I read a very disturbing post on Wowhead which described Ghostcrawler’s theory on the speed of the game, gym memberships and content:
The problem is the pace that players used to play to be able to keep up is not even close to current requirement
Used to from when? Cataclysm didn’t ask players to play much… and they didn’t. 🙁 The catch is that people may realize they aren’t using the gym much and cancel their membership. We want you to play WoW.
World of Warcraft has a very huge negative stigma attached to it best described in the infamous South Park episode. Certainly, anyone who plays World of Warcraft and/or is a lover of South Park will know that episode. But it addresses a huge issue in the game: addiction.
It’s not explicitly stated in the episode how the boys’ lives ended up becoming a stereotypical geek mess, but the implications are quite obvious. What wasn’t explicitly stated in that episode though was summarized quite effectively in Ghostcrawler’s statement: “We want you to play WoW.”
Certainly, Blizzard/Activision/Viviendi want you to pay for World of Warcraft. That goes without saying. But the theories in game design to hook people into subscriptions are what I take exceptional issue with here.
The primary flaw in Ghostcrawler’s argument is comparing World of Warcraft to a gym membership. I see both as completely separate issues. Not everyone who goes to a gym does it because they love it. They do it because it ends up becoming a necessary part of their life.
World of Warcraft is not a necessary part of people’s lives. Some people might be brainwashed into believing it’s an integral part of their existence. But that’s like television or any other addictive form of entertainment. However, the fact that the game maker believes that people need it as part of their lives reveals a very nefarious spirit behind the company and designers.
When a gym says that they want you to go to the gym, it really is at the end of the day for your own good. When an entertainment company does the same thing, there is no real good that can come out of it outside of spending excessive time and money. Here, the idea of forcing people to play the game in the fear of subscription loss is what I feel where Blizzard and people like Ghostcrawler have absolutely no pulse on the general public in terms of how to create a great game that invites subscription loss.
I’ve worked in subscription based companies previously and have experience in this area. Every company these days feel that the new golden ticket is subscription. Get people hooked in like a drug dealer. Make it near impossible to cancel such as your cable television, Netflix, etc. The thing with subscriptions is that they should exist as a convenience to customers. The customer willingly pays for a subscription knowing that it’s a service or product they want on a consistent basis. If the product is shoddy, the customer should rightfully cancel.
The controversy then arises around the definition of what a good product is. What makes something worth subscribing to? In the case of games, it should always at the end of the day be all about having fun. Fun is an exceptionally subjective viewpoint. You can go to an S&M bar in Japan and enjoy it or perhaps you might be the type that does working on an Excel spreadsheet all day long.
However, I do think there is a common sense in gaming which attracts people to games like World of Warcraft. I enjoy games that present reasonable long term goals like leveling, gearing, skill advancement because it’s all about character and personal growth. You like seeing yourself start out as an inexperienced being who stumbles out in the world, discovering their place in the universe, making friends, forming armies and becoming lords of the land. That’s the appeal of fantasy RPGs.
I think the way World of Warcraft is going, it falls very far from this path into something that is just an incredible chore. If you miss time away from the game, you lose progress and fall behind the curve. Think of all the people who were not around during Burning Crusade or Vanilla. There’s an incredible learning curve to the game. If you didn’t play from the start, you’re pretty much an outcast and much find people willing to accept you into their world. And if you did play during that period but quit for a significant time and returned, your world will be completely different than what you remember.
But this is all part of the screwed up game design mentality inside of Blizzard. There is no nice middle ground for the game. There are aspects of it but it’s very confusing and the game is quite schizophrenic in the vision it wants. Does it want to pander towards casuals? Does it want to cater towards hardcores? What about PVE vs PVP?
To me it’s this schizophrenic, lack of vision that is causing a huge rift in the player base as well as the subscription loss. The game has become a very fragile shell of itself and the game maker is too scared to make a commitment towards any direction. We’ve seen the results of visionless products, companies and countries. Look to Yahoo prior to Melissa Mayer, or Japan’s kaiten prime ministers in the past 10 years.
I feel that subscriptions will return if the game itself had a true purpose behind it. At the moment, there’s only a few purposes in the game: leveling (to 90), making gold (possibly through professions and Auction House), raiding, PVP, gearing and dailies. You could add “end game content” meaning the storylines, but with the internet around, it’s pointless. Everything gets spoiled the minute it’s released on PTR.
For me the purpose should not be these end game elements, but instead a focus around community. Simply stated, the game was intended to be played with people, possibly friends. At this stage, raiding and to a degree PVP are the only elements that provide a group oriented mechanic. But the question at stake is “is this fun?”
My answer is no. The end game is not fun. In fact, it can be downright demotivating. Ever watch live streamers doing heroics? How many have you seen that truly look like they’re enjoying themselves? Ever watch videos on confessions of raiders? The way raiding is designed is just not fun. It’s a lot of work. But it’s not fun work. It’s not productive work. It’s only good for measuring your penis size (and my guess is that raiders do not have much of any since they just live and drink raiding).
Raiding will always be to me what the Friday night AD&D games used to be: get some friends together to do something. Raiding has become something that caters to a few end groups with a bunch of people who have big egos and little perspective in the world. If raiding ended up being brain dead easy but gave the community something to do for fun, make friends and enjoy themselves but at the same time killed all the endorsements and high end gaming, I say pull the fucking trigger.
That said, the farming aspect of raiding and everything related to farming just isn’t fun at a certain point. Krippie released a video on how he stated he would not be participating in patch 5.2. In essence, his viewpoint is that the requirements for raiding are just not worth the time and effort compared to downing bosses. When you look at Ghostcrawler’s statement of “We want you to play” and you combine that with Krippie’s admittance that the farming aspects are not fun, it tells the story of just how bad the direction the game has gone.
For me, the game is just tedious. It’s not that the game isn’t doable but the level of effort compared to the reward is completely skewed. I’ve stated this on numerous occasions. The game forces you to put in far too much effort to get anything from it. I feel that the tedious nature of the game is what’s pushing me away from it. When I see a statement like, “We want you to play” and “not using a membership leads to subscription loss,” I feel like the game really doesn’t have any sense of charm and that it’s just more of the same.
I don’t want to be forced to play a game to get me into subscribing into something. I want to play it because I feel it’s enjoyable. A game like World of Warcraft to me should be about playing with others while reaching your goals. As my friends leave, I feel that the game has no appeal anymore outside of getting better gear. But this design has it’s limits. What happens for the next expansion? More raids? More PVP? More dailies?
None of these things really appeal to me. I think people realize the same. With the game increasing in difficulty, frustration and time consumption, people will just quit not because they didn’t have anything to do, but because there are more effective things to do with your time. I hope that Ghostcrawler and the team at Blizzard read this post to understand why the gym membership analogy doesn’t hold here. It’s simply that the game isn’t fun and not having people around to play with isn’t fun.
My membership expired recently. Maybe I should renew that and use my World of Warcraft money for that instead. At least, I’ll feel better about myself and see real progress from all the effort I put into that.
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