As a simple player I’m odd because this genre attracts me so much more for the development side rather than the gameplay. This means that the games I love more aren’t simply those where I have the most fun but in particular those where I feel a vibrant community that is able to tickle my ideas and where I can see a dynamic environment that keeps ‘learning’ and evolving at a good pace. The change is all for me.

From this point of view World of Warcraft is soporific. I joined the semi-closed beta at the end of March 2004 and after ten seconds in the game I was already sure that my previous ‘bets’ on this title were absolutely correct. After about two months my expectations both increased and decreased. Increased because the game was actually better than how I already expected, decreased because I found an environment completely different from the other betas where I participated. The game was moving *painfully* slow.

While Blizzard’s approach was correct and not superficial, the evolution of the game was ascending and descending (for example I criticized the changes to the graphic). The beta was actually a large demo with the tersters actively playing as it was a release but the unique ‘mmorpg flavor’ was missing and despite after one year the game is incredibly improved under various aspects, it also remained basically the same.

I’ve already commented too many times that I don’t like much their approach to this genre because I find the very nature of it in the evolution and constant work. Instead Blizzard has always worked to *finalize* a product to then ‘exploit’ it with future expansions and patches. While this works perfectly for a single player game, I believe it is a wrong model for a mmorpg. A mmorpg is never finalized and once its structure is definitive I consider it already lost.

The life of a mmorpg is its possibility (and directly the one of its developers) of adaptation, of evolution. A continuous learning process that draws its life from not being directed to a final point. When this process stops, it’s over.

This is why in May of the last year I defined World of Warcraft as a large elephant. It’s ‘important’ but it’s also so hard to move. Blizzard did a wonderful work on this title but with qualities coming from the single player games. It drew a line. This line rised the bar for the whole industry in this genre but it’s only now that Blizzard faces it directly. The development now isn’t anymore directed to a final release. What matter is the possibility to learn and evolve and use the time directly as a driving strength.

Well, I don’t see this happening. The bar was raised but now it’s stuck.

EverQuest 2, just in the last month, patched five times. Significant changes and not minimal fixes about wrong tooltips or numeric tweaks. On the other side they also draw a long term plan that, while can be criticized in the approach, directly demonstrates their strong commitment to the game.

A commitment that looks severely lacking at Blizzard. The last patch came before Christmas and was all but impressive. It added a new dungeon, a few quests and a long list of minor fixes (the ‘flat’ development that I always bring up). Nearly two months have passed and what we have is a rescheduled ‘localization patch’, to be delivered next week.

Tyren:
We’ve never described our content updates as being monthly Ferris, just that we plan to provide them as often as possible. Please be patient, we have quite a bit in store for World of Wacraft.

Goodnight mmorpgs, welcome Diablo++. At least the subscription fee is still ‘monthly’.

This while craptacular, completely retarded ‘features’ work ‘by design’:

Foozle:
(because moderators need parsers and various pages of explainations before they understand what is being asked)
He’s asking you to remove teh ability to communicate in l337 speak.

Tyren:
I have heard no consideration for changing the way it works now.

Congratulations. We have a game with a strict naming policy to not break the roleplay immersion while everyone is allowed to exploit the communication between the factions in leet speak.

Cerealkilla breaks the immersion.
|_0|_ ||>\/\/|\||) \|/0|_| |\|00|3 <- This, instead, doesn't break the immersion, obviously. In a similar way exploiting the Line of Sight in PvE is worth a ban, while exploiting the Line of Sight in PvP is allowed.

It makes sense only for Blizzard.