communities. Many casual players had no initial interest in end-game PvE, and since PvE wasn't competitive it didn't really matter. The big rifts between these communities developed when they were forced to interact, namely in a PvP environment. Battlegrounds such as the 10 vs 10 Warsong Gulch and the 40 vs 40 Alterac Valley were simply not very fun for players without raid-quality gear because they were no match for those who did have it. The power difference grew even more as the raiding progressed, but pre-raid gear never did. Blizzard has tried multiple possible solutions to these problems over the years, only one (heroics) being widely accepted by the community, the rest (Wrath of the Lich King "badges", Honor points as currency, etc...) have always angered the hardcore community. These additions which give the game's endgame content a significant boost of ease of access diminish the value of the hardcore player's time investment, alienating them and making them feel like the game is simply not being designed with them in mind.

This is very significant. RPGs have always been about character growth via time investment. If the time you invest in a character is later rendered meaningless by a future addition that makes it much easier to progress (again, Wrath of the Lich King "badges"), the only reason to ever belong to the hardcore community is to experience content first, as opposed to at all. It is extremely demoralizing knowing that the raid dungeon you've spent week after week going through, learning all the fights getting them perfect, will by the next month's content release be worthless. The rest of the player-base easily farms the same gear doing 5 man dungeons to get the same quality gear. It's less demoralizing if you're only in it for the challenge of raiding, but to anyone who values the time they invest into their characters, it becomes less and less appealing extremely fast.

The situation is interesting, however, since the hardcore community doesn't even make up a tenth of the game's playerbase: financially speaking, it makes no sense to hinder the casual playerbase in favor of them. Since it is impossible to strike a reasonable compromise between both side's grievances, the casual market will be weighted more heavily than the hardcore.

Market Slayer

WoW has the unique distinction of becoming the most successful MMORPG of all time. MMOs have the unique distinction of being very long-lasting and time consuming games, often a player will feel forced to choose a single MMO to play. This mean that any MMO that is created has to compete with WoW in a way that most other genres don't have to worry about. Because of this, MMOs have essentially halted in their evolution, since innovation is too risky to invest serious money into. Many companies simply choose to copy elements from WoW and put their own spin on it. Most do it poorly, others do it well. Still, there is serious money to be gained by hashing old ideas together and designing a pretty game to go with it, which means that an unoriginal WoW clone can still rake in lots of dough. There are some developers, however, that do take this risk: sandbox games aimed at niche markets. While they tend to stay afloat, and the companies in charge of these games make profit, they still don't compare to WoW or its more successful clones. Like EQ before it, WoW has stopped the progression of the MMORPG genre, and will continue to do so until it dies out. How that will happen is anyone's guess. It could simply die out from old age, another blockbuster MMO title could steal the spotlight, or, hell, Blizzard could simply just say they are done with the game and release a sequel. It's anyone's guess.