I wouldn’t write about this but I got called on.

It seems that the Koreans were able to kill the biggest foozle currently in World of Warcraft, aka the dragon named “Onyxia”. This while the 600k players on the north american servers are still tinkering to accomplish it (and struggling with raid-related bugs).

This news is accompanied by a choreographic screenshot and the announce that they just needed three days to level up a mage to 60 (but weren’t characters kept from beta to release in Korea?).

The news isn’t important as a big event itself. It is important in the way it’s tied to something Ubiq wrote recently (today it’s all-Ubiq, Ubiquitous).

“World of Warcraft” is the exact same game here and in Korea. It’s not getting a localization that will adapt the mechanics of the game. In this case I’m interested in observing how Blizzard will react to this. If what has been said is correct, this game will become a huge hit in Korea and this means that those players WILL HAVE an impact on the design of the game. This super hardcore playerbase will feel flat bored way, way sooner than the north american players and I’m more than sure that Blizzard won’t just ignore a million or so subscribers paying up to 24$ each month (that’s the monthly fee in Korea, confirmed by Blizzard).

This may be both a good (because it will push the development of a game that now seems sitting and yawning, glutted, the day after the party) and a bad thing (because it will force the flat, horizontal development. Adding an infinite number of ‘stuff’ in a strategy dictated by mudflation and removing directly any type of depth from the game world).

Btw, your ph4t 133t is here.