…Another 40-man raid instanced slated to launch this spring! Rejoice!
Blog commentary here.
The original “news” starts with a great handjob. Here is a summary of the relevant parts. Plase also notice as Rob Pardo isn’t leading anymore WoW as I rumored many times:
Jeff Kaplan knows what it’s like to try to please all of the people all of the time. Don’t envy him.
As a lead game designer at Blizzard Entertainment for World of Warcraft, the ridiculously successful online PC game that now has more than 5.5 million subscribers, Mr. Kaplan, 33, is a combination of long-term planner, whipping boy, police chief and deity for a rabid global player-base that is about as large as the populations of the cities of Chicago, Houston and Detroit combined.
That ease of play has made the game fantastically successful, but it has also created what has become almost a blood feud in the game and on Web message boards between the game’s casual users and more serious players. The issue is that once players reach Level 60, if they want to keep fighting bigger and badder monsters and if they want to get rarer and more powerful loot, they must start to work in teams, perhaps of 10 or 20 players. The most epic challenges, like conquering Blackwing Lair and its master, the black dragon Nefarian, require 40 players to work together with the coordination of synchronized swimmers.
But because the game from Level 1 to Level 59 is so easy, there are a ton of Level 60 users who don’t know how to be team players and don’t have the time or inclination to learn. And that is the root of the current conflict. Casual players complain that they can’t get rewards comparable to those earned by hard-core raiders, like the Claw of Chromaggus or Mish’undare, Circlet of the Mind Flayer. Raiders like me often respond that casual players just want a handout.
On Thursday morning, Mr. Kaplan took time to discuss World of Warcraft’s high-end content, including new details about the game’s next hard-core dungeon, the Naxxramas necropolis, home of the undead Scourge. (There is also an additional retail expansion expected later in the year, probably in the fall, that will increase the level cap to 70.) Here follow excerpts from the conversation:
Q. Tell me about your general approach to top-level content and how you can appeal to such a diverse user base.
A. What we constantly do is look at the whole picture. We need to address an audience like my mom, who plays once in a while but still manages to get to Level 60 and doesn’t raid, all the way to people who play 14 hours a day who need less sleep than the rest of us. People talk about the game fundamentally changing at Level 60, and they are right. There are people who are seeking that hard-core endgame experience, but to people who casually follow the quests and just ended up at Level 60, it can be very jarring to them. We’re trying to put in more content for them, like the Field Duty quests in Ahn’Qiraj, but the resolution we’re all hoping for is the expansion, which will give those players more WOW as they know it. [Mr. Kaplan also said that the game would soon add a new casual-player-friendly armor set obtained through a multipart quest. The first parts can be completed by a solo player, he said, while the later parts will require a group of no more than five people.]
Q. Why not just let casual players get rewards comparable to those from raids?
A. It would be almost impossible for us to do, and this is a philosophical decision. We need to put a structure in place for players where they feel that if they do more difficult encounters, they’ll get rewarded for it. As soon as we give more equal rewards across the board, for a lot of players it will diminish the accomplishment of killing something like Nefarian. My favorite times in the development cycle are when there are encounters that are close to being defeated but have not yet been beaten. It really creates a sense of awe among the players that there is something big and truly dangerous in the world. But it would be very disappointing if the items found on Nefarian were the same thing you could get in your nightly Stratholme run. [Stratholme is a much easier five-person dungeon.]
Q. What can you tell me about Naxxramas?
A. Naxxramas is going to be the most difficult thing in the game until the expansion pack comes out. It will be the pinnacle, and it’s absolutely massive. You’ll see this big necropolis floating above Eastern Plaguelands. It’s a 40-man raid zone, and it’s bigger than the Undercity [one of the main cities in the game]. Things could change, but we’re up to something like 18 bosses in there, and they are really cool, too. But it’s going to be hard. Really hard. We’re hoping to release it in the spring.
Btw, I love how he quotes his “mum” as an example of the casual player who cannot access raid content when this October (Blizzcon) he used her again to demonstrate pretty much the opposite:
By making sure that there is “unbeaten content” in the World of Warcraft, it not only enriches the world for the people the ‘high end guilds’ that strive to beat it, it also makes the world feel bigger and more alive for everyone else. It gives people something to strive for. Blizzard take issue with the charge that endgame dungeons are designed for the ‘1% of the game world that will actually see it.’
Jeff Kaplan (Tigole): My mom has two level 60’s and a level 40, and she gets MC raid invites.
The solution for the casual players? Straight from Tigole’s mouth:
but the resolution we’re all hoping for is the expansion, which will give those players more WOW as they know it.
Which is exactly what Tobold commented (and I quoted many times already): “pushing the unfun further back”. That’s the solution they have, stretch the treadmill and temporarily dodge the bullet because they have *no clue* about how making WoW more fun without resorting to the same patterns they copied and refined from other games. Here we go with the mudflation. You’ll love it.
I also love this part:
There are people who are seeking that hard-core endgame experience, but to people who casually follow the quests and just ended up at Level 60, it can be very jarring to them. We’re trying to put in more content for them, like the Field Duty quests in Ahn’Qiraj.
So, your role as a casual player is as a worker for the uber guild capitalism. You grind and farm stuff so that the patrons can access content while you sit there staring and drooling on their shiny armor.
If all the players could access all the content “it would diminish the accomplishment” (Tigole’s words) for the catass uber guilds. So there must be a gap between you and them so that they can feel cool and mock you with their uber superiority (laughing at your dead body in PvP while dissertating on how much more “skilled” than you they are in their deep purple suits and epic mounts).
That’s pretty much the same design phylosophy of Brad McQuaid (first paragraph quoted), you can see clearly their “shared background” (Tigole was a famous catass guild leader in EverQuest).
Enjoy your second citizenship and the “MMO social pyramid”:
They are doing a pretty outstanding work at demonstrating that they have no clue. And that they don’t deserve that success they are seeing now.
Things will change, albeit slowly and depending how much more fucking *asleep* the other MMO competitors will remain instead of waking up and take advantage of all the mistakes that Blizzard is currently doing. And instead of contributing to its success by being more clueless than them and copycatting them while dying of envy.
Don’t chase the tail and bite the dust. Solve the core problems. Anticipate!
WAKE UP!