People are toying with WoW’s new statistics page.

Lum in particular says (or not, see comments) this is the perfect Mordor’s all-seeing eye that every designer would desire. Instead I’m one of thise who looks at statistics only with a mild interest.

People usually like statistics because they can be seen as something “objective”. But the truth is that they only give the illusion of the objectiveness. Even the statistics can be seen from different perspectives and there’s always something you miss. You can never be sure of your observation and at the end this makes statistics pretty much as arbitrary as any other observation.

Take for example this problem of the Defias. It’s the most evident one if you look at the kill list, and if you browse it you can see that every flavor of Defias is in pretty high position on that list.

So, instead of trusting what that page tells me, instead I consider my own experience. Well, in my own experience the Defias, and all Westfall in general, aren’t all that dangerous. Quite the opposite. In fact the last time I leveled a character (recently), moving to Westfall felt like a liberation because I knew things would have been very smooth and better manageable.

The most (and by a HUGE margin) dangerous zone for me at that level range, alliance side, has always been Loch Modan. I’ve died hundreds of times in Loch Modan and sometime even logged out in frustration. That kind of frustration that makes you want break things. That zone is pure hell and the quests really, really hard if you go solo and don’t outlevel them. There is aggro just everywhere and there’s always a random mob waiting to ambush in the worst moment possible that it feels almost like they have developed an artificial intelligence on their own.

I’ve died to troggs at least ten times more than I died to Defias. In particular if you aren’t a melee class, it’s basically impossible to fight troggs without aggroing the whole zone. Not only the troggs themselves are a great pulling puzzle, but there isn’t any decent safe space because as you move one step you aggro a spider or a bear or a whole other trogg camp with javeling throwing scouts and casters. If something goes wrong the risk of dying is extremely high. That zone is packed with roaming mobs and all the quests send you inside caverns or through narrow places that get increasingly dangerous. The quest given by the gnome who crashed near the lake with his plane is one of the hardest in the whole game for that level range. It sends you recuperating objects that sit deep in troggs camp where you have no possibility to pull one by one and also risk that they respawn right on you if you don’t clean the zone fast enough.

Westfall, instead, is much more open wide, there are safe spots and the encounters are much more spread apart. It has more breadth and it is much more accessible in general.

So. Ubiq says that Defias need nerfing. You know what? My theory is the exact opposite. Westfall and the Defias are the “easiest” part of the WHOLE game. And it’s for that reason that the players prefer it to other zones and play there for most of the time.

The kill list, as well as the number of “soul shards” created are documenting an use. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Defias are high on the list because, yes, they are more dangerous, but more dangerous among content that has the higher usage. This reveals a *preference* more than anything else.

Loch Modan is HELL compared to Westfall, but it isn’t represented in that list. And it isn’t represented not because the zone isn’t deadly, but because the players have learnt to AVOID that zone. As it is dangerous.

Moreover, the choice of (1) the faction and (2) the race, strongly influences those stats. It’s kind of obvious that the monsters who are being fought more often (and that may kill more players) are on the alliance/human side. No surprise there.

My conclusion is that those stats aren’t saying that Westfall is the deadly zone that should be nerfed. Those stats are instead the demonstration that Westfall is the zone preferred by the majority of the players and those zones that should be looked at are the others that the players have learnt to avoid (mudflation, or path of least resistance). Which is something I had understood from my own (arbitrary) observations, and not because a page of statistics was able to reveal all that to me.

And what I wrote here is just the demonstration that the use of statistics is an arbitrary observation as any other. And as valid as any other.

It’s a while this topic isn’t discussed and I take the occasion from a discussion on a forum (the GMG thread again) to bring this up again.

We are also close to the anniversary of the great analysis on “levels” that Raph wrote a year ago, and the long discussion that sprang from it. This was also tied to my further analysis (this is how MMORPGs die) that also led to the comments here below.

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I do believe that Blizzard has focused on retention AND new player influx more then any other company really has, but thats saying a lot because they’ve also designed their game around new players vs. veterans.

At all.

Let’s be honest. WoW has an unexpected player retention but this is due to two main reasons:

1- WoW is “king of the hill”, and that fact alone assures a good retention and constant influx of new players. And this fact won’t change till WoW won’t have a serious competitor (and it won’t happen anytime soon).
2- The good retention the game still has is NOT due to what Blizzard did from release till today, but the great work on the “accessibility” that was done BEFORE release.

For example something that I repeat from *years* is that a soloable game usually ages better in the longer term as it can depend less on the presence of other players at the lower levels.

But despite WoW has a very good retention, it is still a clone of a model that is PREDESTINED to a decline. This is a rule.

A game world based on THAT model can die more or less slowly, but the fact that it WILL die is assured.

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In particular I want to underline that “point 1” doesn’t depend on WoW’s game design worth, but just on a moment of the market.

While “point 2” is surely a WoW’s quality. Today the importance of soloable content is widely accepted everywhere, but it is often misinterpreted on its real meaning. Soloable content IS NOT important because there are players who prefer to play alone and that preference should be respected. That’s irrelevant, the least important aspect that is often seen as the main one.

The importance of soloable content doesn’t depend on a “preference”, but on the side-effects that forced grouping brings. The problem isn’t that some players dislike grouping, the problem is that EVERY player dislikes, for example, to sit LFG for a long period of time because he cannot progress in the game without a group. And maybe he has to sit LFG for a long time WITH a group because they cannot find an healer (and this is an example of a problem of game design that I did try to solve *radically* on this website with concrete ideas). The players don’t refuse force grouping, but they just don’t accept to have some time available only to see it wasted because they depend on other players. What is “punishing” and that was rewarded in soloable games that eliminated it, is the *dependence*.

So, if you could design a game where forced grouping can happen without side-effects, then you can also have a game with forced grouping that is largely successful. Today we have learnt that the solution isn’t forced grouping, but “favored” grouping. Where “favored” doesn’t mean that you put better incentives on grouping (like an exp bonus), but that you give the players better tools so that they can meet and play together more easily, with less burdens. For example by giving players the possibility to summon their friends (that WoW does with a warlock ability), or by giving them better LFG tools (that WoW still lacks today). Or by working on “permeable barriers” + “gated content”.

The key is removing the barriers, instead of building new ones.

And even in all these cases it is still a matter of “accessibility”. That’s the keyword of WoW’s success. That’s the word that defines WoW’s success. It is often mistaken as “polish”, but polish is important only in the measure it makes the game more accessible.

For example an interface is usually considered good when it is intuitive and simple to use. We can assume that a well polished interface IS intuitive and simple to use, but the “polish” is not the relevant trait. Because what really *matters* is the accessibility of that interface.

MMORPGs in general, but also MUDs, had a LONG story of user UNfriendly-ness. That’s the habit that WoW broke and that’s the real major key in WoW’s success.

The rest are a myriad of details, all with their own importance but also all subordinate to the “accessibility”.

P.S.
Also notice that this thing about the “accessibility” isn’t just my own fixation. There are games out there who made the accessibility their MAIN marketing strategy. Think for example to Guild Wars and their major decision to not require a credit card. This is again a case that falls in the field of accessibility.

There are aspects of the accessibility that are external to the game. Like this case about the credit card or the hardware requirements. But there are also aspects internal to the game and that are competence of game design, some of which I considered in the link above about permeable barriers.