WoW is Transforming…

The ‘death’ of WoW is being highly exaggerated. What I find hilarious is that a flood of our good friends, The Hardcore Gamers, are jumping on soapboxes and declaring ‘why’ the subscription rates are dropping. Never mind the fact that the subscriber base was flat throughout Wrath of the Lich King, that there are 5 million subscribers in the United States which certainly doesn’t include all 600,000, or that the subscriber base went up to 12 million when Cataclysm came out. Let’s just ignore all this and just hop on a soap box and insert your own personal angst about the video game as THE REASON why the subscription rate dropped 600,000.

Ready, reader?

“Uh huh.”

Then let’s start.

“The game is too hard now.”
“The game is too easy now.”
“There is not enough content to play through.”
“There is too much content to play through.”
“There are no new lands.”
“The new lands suck.”
“Healing is no longer fun!”
“There are too many healers.”
“Who the hell is Deathwing?”
“Deathwing has too much of a presence in the world.”
“The DPS heroic dungeon queues are too long! Blizzard should do something!”
“The Call to Arms satchel, made to shorten queue times, is unfair because DPS will never get them!”

As you can see, this can go in circles all day long. None of it is getting to the source.

Actually, the drop in subscribers is larger than 600,000. What is not being said is that many who dropped out are being replaced by returning players and, of course, some new players. A big issue is that the cost of entry to WoW is getting way too expensive. WoW + the three expansions comes at a price of $120 (using Amazon’s non-sale prices). Something there needs to change in order for a pipeline of new consumers to be restored. But regardless, it is common in this sort of game that people who drop out commonly get replaced by others.

One example is myself.

Since the Wii was doing nothing and I got bored of Starcraft 2 (seriously, who wants to watch Korean kids play and listen to the godawful rank-amateur casters [my favorite is the strange stuff they make up to pass time during the first several minutes of the game because there is no way to make ‘he is building more scvs’ or ‘he is building a supply depot’ into an exciting strategy discussion], I decided to revisit WoW. I was a Vanilla player who quit in 2005 (interestingly, that was probably when I picked up the DS). According to the designer, such as Ghostcrawler, Cataclysm was not designed for current WoW players. It was designed for players like myself, for those who liked Vanilla and left long ago.

Earlier I made a post on Cataclysm, and I said that Blizzard was taking a huge, huge risk here with revamping the game world and other things they were doing with the expansion. Others picked this line up such as Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry.biz who wrote a column on Cataclysm.

What makes Cataclysm more interesting than any of this is that it’s not, at heart, really an expansion. Rather, it’s a ground-up revamp of the original game – a reworking of the six year-old content which defined the experience at the outset, along with a fundamental re-imagining of the stats and mathematics which are the beating heart of WoW’s gameplay. Compared with these changes, the new races and zones, while exciting for many players, are a side dish.

In changing the fundamentals of World of Warcraft, Blizzard is taking an almost unimaginable risk. This is not comparable with releasing an update to a much-loved franchise which alters the basic structure of the game. A franchise can have the occasional dud game, or simply turn out the odd annual update that doesn’t resonate with the audience. It might make it a little tougher to sell the following year’s game, sure, but it’s not like a weak game in, say, the Call of Duty franchise would change the fact that earlier games in the series were much loved.

Now listen to what is said next…

Faced with that task, Cataclysm is as bold a move as can be imagined. It risks, of course, breaking the fundamentals of a game which is arguably the most successful in the history of the medium. It represents something that no other media company, let alone game company, has ever attempted to do – the radical reworking of a live franchise which generates over a billion dollars a year. It’s the entertainment equivalent of open heart surgery.

Now, why did WoW need open heart surgery in the first place? Blizzard did the change of Cataclysm for a reason. If Cataclysm was open heart surgery, what was clogging up the WoW heart?

WoW’s situation is unique, in both a business and a cultural sense, because it hasn’t followed that curve. Its growth slowed a little in the past year or so, certainly, but there’s no sign of an actual decline – no reason to believe that having hit 12 million subscribers, the game won’t eventually pass the next milestone at 13 million. Cataclysm, in this regard, is a fascinating experiment not just for WoW but for the games business as a whole. It’s an experiment which seeks to answer the question of whether there can be such a thing as an evergreen game, one which is refreshed in perpetuity and keeps its consumer base fascinated in an entirely open-ended way.

World of Warcraft used to be cool. During Vanilla, WoW was very cool. During Burning Crusade, WoW was still somewhat cool. But during Wrath of the Lich King, something very much changed with the health of the brand. WoW suddenly became ‘uncool’. A stigma appeared. People who played WoW were dorks. WoW players became embarrassed to say they played WoW (where as in Vanilla, they were proud and would beat their chest in pride that they played WoW). World of Warcraft also did not really grow with Wrath of the Lich King even though additional territories were added.

There was something about Wrath that turned WoW into a joke. People refer to the faceroll dungeons or the ‘welfare epics’. Whatever it was, what turned Wrath into a joke were the Wrath players otherwise known as ‘Wrath babies’.

As someone who went into Cataclysm from Vanilla, the current player (often a Wrath baby) often says to me: “Vanilla must have been interesting because players didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Everything was so new.” This, of course, was not how Vanilla was. I politely tell the person, “The Vanilla players were much better than the WoW players I see today. They had to do things like CC [Crowd Control] in dungeons, healers had to dispel in fights, and the game was very punishing to idiots.” In Wrath, the game did not punish idiots. People could stand in fire and the healer could carry them.

Here is what I have witnessed. Many players rush through the content and got to 85. It is at 85 where things fall apart for them. The Cataclysm content is very Old School in its design. It is not that it is ‘hard’, but it does severely punish idiots. If you do not understand your class and how to execute it, you will fail spectacularly. It is actually quite a joy to see these Wrath babies’ tears flowing. Often, they then quit the game (good riddance!). Many Wrath guilds fell apart with Cataclysm because they could not handle the content.

“Is this an advocation of hardcore gaming, Malstrom?” No, it isn’t. This is an advocation of Old School gaming. “What’s the difference?”

Think of another RPG, Final Fantasy. What is the difference between Old School Final Fantasy and New School Final Fantasy? Old School Final Fantasy isn’t so much ‘harder’ as it relies more on math. New School Final Fantasy relies more on ‘production values’ and ‘story’ and ‘characterization’.

In general, Old School games demanded skill. People would brag when they got to the next level, e.g. “I just reached Level 5!”. New School games do not demand skill. This is why a New Schooler describes his progress as ‘I am 15 hours into the game’.

Gamers are egomaniacs. MMO players are egomaniacs multiplied by ten. What I am witnessing is that the people who are quitting have been treating WoW, not as a game where you play and can win or lose, but as a vehicle for ego. Their WoW experience is not actually playing the game but more of stroking their own ego. It is as if the game is a providing them something that is missing in their own life.

One thing that Cataclysm does very well is hit you in the stomach. Like a good old school game, it will make you fail… at first. But you learn, get better, and easily beat it. No one ‘failed’ in Wrath. Even a dungeon with the biggest idiots (imagine three hunters) could be carried by a decent healer. But like in Vanilla, if you do not understand your class or have an idea of the mobs you are facing, there is a high probability that you will die.

When people play a game to stroke their ego, they expect to constantly win. Cataclysm does not do that. The reaction is that these Wrath players become enraged at the game (because they cannot get enraged at themselves). The game has failed them! Why couldn’t it be like in Wrath where it was so easy?

What is the point of playing a game if it is so easy? Sounds like a waste of time to me. Games need a challenge or else it isn’t a game but a collection of digital production efforts. Usually people who cite ‘story’ as the most important thing in a video game are people who play games to stroke their ego (e.g. what is the story but the game telling you, the player, how awesome you are?). I have to laugh at those who complain about Cataclysm’s ‘story’. As if WoW’s story was anything but a joke. Who plays games for stories? That’s right. It is people who see games as nothing but as an electronic bath to soak in, not as something to be played.

It was so bad in Wrath that in dungeon runs, the healer could be watching TV while playing. Other players could be half drunk. It was a joke. And it is why the WoW brand imploded.

What we are witnessing with Cataclysm is a transformation of WoW. We are seeing the game swing away from the ‘New School’ style and more toward the ‘Old School’ style. Naturally, the players who loved Wrath are hating what is going on. But good riddance to them. They are being replaced by people like me. The End Game content activity is at an all time high. People who enjoy this type of game are having a ball. I, myself, am having a blast.

But there have been major changes in Cataclysm that were not for the better.

When WoW was first released, there was no endgame content. There were no battlegrounds. It was just the level 1-60 content. However, it was that content that made WoW such a smash hit. This content was very fun to play and was no faceroll. A good example of how Vanilla content was would be Tol’Borad peninsula in WoW. The way how the quests are, with how packed and respawning the mobs are, and with how easy it is for the other faction to shoot you in the back, that is very much how Vanilla was like. Very brutal. With Cataclysm, Blizzard revamped the 1-60 content and replaced it with a faceroll easy-mode zones. Ironically, while people blame ‘the change in Cataclysm’ for the faceroll 1-60 zones, this change is more in the spirit of Wrath of the Lich King than Cataclysm.

Blizzard is transforming WoW to revolve more around endgame content. Whether this is good or bad, I cannot say. But the faceroll 1-60 quest lines now is to rapidly advance players and alts to the endgame. It is why there was only 5 levels added instead of 10.

Another bad change was the Guild leveling. This changed Guilds from being a mere container that held people (where the people held the value) to where the container had more value than the people in it. It has changed the playerbase to do things like stay in high level guilds that are full of people they hate.

World of Warcraft is cool again. The game actually rewards skill. Let me give an example of this. I play a priest. In Cataclysm, healing changed where you would run out of mana if you did not tactically use lower level spells when you could. When Cataclysm came out, all the Wrath healers threw a fit because the game was telling them that they sucked (which is true, they always did suck which is why people like Vanilla veterans have been laughing at them). A more precise example is take two priests, me and this dude. The dude’s gear is ten points higher than mine on ilevel. But I heal better. Why? I correctly gemmed my gear. He prioritized on spirit while I prioritized on intellect. So I ended up having a larger mana pool, with more spell power, and could out heal him easily. Plus, my mana was regenerating faster than his despite his focus on spirit. Why? It is because intellect also regenerates mana. There are simple math equations that explain how all this works. Since he didn’t do his homework, he ended up behind.

“But I don’t want to do homework! This is a game.” Did you know that back in the day, even back with NES games, we would actually draw maps? We did these things outside of the game. NES gamers swear by Nintendo Power.

Video games are best when they reward intelligence and perseverance instead of being nothing more than exercises in visual and audio stimuli.

Cataclysm annoys all the right people. And those who are enthusiastic about Cataclysm are all the people I enjoy playing with. Wrath had people playing the game who never should have been playing in the first place. It is fantastic to see Cataclysm correct this. The moaning and gnashing of teeth at Cataclysm from your local ‘Hardcore Gaming Forum’ is music to my ears.

Above: Ahh, Cataclysm. Annoying all the right people!