Kontroversial Keith

World of Warcraft: Give it to the Community

The latest patch demonstrates the problems with an online game like World of Warcraft. The main problem is that the game forces you to upgrade, whether you want to or not. If you don’t buy the latest expansion, you’ll be screwed because you’ll be behind. And if you do not want to partake in the expansion, you have no opportunity to just stick with whatever patch you want to play. For a game that has involved millions of fans, World of Warcraft makes me believe that allowing Blizzard to retain this much control over the game is dangerous considering the time investment for players.

A bigger question becomes: what happens the day someone pulls the plug on the game? What happens to all that effort? I dislike the notion of the “cloud” because you’re putting your assets in someone else’s hands. For some services like Facebook, you end up losing control over your data and always run the risk of others stealing or manipulating it without your permission.

So with regards to games, the effort you put into a game ends up being the property for these gaming companies. Essentially, you’re renting out the time for a game. This model is completely and obviously biased towards the publishing company, which is why I only have subscribed to one such game. That said, this recent patch demonstrates the mentality that Blizzard is moving towards, which I call the “Greedo Shot First” or “George Lucas” mentality. Meaning that the game and their makers have gone into denial and can’t see how badly their shit stinks.

In the South Park episode where the boys attempt to rescue an unnamed movie from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Stan Marsh says that the work of an artist eventually becomes public domain. I feel that there is definitely a point in that statement where the community develops a huge emotional stake that has helped define and support a subject. Star Wars is one of those cases just as World of Warcraft because of how big of a pop cultural phenomenon they have become. In short, these artifacts to a degree have exceeded what the creators are capable of at this point.

I think with World of Warcraft, the survivability of the game and culture is linked to Blizzard’s eventual need to allow the community to exert more control over the game. Just like DoTA, the game needs to spawn its own ground by open sourcing the code so people can run it on private servers without fear of persecution.

Right now, the community and game at large are at the mercy of a few select people who are making rather unpopular decisions. These decisions though affect everyone in the community for better or worse (mostly worse) and there’s no real feedback loop until everything is too late.

If this continues along with the continuing drop in numbers (which Blizzard attributes to the age of the game as well as the inability to reach Chinese markets early), the game will continue to spiral downwards. However, Blizzard does not seem to see the repercussions of these few developers until much later when subscription loss clarifies everything.

More than likely though, Blizzard, in the CEO’s utter greediness, will never release the game to the public. So what can we do to save it?

Quite honestly, I feel that the game in the long term has little hope for being saved. The only thing saved are transient non-digital memories. Instead, what needs to occur is a new project that is not controlled by a massive corporate entity but it supported by the community and run by a community.

I do have a small side project that I’ve been working on from time to time. It’s at a non-coding stage and just describes the rules for the game that I’m envisioning. One thing I will need to do is develop the world, culture, history, geography, etc. But I hope to develop it more one day.

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2 responses to “World of Warcraft: Give it to the Community”

  1. Tyrantis Avatar
    Tyrantis

    The closest example I can give you is what became of Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars Galaxies survived actually ironically due to the poor decisions of SOE.

    SOE released two large content updates the Combat Upgrade (CU), and the New Game Enhancements (NGE) which essentially destroyed all game play elements people had previous enjoyed and paid for, years later this ultimately killed the game as many left for these reasons. Regardless as soon as NGE hit the servers which was supposed to fix what players didn’t like about CU, teams of coders who loved the game set out to roll the game back to Pre-CU and NGE. This project was dubbed SWG-Emu, Star Wars Galaxies Emulator.

    Since SOE controlled the game and all source content, much of the game was reverse engineered so to speak and recreated as it was exactly. This took immense work and time from numerous parties, and still its not 100%, but they finally have much of what was working for people to use on private servers in a throwback to a MMO that has since closed its doors permanently.

    The point here is fans always find a way to get what they want, but its always hardwork and it frankly shouldn’t be that way. MMO’s have reached a point where corporations care nothing about turning one more dollar, and there’s no consideration to the fanbase whatsoever.

    I think the industry will hit a point when we’ll see smaller developers take up the mantle in the way Indy games have taken off in recent years. We’ll see micro-mmo’s with less initial content as big titles like WoW or GW2, but are focused on maintaining a certain loyal community and adding the content they want to see. In short a much more competitive market. Currently there is really only two games on the market competing against Blizzard so they don’t see much reason to be careful with their playbase or innovative in what they code.

    1. keithyw Avatar
      keithyw

      i’ve been reading/hearing a lot about Kickstarter projects where some of the original founders for hot, older titles are revamping games, getting the proper licensing, etc. that might be the way to go.

      but the tight corporate control that the gaming industry have over the titles has really left a sour taste in my mouth. the thing that bothers me the most is that you’re renting a game essentially, so all the time investment you’ve put into your character aren’t really owned by you at all. however, if a game or company does go belly up, it sucks big time.

      the real problem is that we don’t own the data by putting games inside a tightly controlled cloud and licensing structure. that’s something i miss about old paper and pencil style games, or even games where you store your profile on your local drive/disk.

      i do think that this model is going to slowly die out though. we’re already seeing Zynga falter big time. i mean, there’s just so many content walls you can put up before players get sick of it. also, i do believe that there are enough game developers who probably are passionate enough and well off who can fund their own projects without being subjugated by evil corporate lawyers, accountants and whatnot and be able to create the games we all really want to play.

      for myself, i’ve never had a problem buying those games either. i know quite a few people putting money into these kickstarter projects that seem to have some great potential. hopefully, it will be demand driving supply rather than some marketing fuck who thinks he can create his own market.

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