Azaroth

Damion tells us about his recent Burning Crusade experiences, about replacing his dagger from Scarlet Monestary with a green BC quest reward something akin to an uberweapon you’d find inside of AQ40 pre-expansion.

He goes on to explain why it’s probably necessary to even everyone up, but then asks – what will we do with all of this old content?

I’ve seen people asking this since BC was announced. No doubt Blizzard will come up with something lame like reducing the maximum allowed players inside these instances and beefing up the rewards a little after a while.

But Jeff Freeman poo-poos the silly notion of expansions, instead preferring the release of new games much more often. As good as the idea sounds on paper, I’m not sure how simple it’d be to move everyone over. Even if it was REALLY simple to move over. Inevitably, some of your population just wouldn’t. Some would want to play the old game TOO. Of the latter, you’d have people paying for two boxes, two subscriptions (barring some kind of all-access pass, or discount), splitting their time between two iterations of, essentially, the same game. Of the former type of people who DIDN’T move over, I’m sure they’d be rather disillusioned both with the abandonment of “their game”, and with the fact that there really aren’t many people playing “their game” anymore. And that’d be The Company’s fault.

Myself, I haven’t played WoW since well before the expansion. I think I may have logged in a couple of times, but as of right now my account is inactive. I’ve even deactivated the monthly fee. I’m disinterested enough to know that I probably don’t need the option of logging in right now if it’s going to cost me money.

But what is it that I’m disinterested in?

I like that they’re evening everyone up. Sort of. I think it’s most certainly done in a cheesy, broken way. But it’s the thought that counts. Sort of.

I like the release of new instances that have less of a manpower requirement. I’d really rather do a five man than deal with thirty-nine jackasses soundboarding in ventrilo. But mainly, I just can’t dedicate the time necessary to keep up with those thirty nine people, and all of the other people like them.

At first glance, this is what Blizzard seemed to have been trying to fix. Evening up the gear, eveyone starts fresh, more focus on 5 man, 10 man, 20 man content. No more 40 man dungeons.

Except the fact that they’ve been dedicated to implementing reputation/faction-gain based dungeon rewards since ZG. If you’ve never grinded faction for gear, it takes a LONG FUCKING TIME. They did it with ZG, they did it with AQ 20 and AQ 40, and they did it with Naxxramas. If I’d read nothing about, I’d assume they’d be doing it with their BC instances too. But I have read something about it, a long while ago, and I’m fairly certain they are.

See, they’ve gotten so caught up in pandering to and satiating the powergamer crowd (and I’ll admit, it’s very hard not to – they do tend to be the loudest) that even their solution was essentially nothing more than an illusion that introduced a LONGER grind.

I have no problem casually romping into Stratholme to get some gear. Even “pro mode” challenges like “UD45″ were a lot of fun. It took teamwork. It took skill. It took experience, timing, and concentration. Best of all, it took fourty-five minutes.

In the end, this is what I can’t deal with. Yeah – when I was fourteen, I spent nearly an entire summer smacking mountains with my miner on UO. I was gonna GM blacksmithing. I never did. I dont’ know if that speaks to my lack of focus or my lack of patience (or maybe the fact that I had some kind of life back then, still, almost).

But what I do know is that I can’t do that shit any more. I really can’t spend three months accomplishing something in your game. I’m sorry. And if you want to cater to the kids who CAN, you’re really going to piss the rest of us off – and those kids are going to reach the peak of your reward mountain anyway.

That’s why I can’t stand the general Diku design, that’s why I can’t GM a smith in UO, and that’s why I haven’t logged into BC. Evening me up just to send me along with a pat on the head into new and improved grindfest v2.0 isn’t fooling me.

Is the answer to limit expansions to X and refocus on new games more often? Maybe. If done right, the plan has its advantages. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well as one might initially plan.

Expansions are great. They keep things new, they refocus the powergamers, they keep that money flowing without the necessity to spend another $50m making a whole new game. Because really, the old content is still good. It’s still there. A lot of people haven’t experienced it yet.

Maybe you want to add a new type of server to your list, though. Most games already rock PvP and PvE ruleset servers. WoW adds RP, and even RP-PvP. That’s really nice of them. How about “Classic”?

Shouldn’t that be a requirement of releasing each expansion? Or at least… once in a while?

Personally I’m a big fan of WoW in those days that I could casually run through the five or ten man instances to get gear that was a little bit better, and totally cool looking. But when you ask me to grind rep – no matter how many people I need to take with me – my answer is just going to be no. I don’t need to be enticed, evened up, or even tricked. The answer is just no. I couldn’t believe how many people were participating in Blizzard’s PvP system before the expansion pack. It boggled my mind.

And as long as there’s “something more to go on to” beyond the classic servers – that being, the regular servers – you’re not losing customers. I can play away casually on WoW circa 2005 or whatever, enjoying the fact that nobody in tier 5 is going to stroll along and smack down my entire group of friends without any effort. Then, if I would like to, I can go back and play a regular server if I suddenly have a change of heart, get desperately tired of the casual game and need more, hit the content wall and need to go through really badly, etc.

It’s the same thing with UO. Might people get tired with the old content? Sure, they might. But in that context, the percentage of those who quit when they get bored to those who move onto a regular server might be XX percent. But it’s a hell of a lot better than zero percent if you don’t put the server up. And there will be those that don’t get bored of the more casual game. Some people really dont’ want to be threatened to grind for items lest they compete with the people who do. Of course, there IS a way of implementing achievement or advancement based gameplay without giving the power to lord over “the mortals”. But that’s a post for another day. In fact, it’s two. Someone remind me.