There was a post at wow.com yesterday about the death of in-game interaction. Unfortunately, the writer set his premise but then spent the rest of the article explaining what he would do to fix it, instead of exploring his actual premise and the reasons why. His ideas were mostly nonsense and even included that old hoary chestnut of a bigger death penalty. This obviously meant that the comments were made up of four pages of people calling him a moron. But digging deeper into the comments I discovered something: a few people were agreeing with his actual premise, and as a result they were getting down-rated.
The actual fact of the matter is that the majority of players in the 11.5 million that play WoW are not the the same ones who played it back in 2005. They did not experience the original WoW and its social aspect. Their WoW is the log in, push a green button, do an instance and get your loots without talking to anybody. It seems that a lot of the original players who want social interaction have moved on to EvE. A pity that I don’t like space games. So of course that post on wow.com is going to be taken to pieces – the playerbase has changed. He’s preaching to the wrong crowd.
So where does this leave old fossils like me? In the unenviable position of whining about this state of affairs on my blog. I played a bit of WoW on Sunday afternoon. Did some stuff on my priest. It actually bored me shitless. I haven’t made any friends, but that is as much my own fault as the games. I searched in the Barrens yesterday and discovered about 30 other players there. Yet I didn’t attempt to make contact with any of them. This is my own unwillingness, but it is also a symptom of the state of the game. The game doesn’t put you in any situations where you could make friends. To try and force it yourself is un-natural and uncomfortable. Why should I go through that in a game that is supposed to be relaxing?
Cataclysm will not fix this. It will have a brief period of social activity when everyone is levelling together. But the basic game mechanics are still the same. I was thinking yesterday that even questing has become out-dated. I do not have to even read a quest now. Click on the ‘!’, look on map where the area is that I have to go, cursor over mobs until I find one that says ’0/12′, kill them until it says 12/12, go back to point on map with ‘?’. It’s not very immersive. But if that is all you know then it’s great. You did not experience the original game so you have nothing to compare it to.
The next 12 months should be very interesting. Apart from Catalycm itself, there are a bunch of new games coming out. Guild Wars 2 looks very impressive. They promise a lot but if they deliver it could be my WoW killer. Lets face it – WoW isn’t the game that it used to be. But it was so good when it came out, so breathtaking in its scope and execution that we just don’t want to leave her behind. I’ll leave you with a quote from Travis McGee on San Francisco. It sums up my feelings on WoW:
“… San Francisco is the most depressing city in America. The come-latelys might not think so… But there are too many of us who used to love her. She was like a wild classy kook of a gal, one of those rain-walkers, laughing gray eyes, tousle of dark hair–sea misty, a lithe and lively lady, who could laugh at you or with you, and at herself when needs be… A girl to be in love with, with love like a heady magic… She used to give it away, but now she sells it to the tourists. She imitates herself. Her figure has thickened. The things she says now are mechanical and mechanized. She overcharges for cynical services … This one had her chance to go straight and she lost it somehow, and it has been downhill ever since. That’s why she is so depressing to those of us who knew her when. We all know what she could have been, and we all know the lousy choices she made. She has driven away the ones who love her best. A few keep trying. But the love words have a hollow tone these days.”
from “The Quick Red Fox” by John D. MacDonald.
August 23, 2010 at 11:30 am
Well, I have to agree with you on this one. WoW has actually gotten to the point with me that if I see a /tell on my screen I almost get annoyed that somebody is talking to me. It’s hard to get into the social aspect when everything is designed to be a button push away instead of through interaction.
I personally am looking forward to FFXIV coming out. It’s basically an improvement on FFXI which came out quite a while ago. The social aspect is one part of FF that never really faded over the course of it’s life. So I’m hoping that game will change things for me and those who play it.
But, I look at it fom another perspective as well. Things change, they always have and always will. Things evolve and if you don’t evolve with it then you don’t survive. I think tradition is a foolish concept as best formed by those who resist change.
My point is that this is how the modern MMO is evolving, and we either have to go along with it or find another choice of entertainment.
August 23, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I hear you. The game is just so shallow now. I stopped my sub 6 months or so ago, and dont miss it. WoW just isn’t the same anymore. I would be interested to find out if the 11.5 million subscribers they say they have is the honest truth. I reckon it would be a fair bit below that.
Like you, I am keen to see how GW2 goes. The Gamescon gameplay demos showed recently look pretty good.
August 23, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Wow… that’s exactly how I felt when i finally decided to quit. I need to read that book.
August 23, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Raiding still needs cooperation. It does not need the cooperators to be friends, but it is still a place where you need other people and they need you.
August 23, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Pick the mechanics right and allow enough overgearing and even raiding can be as much of a ADD-rushed faceroll as a heroic.
August 23, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I suppose your raiding comment is right in a way. It’s not so much the need for teamplay as it is the desire for a social community. WoW, does NOT have this. You may have a guild with friends you like and raid with, but other then that there is no more joining guilds based on experiences with. it’s just blanket recruitment with randoms joining and leaving all the time.
August 23, 2010 at 9:22 pm
With that many people playing, the average player is no longer a gamer who likes the genre, it’s the average idiot you find everywhere online. I’d rather have fewer social interactions with them and I’d quit if I had to rely on them to level up.
And if you do find somebody you like, you’re probably not playing at the same pace. If you gain 10 levels on your friend, there’s no shared content. He’s either boosting you or one-shotting mobs he’s killed before. Maybe you’ll reconnect at the level cap? Yeah, right. This means you either need a big social network or a good friend who agrees to level with you.
Hard to find sympathetic people. Probably transient anyway. WoW isn’t about engaging with other people. It’s mostly about playing alone, together.
August 23, 2010 at 11:45 pm
It’s about changing the way you play the game. Changing from the investment of hours of your time to the NEW gameplay: short, controlled bursts of enjoyment.
Quests: The distance to the mob has been reduced. Heroic 5-mans: automatically in group, gogogogo, leave. PVP: Log on, get in queue, pvp, leave. Raids: If our ICC HM is not fully cleared in less than 3hrs, it’s a fail.
Blizzard wants WoW to be something a casual gamer (ie. the whole marketshare, not a specialised demographic ie. young male with nothing to do for the whole weekend) can log into at any time of the day, get a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, then leave. No more flying halfways across the Outlands continent for that one daily quest. No more recruiting and travelling to 5-mans and BG’s. No more all-day (spread over 2 days) raids. The casual market DOESN’T HAVE THAT TIME… but that’s the market with the most money.
Most importantly, your gaming experience is not reliant on OTHER PLAYERS. That places the *control* out of Blizzard’s hands, and into someone elses. That’s unacceptable. If you have to do something, you can’t be reliant on another player, because that’s a time sink. That player may be bad, or unavailable. Remember archiving group quests until someone… anyone… was available? Casuals simply don’t have the time to wait.
WoW is now a game of short, controlled bursts. Like FPS shooters and flash webgames. People can fire it up, do something and get a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT, then log out. WoW no longer requires a TIME INVESTMENT. The game itself is no longer a time sink.
The middle school student, the Uni student, the young worker, the middle manager, the parent, the grandparents… they can ALL play WoW. Just 1hr or two a day, max. Market share up, watch the money flow. Congratulations to Activision+Blizzard for a profitable business strategy.
August 24, 2010 at 12:05 am
The point of the rant sort of slipped away from me there. So, to re-iterate:
“Reliance on other players is the game’s biggest timesink, and Blizzard must reduce it to cater to the casual gamer market.”
Waiting around in Dalaran so a 25-man raid can fill is almost half the time of the raid itself. That is bad business, and the main reason why it’s being killed.
August 25, 2010 at 11:59 am
What Karadan said. I seriously can’t believe that you are whining about player interactions.
I am playing since TBC and I know what it was like to form a group for a damn heroic. Fuck man. It took half an hour to get a healer and another half to get a tank and when you zone in, wipe at the second trash pack because the tank is not def-capped or the healer is in pvp gear.
Then go back to Shat and spam another half an hour for a tank/healer. Some dps will leave. Spam for DPS as well… seriously? all this for a damn heroic? no ty.
Second, I don’t know how you guys are seing it, but my experience with the players in this game have all been bad.
I have met people so weird that have made me shudder. Those who are not weird are simply just cold and cruel. Those who aren’t are just immature teenagers. Frankly the best I can hope for inside such a game is for someone who just shuts up and gets his job done.
August 25, 2010 at 10:02 pm
[...] one’s going out on a limb a tad but Adam at The Noisy Rogue has a response to a recent discussion on WoW.com about the death of in game interaction, and how in his eyes [...]
August 29, 2010 at 9:14 am
The whole “quick, do the job, get out” is not appealing to me. I would very quickly burn out if I did not have my guild to interact with on a social basis. The does actually state that its intended goal is to maintain a social community in wow.
The changes does indeed have benefits as Okrane mentions but at what cost? The game nourishes a non-interaction community sadly.