Nothing is perfect, obviously, but I think WoW nails it about as well as I can reasonably expect on casual post 70 content. Now that I’m finally 70, I can do daily quests, work on faction, do instances, PvP in several interesting battlegrounds, or, gasp, do some raiding. The point is, there is at least something reasonable for you to do whether you are a raider, a pvper, or a casual player. And it gives us casuals the best chance of eventually getting to the point where we want to be that 40th man in the super duper secret best friends club uberguild and get the tier 6 drop and win the internetz.

The secret to what casual players want to do btw: get home, take off our shoes, kiss our significant other, watch some TV, go in front of the computer, get in vent with our friends, tell lame jokes, have a beer, and kill some monsters (or even better Alliance players) for a few hours while arguing whether Wolverine can kick Yoda’s ass or not.

And WoW lets me do that! Thanks Blizzard.

“The fact is, WoW WAS fun for casuals at several different points in the game’s history. It was fun for a few months at the beginning of the game, it was fun for a few months after BGs were added (and before the honor system sank into super-grind with all preset teams), it was fun for a few months after BC was added and everyone was levelling again. This part is the part we understand. However, the other lesson of the WoW experience is that casuals actually burn content much more QUICKLY than hardcores because they don’t respond well to being cockblocked. Hardcores will bitch and moan and post long rambling whines on the forums, but they will soldier through; casuals will realize it’s not worth it, and quit.

It’s an inherent flaw of the “content shovel” game concept that I believe Lum has discussed before, and at this point? Not terribly much Blizzard can do about it.”

If casual players comprise 95% of your customer base and if casual players don’t respond well to being cockblocked, then maybe it might behoove game developers to do something different than just throwing their hands in the air and saying “oh well — we don’t know what they want and they don’t like the whole cockblocking thing!”

I also don’t think its a fair statement to say that casual players burn through more content than any other. I think it might be fair to say that casual players burn through the content aimed at them (not necessarily faster than dedicated players) and then feel frustrated becuase they cannot proceed at their own pace — the higher end content taking weeks and maybe months to finish if it can be done at all and there being no where else to go. And that whole taking weeks and months to finish a thing? Really very boring after a week or two.

So I can see where it might challenging to continually crank out content for the mid-levels, but if that’s where your bread and butter is, why wouldn’t you do that?

I guess I just don’t understand the sentiment that casual players are hard to cater to and therefore the prevailing answer is to just give up even though they comprise 95% of the playerbase.

I can kind of understand designing uber content for the uber players and it remains uber until it is dumbed down to make way for the next uber development and to create psuedo content for the casuals (but it isn’t really cause its still too hard for them) but then I cannot understand the uberfolk bitching about it as they are the only people really being designed for.

/bow

“What I mean is that an intricate web of attunement keeps bleeding edge guilds playing longer, as they will progress faster than other guilds. Not only that, it channels them through as much content as possible, in attempts to get the most usage from any given dungeon.”

With the highest respect, o great one, you have two errors in your thinking.

1) You assume that players have pretty much zero opportunity cost for playing a game, that it doesn’t matter if they don’t really ‘achieve’ anything long-term as long as they have fun in the present.

2) You assume sympathy for the company will have weight in the players’ decisions of value and obligation.

#1 applies for many, but not all players who play an MMO. It’s complicated because there is story value, and there is ‘gear’ value, and while they are two different things they are related and it’s easy for people to confuse the two in arguments. On one hand pixels in a computer game do not really matter; but on the other hand the story of achievement players have been thru, and which is commonly represented by those pixels when it comes to endgame achievements, is something that many players (not all) do place value in and get upset when it is subsequently removed.

This is why the singular focus on items in WoW is so flawed btw, and why the devs try (unsuccessfuly, because the entire rest of the design pushes in that direction) to put value in other things, like the two PvE titles for the SSC/TK and BT/MT attunements. But anyway, the relevance here is that it is a very unwise idea to include attunements or any other achievement with the intention of later removing or nerfing it. It establishes a pattern for players who think long-term, being.. ‘nothing I do in this game is of any use because it’ll just be nerfed and made 1000x easier for anyone who waits half a year for the playerbase to catch up’. If done right this wouldn’t matter, but done wrong it injects uncertainty into the minds of players who did it the hard way whether players who did it the easy way will view the ‘hard’ achievements as something that is respectable, or something that is to be pitied and scorned.

A nice example would be the treatment of HWLs/GMs after the WoW 2.0 transition patch.

You justify, Knurd, because you see there is no better way to accomplish the ‘slowing’ of initial progression, but there are definitely other and better ways. It does not accomplish good to have attunements or other progression that is planned to be removed after some time… it may have some support from the ‘zomg buff’ mentality, but such attitudes are always short-lived. To use yet another example… one of the reasons WoW was so successful was because the leveling game was deliberately planned to be so short, compared to previous grind-based games. This has gotten away from the dev team probably because of all the people who quit the company.. ;​)… but if they had wanted to, they could have continued the same philosophy without compromising content. They just don’t know how to address the relevant barriers to achievement.

The reason attunements were removed was more complex than ‘it makes getting into endgame content difficult’. There were many complex dynamics from how the attunement requirements interacted with stuf like guild dynamics; you had guilds that would have to run an ‘old’ instance with’useless loot’ just to attune someone, or players hopping from guild to guild by selling their attuned status with instances (one of the main reasons the Karazhan attunement requirement for SSC/TK was such a flop). Note that the raid instance that’s been in WoW the longest, Onyxia, has not had its lengthy attunement chain removed for either faction… because the chain is PUGable in its entirety and doesn’t require any grinds, the way the Heroics requirements for Karazhan attunement did. However difficult that escape quest in BRD for alliance is, you can’t say it’s a grind.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to post about WoW ever again.”

But isn’t there something to be said for learning from past successes and continual improvement…? from death comes life, phoenix..

“P.S. – You didn’t answer Viz’s question(s)”

I hope Ben will excuse me if I attempt to answer her questions myself.

MMOs are more difficult than many other media because the issue they attempt to solve is so much more ambitious and complex than usual. This means that most attempts will, relatively, be failures. And exactly because it’s so complex (the dichotomy of being forced to offer progression, while at the same time that progression is the same thing that can doom a game), it’s hard to understand and also hard to communicate a perspective on how to address it. This means it’s hard to get funding on top of the fact that, again, most attempts will be relative failures.

Not to mention the whole insularness of the industry.. :/ Why try to address the flaws in the usual design with a more expansive attitude towards the wider market, when instead you could just (unconsciously) design to be insular for those who ‘have no life’ in the real world and don’t mind how much time they spend grinding in a computer game.

@Ben

A real name or resume with actual game titles would really help your credibility. I’m not a professional game designer, but I can still think that my ideas are better than those of the persons who designed World of Warcraft’s PvP system. There’s no shame in that, it just takes a little bit more evidence on my part to prove that my ideas have merit.

If you think you found the Holy Grail, I won’t argue with you. I would simply want to play your game and form my own opinion. But, as you say, you haven’t made it…

P.S. – You didn’t answer Viz’s question(s)

P.P.S. – Do you really understand the collaborative, creative process; or do you think genius spouts from one fountainhead?

(apologies to Ayn Rand; that bitch)

Surely, a concept that provides fun, long-lasting gameplay for the great mass of casual players can be considered the holy grail of MMO design. When Blizzard is raking in well above half a billion in annual revenue, and numerous other mediocre ideas are finding plenty of funding, can a person who has found that grail really not find someone with $20 million to mount a challenge?

There is very little that is clever in MMOs because there are so few clever people in the industry. I don’t mean to be cruel, but in our industry there are plenty of people who know how to slice a different block of cheese the same way, plenty of people who think their two-minute ideas are so off-the-charts genius that they won’t listen to anyone, plenty of horrible managers, plenty of technicians who just wanna beat traffic home and had more synaptic response during lunch at Chilis talking about other people in the office than they did all afternoon during work, plenty of deadline confusion, plenty of indecipherable hires and paper-napkin schedules, plenty of complacency. There a few at the top of the bell curve who have some really innovative, thoughtful, creative zingers that are very often not even difficult to implement, but getting those ideas past the rest of the bell curve quickly becomes rather nightmarish because the rest of the curve wants it simple…

Dropping entry requirements on BT doesn’t mean guilds that weren’t in BT will be in there next weekend. While it’s possible to “gear up” via badges and ZA, raiders are well advised to run at least a little bit of T4 and T5 content for the rest of their gear. And given the randomness of loot, you could be running it a -lot- for those last three pieces you need.

For myself, I’m glad the attunements were dropped. Getting Kara attuned was interesting… once. I can hardly imagine trying to do it a second time, particularly since quite a lot of it is 5 man content. I would imagine a lot of guilds are relieved, as they don’t have to attune new members to T4 to get T4 loot, to then attune to T5 to get T5 loot, to finally attune to T6, so they can all do the content they want to do. Particularly since you could be stuck getting 24 people, who’ve already gotten sick of Mag or Kael, together to attune one guy. Good luck with that…