Category Archives: Philosophy
Inevitability of Decline
Nils and I have been debating here lately over whether the decline of WoW’s growth had something to do with Wrath and Cataclysm’s design. One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to WoW discussion is the notion that subscription numbers are somehow correlated with endgame design. They are not. As I mentioned in that article, only ~20% of subscribers killed the easiest (non-Naxx) boss in the entirety of Wrath and the stats for Cataclysm thus far¹ are not any better: 17.9% have killed Magmaw, even after the nerf. But my actual argument goes further than that:
The decline of WoW was/is inevitable. That is to say, WoW’s subscription growth would have slowed and eventually declined no matter what Blizzard did. This is in contrast to the implied argument from Nils and others that had Blizzard simply copy & pasted TBC, they would have gained 2 million subs per year into perpetuity. My argument about the inevitability of decline has further consequences when it comes to MMO game design, because I believe that good design decisions can still lead to net loss in subscribers. Bad design decisions can certainly increase the magnitude of the hemorrhaging, but the best you can hope for with good design is to stave off the inevitable as long as necessary. This argument rests on a few premises.
Premise 1: Fun has diminishing returns.
I explored this premise a bit in The Diminishing Returns of Fun post. The basic idea is that Novelty is the ineffable quality of “newness” of a game that is consumed as the game is experienced. It can also be expressed by the quotes “You can’t go home again” and “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Novelty can be about learning new systems (i.e. rules) within a game, but it can also be about seeing new areas². Part of the “ineffable” problem is that novelty is not just about new things in of themselves. A jigsaw puzzle you previously solved does not become novel simply because new rules are introduced, like forcing yourself to not start with edge pieces or playing Tic-Tac-Toe before being able to place a piece. Once you feel confident of the contours of an experience, the remaining novelty quickly evaporates.
Nils described this once as: “The longer you play a game, the lower its potential to keep your mind busy, because you get ever better at it. If you so want, the game is in the cache now and you don’t have to think as much to play it.”
How this relates to WoW can be expressed in this investor call quote from Blizzard president Michale Morhaime:
“As our players have become more experienced playing World of Warcraft over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content,” he said at the time. “And so I think with Cataclysm they were able to consume the content faster than with previous expansions, but that’s why we’re working on developing more content.”
Players become much better and faster at consuming content because the novelty of said content has already been experienced. A quest that might once have been novel (despite being built from un-novel components like Kill X Foozles, etc), becomes much less so the Nth time around. With the novelty gone, there is no compunction against finishing the content as quickly as possible – the quest becomes a task to be completed, instead of an experience to be sensed. Anyone can open a book to its final chapter and read how it ends, find a plot summary or otherwise “spoil” it. That we do not do this is a function of our desire to experience the story, which (typically) only occurs by limiting ourselves to reading it in order from beginning to end.
Unfortunately for Morhaime, developing more content will not stop the decline, no matter how good it is.
Premise 2: Market Saturation exists.
As I talked about in Saturation, Tom Chilton made the intriguing comment in an interview that:
” […] if you look at the way the population breaks down, we’re at a point in our history where there are more people that played World of Warcraft but no longer play World of Warcraft than currently play World of Warcraft.”
If measured at the peak of WoW’s reported subscription rate of 12 million, that means roughly 24 million people have played WoW at some point in time. How many more people would play WoW that have not done so already? That is somewhat of an open question. However, if we look at the Wikipedia list of best-selling games of all time we see that more people have bought World of Warcraft than Halo 1-2-3 combined (5m, 8m, 8.1m), more than Super Mario World (20m), more than Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 combined (11.62m, 9m), more than The Sims (16m), and damn near two-thirds of the way of overcoming the original Super Mario Bros that came with every single NES (40m).
I doubt that Chilton was including Free Trial downloads in his statement, but either way, it is difficult to believe that the market has been anything other than tapped. If we assume that Blizzard is staffed with rational bussinessmen (if not designers), then we can infer from Chilton’s statements that the market for WoW has peaked according to Blizzard’s own data, and further sub growth is more likely to come from additional localizations than, say, capturing/retaining more US/EU subs.
Premise 3: Players consume content faster than designers create it.
The difference between this and Premise 1, is that Premise 1 is about how it becomes increasingly difficult to create subsequent content as novel as the original. This particular premise is simply how long it takes to create content versus how long it takes to consume it, novel experience or no.
Factoid: There were 8.75 million subscribers in vanilla.
Back in my Subscription and Correlation post, I augmented a graph from MMOData.net to show the release date information of the WoW expansions for illustration purposes. This is what it looked like:
The interesting thing to note is that the total subscription numbers (the green line) is actually above 8 million before the release of TBC. China did not get TBC until the end of 2007, so if you add that interim period (the blue line) to the whole, we get WoW’s vanilla population at 8.75 million.
I believe this factoid is important because that 8.75 million segment can be considered the Baby Boomers of WoW. Indeed, between 2006 and 2007 the sub population grew from 6 million to 8 million – churn notwithstanding, it is possible that 6 million subs aged for an entire year. Compare that with 2005 to 2006, where less than a million subs could be said to be one year old by the end. In other words, starting in 2006 the volume of veteran players more than likely outpaced new players.
Premise 1 + 2 + 3 + Factoid = The decline of WoW was/is inevitable.
Ultimately, I wanted to stake out this argument because A) I do not see many people that do despite implicitly acknowledging it (e.g. growth is always finite), and B) good MMO design decisions tend to be indistinguishable from the bad when viewed through the one-dimensional prism of subscription numbers.
For example, the general (blogging) zeitgeist surrounding Wrath of the Lich King was that it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. What does not get separated was, say, how the questing experience was orders of magnitude better than questing in TBC (does anyone seriously disagree?), and how I feel that the episodic raiding model is a lot more honest, and better designed than a strict linear progression model. Yes, raid difficulty was poorly handled. Yes, turning heroic dungeons into 5-man daily quests burns people out (starting with TBC, mind you). None of those raiding missteps can realistically can be responsible for more than a fraction of sub losses, but that is neither here nor there.
The mechanics of what I am asserting can be visualized in the crude image below:
In frame 1, a player has just begun playing. In frame 2, they have carved a path through the majority of the game on their way to the level cap. In frame 3, they have reached the endgame, where most of their activities involve repeated content such as dungeon runs, raiding, dailies, and so on. In frame 4, the player either rolls alts or otherwise backtracks in search of novel experience in the content they missed (different leveling zones, class-specific quests, the opposing faction, etc). As expansions are added, the frames get taller… but not by much. Whereas the original leveling experience might have taken 300 hours, leveling in an expansion takes a fraction of that. If an expansion is released when you are in frame 2 or 3, that is fine. But if you are in frame 4… the end is (already) near.
So, in summation, WoW would have inevitably declined no matter what Blizzard did. That the decline “began” during Wrath is largely an irrelevant coincidence compared to the Baby Boomer population wave reaching the natural end of their novel experiences. The Baby Boomer hypothesis can be falsified should we ever get average age of account statistics or character maps of activity, but it would not affect the soundness of the underlying argument either way. Raid design decisions are unlikely to have anything but marginal effects on subscriptions compared with what the bulk of players are doing – which we know to be not raiding. And I believe that a lot of better game design could be achieved if we spent less time fixating on a drawn-out, endgame experience.
The deserved popularity of WoW proper came from the strength of its IP narrative, its pacing, its humor, the vastness of its game world, the underlying character of each of its zones, the uniqueness of its classes and how each demonstratively created their own novel experience. We should not take its declining subscription rates as anything more than the natural decline of an otherwise well-lived life. Here is to hoping that Blizzard opts for hospice care instead of the intensive life support that is currently in vogue.
If not… well, here is a raised glass to Diablo 3 and Titan.
¹ WoWProgress says 64,642 guilds have killed Magmaw as of the time of this writing. Assuming 18 raiders per guild (charitable considering 10-man raiding is vastly more popular), that means 1,163,556 players. WoWProgress only tracks NA/EU/KR/TW guilds, which number ~6.5 million. Ergo, 17.9%.
² You can probably argue that exploration equates to “learning the rules.”
The Diminishing Returns of Fun
I was listening to an episode of The Instance (#242) today and was struck in a rather fundamental way by what they said in the Mailbag segment. So much so, that I went ahead and captured the 8 minute audio exchange and uploaded it to Youtube so it could be more easily accessed. The reader email question itself was rather asinine, but it elicited a (brief) discussion on how the playerbase of WoW has evolved over time. The evolution of the playerbase, or devolution as some say, has been a frequent whipping boy of forums posters and bloggers for ages – Blizzard dumbing down the game, catering to casuals, and so on.
The thing is, I firmly believe that the argument has always been backwards. Blizzard is not catering to casuals, they are desperately trying to retain that ever-sliding core of veterans. Blizzard is not shaping players, the players are shaping Blizzard. The rest is worth listening to, but I went ahead and transcribed the most important portion of that audio clip, spoken by Scott Johnson:
[Repeating content] is a distinct downside to MMOs in general, and it is why I really enjoy a cultivated experience like Diablo 3 – like the Elder Scrolls games, like I am expecting with Skyrim, like a lot of single-player RPGs – where the wonderment and the excitement and the newness is always present. Because, unless you are freak who plays games six times through for no reason, everything is new as you consume it. Whereas in World of Warcraft, and other MMOs like it, as much as Blizzard tries, and they do the best out there to make things SEEM as fresh as possible. After a while, like that Blood Beast fight… [snip]
But again, I’m kinda with him. This is why I don’t pug much. Because I find that so grindy and so not fun. What I want … if I’m going to do that stuff, I’ll do it with my friends because then THAT is the newness of the experience. Because we’re laughing, Manny said something funny, Pootinky made a fart noise, whatever. We’re having a ball in there. So THAT is fun for me. The actual pugging of the thing for the 5000th time is not fun for me at all in the least. It is just earning money, currency to go get something. And that’s fine, that’s working as a system. But I’m kinda with him that you lose that cultivated experience, you lose that wonderment of walking into a room for the first time, like walking into Ulduar and going “Holy crap! Look at where we have to go and how we have to get there.” And then after a while you are “Oh my gosh, Ulduar can suck it. I hate this fight.”
That is reason the “vanilla forever!” mindset never made sense to me, nor the appeal to nostalgia that was Cataclysm; as they say, you can never cross the same river twice. People like to imagine that if everything had stayed hard, they would not have gradually lost interest in the game. But think about your favorite games of all time. Are those games still fun for you today? Would they still be fun to you if you replayed them half a dozen times back-to-back? You can never recreate that original experience – the wonderment and newness is consumed in the act of experiencing it. And as much as I agree with Scott that Blizzard does a lot in trying to keep content fresh by constant iteration and new boss abilities (etc), at some point you understand on a fundamental level that the Ship of Theseus has sailed, so to speak.
The “catering” is not to casuals, but to the veterans who have reached the end of their original experience and who, through boredom or social ties, are looking for more things to do in-game to fill the time while they wait for schedules to align. But why would veterans actually want extremely fast leveling, faceroll dungeons, and so on? Some of that is actually trying to capture the 80-90% of players who never finish games, sure. But the things like Justice Points and LFD are firmly for the vets. Nils suggests that Blizzard uses “ease” as a weapon in the form of competitive advantage against other MMOs (or perhaps in response to others doing it). Or perhaps in reaction to player “entitlement.”¹ I would argue instead that fun in games has diminishing returns. Running across the entirety of Searing Gorge each time you wipe in BRD might have given you a healthy respect for safe pulling in your formative years, but I guarantee that you would be sick of it four or five years later if it was included everywhere. You learned that lesson, and reinforcing it constantly adds nothing of further value to your experience anymore than would repeating grade school as an adult.
Ultimately, I feel theme-park MMOs are their own worst enemy. Nils told me once that it was in my best interests for an MMO journey to last as long as possible. If I was purely fixated on the eradication of my free time, then sure. I played WoW for over 7000 hours as compared to Xenogears’ 80 hours. But I never once, for a single moment, felt that the magnitude of fun with the former came remotely close to matching the latter. In fact, as is the case with any novel or movie or TV series, the extreme danger is that efforts to elongate the experience instead poisons it². More becomes less. Instead of cultivating a complete experience with a beginning, middle, and end, the theme-park MMO model demands an open-endedness at odds with its progressive narrative.
Perhaps this is merely a sign that (theme-park) MMOs are not a genre meant for me. I do not think that is entirely true though. The genius of MMOs is that they appeal to and accommodate a huge variety of players with different interests – as vapid as questing seems to be to vets, it was actually an endearing experience the first (few) times. Instead, I think designers should embrace the end of their games, incorporating a more conclusive experience while leaving the door open for an encore. Or the after-party.
¹ Entitlement is a word so abused by bloggers and commenters that it has lost most of its meaning. Entitlement should not be synonymous with the expectation of a fair exchange of value. Nor should it denigrate legitimate instances of design criticism. It’s honestly getting to the point where you cannot say something is superfluous or inelegant without being accused of feeling “entitled” to, you know, better design.
² See: Lost, Rescue Me, every Terminator movie after T2, every Alien move after Alien 2, etc etc etc.
The F-Word
I was reading Stabs’ post about treasure hunting in Diablo 3, how the typical gold farmer strategies won’t work and so on, when I see Nils in the comments say:
While reading this something inside me cries out: “Why don’t you just try to have fun??”
You seem determined to optimize the fun out of it.
The first question that popped into my mind was “What if you find optimizing fun?” And Stabs replies:
@Nils Ah we’re getting back to the question, what is fun? All I can say is, for myself, I’m hyped that I’ll be able to play D3 for money, it was a game I’d have played heavily anyway, I’ve always loved theorycraft and numbercrunching, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane D2 mechanics and I believe I’ll have an utter blast doing this.
I can’t really defend optimisation to someone who considers it not fun. I do suspect that you’re swimming against the tide.
If you listen to the PC Gamer podcast I linked you’ll hear them argue very persuasively that D3 is a game where everyone is a gold farmer but then go on to talk about how much fun it is to play. They’re not mutually exclusive.
I think the only fun I’ll intentionally sacrifice for optimisation is alting. I usually mess around with lots of different classes and builds when I get a new game. With this game I’ll be rushing to the end.
I have heard the phrase “optimize the fun out of it” from Nils and Tobold and others, and it was not until Stabs’ unapologetic response that I realized how asinine the phrase is to begin with. Optimization is fun. I am not going to hedge that with “can” or “to some people” because you have to fight stupid declarative statements with Objective (Self-) Truth. If you find optimization fun, then it is. Period. If you don’t like it tomorrow, then it is not fun, until such time that you change your mind again. If someone finds something different fun, they are wrong. Unless you agree with them. Is that not the implied premise in these fun discussions? Are we not justifying our favorite colors (red), flavors (peanut butter), or meals (taco salad)? I hate steak. Do I ask why people ruin their dinners with slabs of tough, bloody cow muscle? Of course not. And not just because I prefer taking a perfectly healthy salad and smothering it in greasy ground meat, nacho chips and sour cream.
I do not judge because I do not live in a solipsistic bizzaro-world where Fun is some objective Form straight out of the works of Plato. Have you read Gevlon at Greedy Goblin lately? He “refuses to nihilistically believe” that two people playing WoW can have different goals, motivations, desires. In a Battleground, he rages at the people fighting on the bridge instead of guarding a flag like he is; they are M&S (moron & slacker) for not winning in the most efficient manner. I was not aware winning was more important than having fun, but he covers that too by saying winning is the only way to have fun in the first place. I am not quite sure how he handles games like The Sims or Second Life – possibly you are M&S for not playing winnable games to begin with – but Nils, Gevlon, and Stabs all played WoW at some point in time so obviously someone was doing it wrong. Right?
The Dark Heart of the Matter
The underlying problem with “what is fun?” posts is not just because fun is a subjective thing. The underlying problem is that none of us can really be sure what fun even is to ourselves. That is, strictly speaking, an absurd statement. But the psychological fact of the matter is that human beings are damn near incapable of accurately predicting how they will feel in the future. Feel free to read along at home the article entitled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. A choice excerpt:
Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950’s to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ”Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we’re designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.” In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ”We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”
It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time — this is a long-known trait — but that we’re generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.
You can probably draw a line from that concept and connect it with Cognitive Dissonance, and especially the sub-set of that: Effort Justification. This is extremely relevant in MMO discussions about what is “fun” and what is not for what shall be readily apparent reasons:
Dissonance is aroused whenever individuals voluntarily engage in an unpleasant activity to achieve some desired goal. Dissonance can be reduced by exaggerating the desirability of the goal.
Oestrus from The Story of O and Nils from Nils’ MMO Blog both wrote about this dissonance in their (hopefully cynical) “What is fun?” articles. Both Nils and Oestreus argue (in effect) that fun is the resolving of the dissonance that is doing a long, arduous grind for an ultimately meaningless reward. After completion, you convince yourself that the journey was meaningful, and magically you retroactively have fun. Your brain does this because it refuses to believe that you could be so dumb to have spent all that time voluntarily being miserable, ergo the reward must have been worth it. And the sad thing is, this works. Nils even has a series of posts talking about how “great games enslave you,” not through riveting substance or fun activities (which is really salt that ruins the larger shit soup), but by pulling a Lucy and moving the football before you get to it, every goddamn time. I may be paraphrasing here.
In their defense, I do believe they are talking about great MMOs specifically, where “great” is defined as ones that keep you pressing levers for food pellets as long as humanly possible. It is the same definition of greatness, incidentally, that makes America’s Funniest Home Videos one of the greatest television shows of all time. Better than, you know, The Wire, The Sopranos, Dexter, etc etc.
On the Other Hand…
The good news is that your inevitable, happiness-based existential crisis may be unnecessary, and here is why: Think about your favorite games of all time. Now… were any of them MMOs? I am guessing no. For me, my favorite games are Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, and so on. I quit playing WoW a few weeks ago after four years, and I have 7000+ hours logged; not only is that more time than I spent playing those listed games combined, it is probably more time than I played in the entire SNES era. And yet WoW will never occupy a place on my favorite game list. No doubt I had some memorial experiences, but the vast majority of those experiences were social ones that could have existed just as easily elsewhere, like in EQ, Rift, LotRO, Warhammer, etc etc. There was nothing specifically exclusive to WoW to merit associating the social triumphs with the quality of the game itself. Moreover, the very principals Nils attributes to “great” MMOs sours my memory of the WoW-specific moments of genius – Sunstrider Isle was an absolutely amazing starting experience, but it and other experiences are diluted by ~6920 hours of merely Okay gameplay. Just like a movie or book or blog post (like this one) can overstay its welcome via lack of editing and meandering structure, a game too can ruin itself by unnecessary extension.
It is for this reason that I believe the future of the MMO market is heading towards a more single-player Show & Tell experience. This was not possible when the payment model was pretty exclusively subscription-based, but now the stage is set through the legitimization of alternative payment models (F2P, but also Diablo 3 RMAH, etc) to allow developers to go back to crafting experiences with defined beginnings, middles, and ends. The end of the story is not always the end of gameplay, of course, which is where the Show & Tell comes into play. MMOs will be less about Lucy taking away the football at the last moment, and more about showing her how far it can fly.
Future of Gaming: We (May) Be Screwed
If you play games and had a pulse in the last fifteen years, you have undoubtedly bore witness to the meteoric rise of the Free To Play (F2P) model, which had been preceded by the Downloadable Content (DLC) model, which had been preceded by the “new Madden game every year” model, sandwiched inbetween the 8-hour single-player campaign and Skinner Box School of Character Advancement loafs. It is enough to make a grown man cynically quip “I told you so!” as he shuffles back into the 1990s when games were games, and boys dreamed of somehow getting credited as Writer in the next Squaresoft Final Fantasy epic.* You know, when gaming was cool because it was an ultra-niche hobby that catered solely to you and your demographic – back before the industry totally sold out** and before it was considered hip to pretend you were upset that something sold out.
Well my friends, it actually might be worse than you think.
900,001; Or How Tiny Tower Killed WoW
The frustrating thing about canceling your subscription is that you never end up doing it for the reasons you want to have done it for. All of us have those little wedge issues that crop up in the process of an evolving game design that we disagree with on fundamental levels. Cash shop antics with the Sparkle Pony/Disco Lion. Heroics being too easy or too hard. Justice point gear and the availability thereof. Premium subscriptions. Racials, class balance, paladins getting nerfed into the ground every patch/not getting nerfed enough.
I had a whole post titled “The Unapologetic Grind” ready to go, talking about how the malaise that seems to be spreading in the “community” has more to do with the transition of the badge system into an “empty bar filling” system that both encourages you to grind way past your normal limits (just… one… more… bar…) and injects feelings of inadequacy when you inevitably fail to fill them. Indeed, the first day that my guild failed to hit our maximum XP cap was the day I could point to as the beginning of the end.
But… when you get right down to it, the answer is always simple.
I first came across Tiny Tower a few weeks ago after hearing Scott Johnson and friends talk about it on The Instance and The Morning Stream, two rather hilarious podcasts I have listened to for months. If you have never heard of Tiny Tower, it is a “F2P” Apple app that is objectively a pointless waste of time. There is nothing skillful or strategic about any of the gameplay, and obviously there is no plot to speak of. It exists on my iPod only because it stimulates my nucleus accumbens in a completely vapid way: it tricks my physiological drive to multi-task into believing that the accumilated time spent playing has any meaning. And yet I have not deleted the app. It is still on there.
The philosophical question of whether anything we do has value or meaning aside, WoW engages in this same remote, psychological pleasure-center stimulation. And why wouldn’t it? It is an MMO with a monthly subscription. The difference between creating enough content to occupy people for a month versus creating content it takes a person a month to complete is the difference between bankruptcy and a sweet raise. Think about those Tol Barad trinkets you spent 30+ days “earning.” That they required 125 marks and Exalted reputation was entirely arbitrary. It was not about creating content, it was about creating a time wall that needed to be dismantled brick by brick by repetitive activity which creates an illusiary value to the end-product. Something you have worked towards accumilates value that simply getting it right away would lack.
In WoW’s defense, there is actually an end product there: a trinket that you might be using the rest of this expansion’s lifespan. Games like Tiny Tower have latched onto the notion that you do not even need the end-goal, do not need a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Worse than that though, these designers have realized that the individual actions do not have to be entertaining either. These are sandbox games without the sand; play replaced by going through the motions of play, yet triggering the same biochemicals as if you were having actual fun. And having thus deluded you into believing your participation has value, they tweak the “gameplay” to make even this seem reasonable*:
Seriously. I am waiting for a Steam deal on Limbo because $9.99 is a tad higher than I would prefer, and yet I was musing on how much could be accomplished with 1,000 Tower Bux… at the low, low price of $29.99. Philip Morris has nothing on these “F2P” assholes.
As my friends started logging into WoW less and less, the weakening social ties to the game gave me room to stand from my chair and really examine what I was doing. The taste of daily quests soured in my mouth. The AH was still fun… but it was the deals and strategy and the profit, not the tedium of listing, undercutting, emptying the mailbox. Sure, I could (further) automate those actions, but that is like automating chewing to speed tasteless digestion – it misses the point. The one activity I enjoyed for the sake of enjoyment was PvP. But when I became Honor capped on my warlock, BGs ceased to be amusing nearly instantly. “If I’m going lose 5 games for every 1 win during Twin Peaks holiday, I may as well do it on a toon that has use for Honor.” In other words, character advancement and fun had been so inexoriably linked in my mind that I questioned whether they could even exist independantly. Tiny Tower demonstrated that I would do something unfun for even the vaguest of rewards, and that was when I realized I was not actually having fun in those BGs. Or rather, it was no longer immediately clear that I was.
A lot of these sort of posts smack of “I quit WoW and so should you, for these reasons,” but that honestly is not my intention. I think there are some definite missteps that the designers made in Cataclysm, and I would be happy to debate those at length any day of the week regardless of whether subs are lost or gained. The fact of the matter though, is that if I was still having an engaging social experience in WoW I would probably still be paying $15/month. Without friends, WoW falls to the merits of its single-player experience. When that single-player experience is no longer fun, it falls finally onto its time soaking skills. And in the arena of time soaking, WoW cannot hold a candle to “games” like Tiny goddamn Tower.
God save us all.
*Obviously anyone who has played this “game” will go on about how they haven’t paid for anything. I haven’t paid for anything either. But any time you looked at that Bux screen and did not laugh at the designers’ overreach is a time you ceased to “beat the system” and became one with it. Nevermind all the stupid iTunes band previews or Youtube videos you watched because they gave you “free” Bux to do it.
The Problem With F2P and Microtransactions
Are you someone who almost never engages in microtransactions, has no real issue with people that do, but nevertheless feel like you are losing something whenever a game company starts to embrace them? Do you get the sensation that the purchasing power of your money is decreasing the longer a game goes on, seemingly for no real reason? Do you think cash shops are just plain wrong but have difficulty expressing it in words? The good news is I finally remembered the name of the economic concept behind the sensation: consumer surplus. The bad news is… so have game companies.
Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer would be willing to pay more than the current asking price, then they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they spent to buy it. An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus. Note that the utility of the first few liters of drinking water is very high (as it prevents death), so the first few liters would likely have more consumer surplus than subsequent liters.
The description is pretty self-explanatory, but I think the graph is a bit more useful.
And why not, here is a Greek college professor talking about it.
Do you want some videogame examples? Think back to multiplayer Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. When I bought Diablo 2, it was because I wanted a quality dungeon-crawler experience similar to Diablo 1 – that there was an entire multiplayer experience attached was pure consumer surplus for me. Same with thing with Warcraft 3. Would I have paid an extra $5 for access to multiplayer? Probably. That $5 that I would have paid but did not have to amounted to Blizzard “leaving money on the table.”* Non-game examples includes Netflix Streaming, where you can access hundreds of movies at any time for $7.99. In spite of the “controversy” surrounding them raising prices of dual streaming/DVD plans, I think it is rather obvious that most Netflix customers would actually pay $10, $15, or even $20 a month for the service, especially since Movies On Demand-style services can cost upwards of $4.99 per movie.
The entire premise of microtransactions is dividing your content into smaller chunks to (re)capture and monetize every ounce of consumer surplus. While it is true that overall the game and it’s various monetized components are still worth buying – it falls within the bounds of the Demand Curve, which by definition means you value the game more than the money used to purchase it – it is equally true that literal value has been extracted from you. In other words, microtransactions remove value from games by reducing your consumer surplus.
Now, there may be the open question of whether the sort of microtransactions Blizzard is doing “counts” as consumer surplus mining. If Blizzard could/did not charge $25 for a mount, for example, would they have made the mounts at all? Would Blizzard have never made the Mobile Armory and/or the premium RealID grouping features if those did not tack on an extra subscription fee? I think they might not have developed those features and mounts, but that is more of an issue with the lack of credible competition** Blizzard faces than anything else. Indeed, competition generally engenders the greatest amount “value-added” consumer surplus since direct price wars are untenable. Then again, I might also bring up the Red Queen argument in that, much like raiding content, Blizzard has to continually be moving forward to maintain its present position. The artists that made and animated the Disco Lion would have been working on something either way, so if not adding that mount in as a PvE/PvP reward of some type, the effort might have been directed into a Titan or Diablo 3 model instead (increasing consumer surplus in those games).
In any case, I find the F2P and microtransaction model somewhat disturbing, yet inevitable. It obviously has the power to save games that would not exist otherwise (e.g. LotRO, APB, etc), and thereby opens the possibility of radical innovation in the types of games we play. Similarly, the rise of Steam and iTunes (and Facebook for that matter) as content delivery services makes indie games/music possible that could not exist in a typical retail box store. That said, the existence of that hitherto unexploited consumer surplus also leads to worse games, like Tiny Tower***. Meanwhile, instead of growing the industry, we have the major players pumping out sequals and squeezing the blood from what rocks are left instead of, well, mining for new rocks. This same phenominom is going on in the movie industry, with parallels like making movies 3D not because that adds value, but because A) they get to charge more, and B) it makes the movies nearly impossible to pirate.
The way I see it, the more game companies fall over themselves trying to monetize every corner of our consumer surplus, the less they fall over themselves giving us quality entertainment. Eventually, there will be some break-point beyond which lies an Era of Subsistence Gaming where we get exactly what we pay for and not one whit more. And those will be very bleak times indeed.
*Except Blizzard did not actually “leave any money on the table,” since that implies there was no value to Blizzard for giving consumer surplus. As we all know, it is the exact opposite: we as players give that value back to Blizzard in the form of brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Part of that comes from the (historic) quality and polish of their games, but the feeling that we are getting more plays a non-zero part in the calculus.
**Blah, blah, Rift, LotRO, etc. Rift peaked at 600k subs and is now hovering around ~480k. LotRO peaked at 560k and is now at 360k. If you add both Rift and LotRO numbers at their peak, and then multiplied that by two, WoW would still have had more players than that in just North America… in 2008. Lost subs are lost subs, but I bet the Disco Lion made more money in the opening day it was released to cover a year’s worth of lost subs.
***Worse as in psychologically designed to exploit your nucleus accumbens, and essentially disprove the economic theory of rational consumers single-handedly.
The Single-Player MMO
Syncaine made a very interesting footnote in a recent post:
*It’s a multi-layered joke. One: Immersion is a long-running inside joke. Two: While I jokingly say that I’m looking forward to playing an MMO solo, the sad truth is many today hope for just that in their Massively Multiplayer games, and SW will make Cata look like a sandbox. Three: Barrens chat will look tame compared to SW general chat in the first month or two. Not only are SW nerds the worst nerds of all, but you just know every Huntard is going to take their unique brand of ‘gaming’ to SW and making the most (worst) of it.
I do think it is an open question about whether gamers actually want an MMO versus a single-player game with (optional) MMO components. Unlike Syncaine however, I do not think people playing MMOs as single-player games is “sad” at all – it is more indicative of the lengths gamers are having to go to find meaningful entertainment. In other words, I think it is a lack of quality games that have driven this segment into MMOs in the first place.
This is not to say there hasn’t been quality single-player games, but rather there are not enough being put out. Outside of the game-crippling bugs and sloppy design in several areas, Fallout: New Vegas was absolutely amazing and I spent 70 hours in there, loving every minute. I spent a similar amount of time in Dragon Age: Origins. Portal 1 & 2 both fantastic, both over in ~10 hours. So… that is 160 hours out of the 20 I play each week, or amusement enough for about two months. What about the other ten months?
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| I quit smoking when I bought WoW, joking I would trade one addiction for another. I have not smoked in 4 years. |
My 4-year WoW anniversary was last weekend, having started 8/17/07. Adding up all the days /played across my toons, I ended up around ~322 days, or 7,728 hours. Depressingly that averages out into 5 hours a day, every day, for four years. I played more when I was unemployed for a year, of course, but it is still shockingly bad. Then again, that also equals $0.087/hour as far as entertainment goes. Or imagine buying a $0.99 app and getting 11.38 hours of gameplay out of it. I find it unlikely that I would have done something (more) productive with my time had WoW not existed, so with that in mind perhaps I should be instead celebrating all the money I saved by switching to Geico playing the everliving hell out of WoW.
I have heard and agree with many people who suggest that WoW will be their first, last, and only MMO. Although I am a storied veteran of games that require other people to play with, e.g. pen & paper D&D, split-screen Goldeneye, Magic: the Gathering, etc, the common denominator was a group of people you enjoy hanging around with. In the absence of friends, WoW is a pretty shitty single-player experience once you reach the endgame. And while this problem can be “solved” by making new friends, actually shifting through all the bullshit is a lot of work* for the payout of challenging gameplay that comes in the form of hoping people that are not you do not screw up, e.g. raiding.
In this light, I do not particularly think the trend of companion AI or whatever is necessarily bad. Having played Minecraft for a while now, I have reached that plateau where you want nothing more than to show off the cool biodome tower you built or the Pit of Doom you dug or the cross-Atlantic powered railroad to someone, anyone else capable of appreciating the amount of effort/vision it took to do so. Of course, the thought of trying to do what I have done on a multiplayer server where anyone could wreck my house and steal my materials at any time is mortifying. I want a Show & Tell, not a group assignment. I want a single-player MMO.
And until then, WoW (with liberal playing of Steam games) will have to suffice.
*As outlined in this three year-old Cracked article, which is still pretty dead-on.
OT: Subscription and Correlation
Did you know that ice cream makes it more likely you will drown? It’s true. When ice cream sales increase, so do the number of drowning deaths. Clearly linked! Speaking of spurious correlations…
I fully expect Rift to now follow in the footsteps of WoW, in that it will decline. Vanilla and BC days had challenging content, and it’s not a surprise that sub numbers grew. WotLK made things ‘accessible’, and surprise surprise, the response was pretty meh (sub numbers dropped in the US/EU, but were offset globally by WoW launching in new regions, hence the overall stagnation). Cata tried to play both sides of the fence, but a combo of too little too late, a gimmick of progression (hard mode rehashes rather than straight-up new content), and a one-track, insult difficulty 1-85 game did it in. With no new regions to offset things, subs are dropping.
(SynCaine in the post “Accessibility killed Rift“)
World of Warcraft’s growth rate went from a perfectly stable 2 million subscribers per year during 2006 to 2009, to zero during WotLK. This was exactly the time when Blizzard changed the character progression mechanic.
(Nils in the post “Smoke and Mirrors“)
“If developers design a game which requires too much effort from the average player for too little gain, the average players will start leaving the game. “
This is the part I strongly disagree with, and WoW’s sub history does as well. Vanilla/BC, which had a MUCH harder end-game that fewer players saw to completion, saw massive growth. WotLK/Cata, with raids being cleared by all who stepped inside, have brought decline.
(SynCaine in a comment on Tobold’s post “Syncaine on Accessibility“)
The reason I bring these examples up is because this type of thinking (or lack thereof) is what I consider one of the most pernicious, asinine fallacies in any discussion of World of Warcraft. It is intellectual laziness at best, intellectual dishonesty at worse. Before I begin in earnest however, here is a slightly augmented graph from MMOData that most people refer to when they talk about WoW subs:
1) Correlation does not mean causation.
Standard preface to any claim that X means Y. Ice cream and drowning are only “linked” because there is a third factor involved.
2) Even if correlation did mean causation, why this particular correlation?
This specific point is the reason the argument is intellectually lazy. When you look at the graph, it is true what Nils and SynCaine said about there being a relatively rapid period of growth during vanilla and TBC that was not apparent after the release of Wrath. However, tying that solely (or even partially) to accessibility/character progression/difficulty/etc is a completely unsupported leap of logic.
There is zero evidence given by either author as to why it was “existence of more challenging content” and not, I dunno, the introduction of the PvP Honor System and BGs in the summer of 2005, which coincides with a 500k sub spike in WoW-West on graph. Or the release of ZG in September of that year, also suspiciously near another 500k sub bump. Or if I looked at WoW’s overall numbers like Nils does with his “2 million per year growth” argument, perhaps I could argue Patch 1.12 with it’s wildly successful:
The stage is set for intense, objective-based land battles as Horde and Alliance vie for control over important strategic positions and resources around Azeroth. Head out for Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands to engage the enemy on the field!
…was responsible for the corresponding bump of 1 million (!) subscribers. Clearly, clearly, more things like Silithus and the old Eastern Plagueland towers is just what WoW needs.
3) What does endgame accessibility/difficulty have to do with anything?
This is another intellectually lazy part of the argument that the authors never bother to address. What percentage of the playerbase ever actually makes it to the endgame, and is this percentage big enough to even impact subscription growth? That is an open question.
The best metric that I can come up with is to look at the number of guilds who killed Beasts of Northrend in 10m ToC after two years of it being out (86,187 guilds), multiply that by something charitable like 30 players, and then divide by the approximate population in the graph above while only taking into account the regions in which WoWProgress collects data (~6.5 million). The result is 39.77% of players killing the easiest boss in the easiest tier of which we have data (something like Noth the Lootbringer from Naxx 2.0 would have been better, but alas…). That actually sounds like a lot of people, and 19.88% assuming only 15 raiders per guild is not too shabby either when referring to raid content.
That said, there is no evidence whatsoever from those two that difficulty-related gyrations amongst the top 1/3rd of players doing raiding content has a meaningful impact in comparison to whatever the remaining 2/3rd non-raiders are doing. Between 2005 and 2009 the subscriber base was growing at ~25% per year. Is it even remotely likely that the top 40% had anything to do with a meaningful drop in growth rate?
4) Growth, or lack thereof, does not really mean anything other than what it is.
What I mean by this is that you cannot simply look at growth as anything other than what it is: growth. It does not mean anything else without further information. For all the talk about growth rate percentages and “the design decisions that caused them,” look at the pink line for a moment. That represents subscriptions in NA alone. Unfortunately MMOData stopped tracking that information individually (or perhaps Blizzard stopped giving it out), but the whole of TBC resulted in ~650k more subscriptions in NA over a two-year period.
Is 325k sub growth per year more than the apparent zero sub growth in the year of Wrath? Sure… but we have no real way of knowing why that growth was occurring. Was player churn less of a factor in vanilla and TBC? Was the growth simply due to the release of WoW in additional regions? Does market saturation have any impact? Do we simply ignore, I dunno, one of the worst global recessions in world history?
Oh, wait a minute… early 2009 was when the markets were at their worst? And yet WoW subs were relatively stable in most regions during that entire year? Clearly Wrath’s accessibility and stress-free raiding were the only things stopping WoW’s overall decline in a tough market, as evidenced by Cata’s increased difficulty leading to subscription loss once markets improved. QED, amirite?
The bottom line here is that you cannot use WoW subscription numbers as evidence of a claim without first proving said numbers have anything to do with said claim. Did World of Warcraft gain six million subscriptions worldwide in its first year? Yes. Was that because of the strength of its class balance? Its risk versus reward structure? Its accessibility? No one can really say; all of it would be conjecture.
Personally, I believe the initial rush was due to the strength of the IP – I know I certainly gave WoW a shot because of how much I enjoyed Warcraft 3 – and also due to the strength of the Blizzard brand. The designers also got a lot of things down perfectly that I feel other MMO designers stumble across to this day, such as letting characters jump, making solo-play possible, having quests with interesting plots, getting the reward faucet just right while questing, and so on. The tone and tenor of game balance has certainly shifted quite a bit from when I began in TBC, but where I disagree with Nils and SynCaine is that I feel that Wrath was actually a step in a better direction in most (not all) ways. Unfortunately, until the duo, and others who believe as they do, let go of the absurd notion that “the numbers” support their conclusions, it is impossible to have any rational discussion about it.
There is a separate argument as to linear raid progression vs episodic progression, but that is an OT for another time.
The Million Gold Question
What would I do with 1 million gold?
The same thing anyone else would do: nothing different.
If you have been using Auditor for any length of time, there is feature of it that is useless 99% of the time, but this happens to fall under the 1%: total audit. The release of 4.0 broke most of my addons beyond repair, so this is only since Cataclysm was released:
I broke the 400k mark for the first time a few days ago, but nearly 2 million gold has whipped through my bags in the last five months. Does that not count? Why do I say “I’ve broken the 400k mark for the first time?” And for that matter, what exactly is the value of the 400k when, by definition, for me to have 400k means that 400k of whatever net worth I actually own is languishing in my bags, getting no return?
Gold is primarily a way to keep score, for gold bloggers and many non-bloggers. If my gold total goes up from day-to-day, that means I’m Charlie Sheen winning. Except that really does not make any sense. If I was serious about reaching a cap or maximizing my potential, I would not have 400k in my bags, I would have 400k worth of items in play on the AH. At the same time, WoW is a game to me, the AH is a game within a game Inception-style, and juggling 400k worth of items on a daily basis is just too much.
Thus I am skeptical of when bloggers like Mageshadow say:
I’m almost at 600k, what would I do with my million gold? Trading Card Game mounts for one, I’ve had my eye on a swift spectral tiger for a while, and a mottled drake & a riding turtle wouldn’t hurt. I’d also probably buy a couple achievements/mounts that are obtained through raiding, mainly Invincible and Mimiron’s head. I’d also probably hand out some gifts to my friends, mainly choppers and sandstone drakes.
None of those things require 600k to purchase, so why wait? One million is a number. And actually, it is a pretty arbitrary number when you have already “handled” 1.8 million. If I had one million liquid gold I would get the Warcraft Econ interview and… nothing else. Maybe it does become easier in some peoples’ minds to spend the gold when they have finally achieved their “goal,” but I doubt that ever ends up being the case. Most people who make this much gold have made it because A) they have a hard time spending gold, and/or B) they are addicted to getting an ever-increasing high score. Spending 100k on a Spectral Tiger is indistinguishable from losing 100k on bad Glyph bet (or whatever) to such people. I especially think it’s funny buying mounts when you can only use one mount at a time – you cannot ride Invincible, Mimiron’s Head, the Riding Turtle, Sandstone Drake, and the Spectral Tiger at the same time.
Then again, maybe I’m just crazy.
P.S. Regarding those two epic weapons I got off Trade for 11k apiece…
P.P.S. I am still fairly confident that BoE epics will retain their value despite ZA/ZG coming out, simply because of the 346 ilevel requirement to zone in. The only sales you should be losing would be to the budget raiders who believe the 353 is good enough for them (and are willing to farm heroics), as compared to the 359 BoE. Odds are good that budget raiders weren’t buying many epic BoEs anyway.
P.P.P.S. If ZA/ZG is faceroll out of the gate though, all bets are off.
OT: Firelands, Difficulty, and Cataclysmic Malaise
As you have no doubt heard by now, Firelands has been delayed until patch 4.2. A lot of people are looking at the delay as a good sign, or perhaps dismissing it as irrelevant considering 4.2 is scheduled to hit (the PTR) “soon after 4.1 goes live,” thus looking at it as though we are getting ZA/ZG early rather than the next tier of raiding late.
From my perspective, this announcement is the unequivocal admission that Blizzard has screwed up the difficulty of this expansion.
Stay a While, And Listen…
Let me start at the beginning. In the beginning, Blizzard created Cataclysm. Blizzard saw that it was hard, and judged it as good. Here is Zarhym on 1/7/11:
We don’t think it was a mistake to start with the difficulty we did. We’re happy overall with the progression path we have in Cataclysm. I think we’ve set an appropriate standard for this expansion, but we’ll continue fine-tuning things (nerfs and buffs) to make sure the end game feels right as time passes. (source)
The forums were filling up with complaints about the LFDisaster tool though, so Ghostcrawler released a rather lengthy blog post called WoW, Dungeons Are Hard on 1/24/11, which can be summed up as “L2P.” In it, he panned the design direction of Wrath with its “zerg-fest” dungeons and breezy Naxx difficulty. It is also the first time we hear about how they lamented the killing of Ulduar by releasing ToC too soon.
Then the numbers must have came in. At least that is the only thing I can imagine prompted this almost complete 180° in less than two weeks:
On the other hand, maybe things have come too far in the other direction. While we’re seeing that player assembled groups have very good success, Dungeon Finder groups are having significant issues. That’s something we’re planning to address. […]
Are you basing this conclusion off of forum posts or in game data? I hope it’s the latter so you get a truly accurate picture.
That’s an analysis pulled from hard data. We always try to base improvements an accurate overall picture.
(2/3/11, source)
The intent of Luck of the Draw is to help make up for the lack of coordination, communication, and familiarity that pick up groups suffer relative to organized groups of guild members and friends. Cataclysm dungeons, especially on Heroic mode, are quite challenging and ask for more group organization than the Wrath of the Lich King dungeons did. Therefore, Luck of the Draw became relatively weaker in Cataclysm. I’m painting the picture with unfairly large brush strokes here, but in general, Heroic dungeons are of appropriate difficulty for organized groups, but just brutal on Dungeon Finder groups. Players wonder, and rightly so, why Dungeon Finder supports Cataclysm Heroic dungeons at all when the chance of success is so low.
(2/4/11, Ghostcrawler’s hilarious follow-up blog post)
The Luck of the Draw buff, however, is being made in response to the feedback we’re seeing on the forums, as well as the statistics we’ve been reviewing which reflect all types of dungeon party trends. We feel it’s a good way of closing the disparity between the success of pick up groups and the success of preformed groups, without trivializing the content for some players to appease others.
(2/5/11, source)
Direct from Blizzard’s mouth, we see an admission that the success rate for LFD groups is abysmal. Players actually in the system need no such prompt; we already know the 50+ minute DPS queues and the constant wipefests of Stonecore, Deadmines, etc etc. There are a bevy of precision nerfs to heroic content, followed by a blanket ICC-esque 15% buff to players.
Always Darkest Before It Goes Pitch Black
Things are a bit more dire than that though. The 2200 PvP weapons, equivalent to hardmode raid drops, are delayed twice. In the announcement, Blizzard says:
The decision to further delay availability of weapons requiring 2200 rating was not made lightly. Currently very few guilds are clearing PvE content that drops weapons of this caliber, which would make rated Battlegrounds and Arenas the primary source for top-tier weapons. We of course don’t want players who are pursuing PvE content to feel as though they must engage in heavy PvP to obtain these weapons in order to be competitive or successful.
(1/25/11, source)
Read it again. The only reason why Blizzard would need to delay these weapons is if they anticipated one thing, and then something unexpected happened. In other words, Blizzard expected (more) guilds to have been downing heroic raiding content by the end of January. The 2200 weapons are released mid-February, and here we are at the beginning of March when we are informed that things have not improved:
In an interview at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, lead producer J. Allen Brack said that players were not sufficiently advanced through the raid content that shipped with third expansion Cataclysm in December to handle the challenge of Firelands. He also suggested that Blizzard was thinking of creating “smaller” content patches for World of Warcraft.
“We feel like the player base isn’t really ready for the next raid yet,” he said. “And that led to some changes where Firelands is now actually going to be in 4.2.”
(3/4/11, source)
The above came from an interview with Eurogamer, not the PR-whitewashed version on the forums. In other words, a month later, there stillare not “enough” players progressing through endgame raiding content. The objective statistics available to players also bears this out. Take a look at these numbers from WoWProgress:
- Beasts (10): 86187 (98.74%)
- Magmaw: 45140 (93.69%)
- Nefarian: 8943 (18.56%)
I picked 10m Northrend Beasts because, as far as I am aware, it is the most defeated raid encounter ever. Thus, that will give us the baseline number of guilds out there remotely interested in raid content, at least circa Wrath. Now look at the most defeated encounter in Cataclysm: Magmaw. Where are the 41,000 missing guilds? Difficulty of content does not necessarily account for 100% of those 41k, of course. There could be attrition, there could be churn, there could be guild consolidation, indeed, it could merely be the death of PuG raiding (which may have registered non-raiding guilds simply because X number of individual members got the achievement via Trade pugs). I do not find the argument that the bottom half of the raiding population is still leveling/gearing up three months later particularly compelling (e.g. “Beasts was out for years!”), but it probably accounts for some.
Or perhaps we should just look at what we have now. Magmaw is the most defeated raid boss this tier with 45,140 guilds claiming victory. It drops down to less than 9,000 guilds for Nefarion. Looks fine, right? I would even agree that such a difficulty curve looks good… if it were not for the fact that 13 heroic bosses exist. Were the hardmodes designed exclusively for the top 15-20% of successful raiders? Does it make any sense for them to be?
Blizzard obviously expected a more robust completion rate months ago. Why has that expectation not been realized? Based on the above, I think it is beyond any doubt that Cataclysm was overtuned, from heroics to raids. You may not have needed any convincing on this, but I find it necessary to lay this groundwork so that I may offer a prediction. I predict Firelands in 4.2 will be easier than this tier of raiding.
It has to be.
Miasmic Malaise
This heightened level of difficulty and barriers against PuGing is what I feel is behind the general feeling of Cataclysmic malaise. It feels like we have jumped from one immediate grind (endgame ICC) to another (heroics/T11). Wrath heroics were easy because that is the point when it comes to 5m daily quests, which heroics have been since Patch 2.3. Meanwhile, Cataclysm heroics were 5m raids, taking upwards of 1.5 hours after 40 minute queues, and you were expected to do them daily. On the raiding front, Naxx trash was AoE-friendly from the very start and people were able to breeze through Naxx itself, yeah… but that was because the concept of hardmodes as we know them was not introduced yet. Naxx hardmodes would have solved the “problem” of challenging content while still fostering an environment that gets people excited about raiding.
Look, this is the first tier of (raiding) content for the expansion. The bar cannot be set here, for the exact reason other bloggers have noticed: burnout and malaise.
Anecdotally, my guild is in this position right now. We are 5/12 only by taking 2-3 raiders from a “sister” guild, and I look at our first few Atramedies attempts and think of Defile all over again. We have two months before ZG/ZA come out, and I cannot imagine mustering the strength to zone back into Bastion or Descent in May, let alone however long it takes Firelands to come out after that. I have not done a heroic on my main in more than a month because 70 VP an hour is not worth my time even with a tank queue. My guild has lost 14 members of a 10m guild between May of last year and Cataclysm’s release, purely from burnout and boredom. I don’t even bother looking at the raid loot tables because what is the point? We aren’t clearing half the raid, gear upgrades are so infrequent as to not be exciting, and the gear itself is not particularly enticing anymore or have that big of a perceptable impact.
Looking at the bigger picture, I think it ultimately comes down to fallout from the 10m/25m gear merge. Blizzard would have to err on the side of caution lest the “25m gear” be given too easily in 10m raids, so 10m was tuned higher. Certain 10m hardmodes, like Magmaw for example, are reportedly miles harder than the corresponding 25m heroic encounter. So, we may in fact have a reversal of Wrath insofar as the 25m raiding tract is easier than 10m, leading to disjointed progression. Meanwhile, if you will remember, the gear back in Wrath contained more meaningful upgrades from 10m tier to 10m tier since it had to leap-frog the 25m gear to get there – getting 251 upgrades after 232 is a 19 ilevel jump as compared to 359 after 346, which is 13. Six ilevels may not seem like a lot, but just look how the reported 353 gear from ZG/ZA placated the “epix are too easy” crowd.
In Conclusion, [restate thesis]
Contrary to how I may come across with the massive wall of text that sits above this, I have no particular issue with difficult content per se. My philosophy has always been that players want content tailored to their skill level. Period. There is nothing selfish about that, or any reason to feel embarrassed by it. One thing Wrath proved rather well is that relatively easy content could in fact exist next to extremely brutal content (Sarth 3D when it was current, 25m H Lich King, etc). The pendulum has simply swung too far the other direction, and it is rather a shame that it has occurred in the first tier of an expansion that should have came out 6-8 months ago.
If you agree, disagree, and/or think I should have directed this 1900-word payload at the AH instead, feel free to let me know in the comments below.
In An Age 
