I snagged this brilliant comment from Slashdot:

(source)
They developped as much content they could afford, and messed with how much they give you at each level. If you plotted a graph with the time along X and the percent of content you’ve seen as Y, let’s just say it would look like very much an asymptote. It starts by going up pretty quickly, but then it slows down, and it takes more and more time to get closer to that covetted 100% spot. By the end of it, huge amounts of time are required to make even the tiniest of progress.

I fondly call it the “boiling a frog alive model“. They say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will just jump out. But if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, it will stay in and get boiled alive. Now I don’t know if that’s true with frogs, but it’s certainly true with about half the WoW players. Because that’s what Blizzard does.

From F13, The Burning Crusade official trailer. Mostly a rehack of previously released CG scenes along with a few gameplay shots. Not so great.

Possible reasons of the letdown? The same speculations I’ve heard for some time:

Yes many members of the cinematics team have left Blizzard (three went to Red 5 Studios including the WoW cinematics director).

This E3 hasn’t been so amazing for Blizzard. Nothing too great to announce beside the Alliance race. Which was also deluding on its own. The model isn’t really good and the race hasn’t an overall interesting personality. Quite deluding.

I’ve quickly given a glance at the lore and it sounds really silly. Nothing even remotely close to the appeal of the original races. It’s like if the whole game is becoming more and more childish.

The Blood Elves racial traits not only seem more fun to play (with two skills interacting) but way too overpowered in PvP, following the trend that wants Alliance overpowered in PvE and Horde in PvP. Really bad design there, even if I have the suspect that to fire the Arcane Torrent you need to have the Mana Tap active (as hinted in the October’s leak), making the practical use a bit more tricky. The Draenei racials instead are pathetic and underline another design limitation.

They could have shown something more interesting like the flying mounts, or at least the standard mounts of the new races, but nothing. I don’t think this expansion will really bring something worthwhile and significant to the game. From the screenshots I’ve seen of the new zones there isn’t anything that tickles the interest. They seem rather bland and too close to what’s already in the game. “More content” doesn’t appeal me if this content doesn’t show anything new. It looks like it’s more of the same like EQ2 is doing. Not even a new feature for the graphic engine or the game in general.

But the real risk is another. This content risks to not be on par even with the WoW we know already.

Cosmik has the NY interview with Tigole. Some passages are really bad:

Q. Why not add any new low-level instances like Deadmines?

A. Stuff like the Deadmines and Wailing Caverns is extremely popular and gets a lot of use. But at the same time people skip over and pass that content extremely fast and they never go back. So there’s not a lot of bang for our buck in those dungeons. And Draenei and Blood Elves will be able to do those dungeons anyway. If we put the time into making another Deadmines, it would mean one less instance at level 60 or something when you need it to level up.

Hello flawed logic:

Q. Overall, what percentage of level 60 players do you think have killed Ragnaros?

A. I don’t have firm statistics, but my gut feeling is around 25 percent.

Q. And what about Nefarian?

A. From the gut, I’d say maybe 15 percent.

Beside the fact that he really has no clue about the overall playerbase (the numbers he gives are way too high to be reasonable), you get the idea.

There are valid reasons to avoid adding too much new content at the lower levels (like the mudflation), but the “convenience” of higher level content isn’t one.

(Tobold commented this too)

It’s insteresting also what he says about the itemization with tokens and factional grinds. Acknowledging what EVERYONE ELSE knew from the very beginning. Of course it’s the whole approach to be fucked up, but understanding that would be too much:

We sure have been learning from our mistakes. I think that itemization is something that’s never perfected. The key is just to learn from your mistakes and avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

In Ahn’Qiraj and Zul’Gurub we realized we made a bad mistake with itemization. Token systems can be good and reputation systems can be very useful, but combining token systems with reputation requirements is not necessarily a good design decision, or at least it wasn’t with ZG and AQ. For example, ZG was supposed to be a stepping stone into raiding. So you take a guild that has little experience and they go into ZG and for a new group, it’s going to take them a few tries to down the first boss, Venoxis. And they finally kill Venoxis and what do they get? Probably one blue item and then this token item. But even using that token item might require Honored reputation, and so they feel like they’re not being rewarded.

I had that happen to me on one of my characters and I was like, “This is just broken.” So we realize things like that and we’re moving to fix them.

He had to have it happen to him to realize that his game design was broken.

They would be able to “fix them” only if they understood what is really wrong in the system. But they don’t. And don’t expect anything to change in ZG and AQ. When he says he wants to fix them he means with the new content. What was fucked up before will be left behind.

And they also have NO IDEA about the mudflation. This would be the VERY FIRST big problem you would have to consider when you start to design something new. Instead they don’t even have started testing it:

Q. In terms of how Burning Crusade players will be able to handle older content, how many level 70 characters, for example, do you think it will take to kill Ragnaros?

A. I’m not sure because we’re actually about to start testing on that, but I would guess 10 to 15.

They are just continuing to slam their face against the same wall. Blizzard was able to push forward the genre significantly and remove many bad habits. But now they don’t know how to proceed past the problems they revealed for the first time and the current trend will reveal to be ruinous.

This, of course, opens the way to the competition. There are many significant mistakes that Blizzard is doing and that could become the very strength of the competion. The problem here is that everyone else is even more clueless and no project (between the hundreds announced) has something valid to suggest and the resources to deliver.

So THERE IS a space. But there isn’t anyone that is moving to take it right now.

That’s pretty much what Blizzard’s E3 tells me. It is revealing vulnerabilities and that, past WoW’s huge success, they now seem out of fuel.

EDIT: LOL! Voltron!

Ubiq posted something that I thought I posted myself. It was kind of a deja-vu.

Actually I cannot remember if I really posted it or just wrote in my “notes” file to write about later on, but I clearly remember to have counted all the PvP and PvE servers a while ago and I still have the numbers I noted down:
55 normal servers
73 PvP

I’m bringing this up now because I’ve seen wrong conclusions being drawn about these numbers, so here are my precisations that I also wrote in the comments over there.

The first wrong assumption is this one:
The most successful PvP in WoW isn’t “MMO PvP” – it’s counterstrike style PvP.

This is false and those number demonstrate the exact opposite. The “counterstrike style PvP” is what we have in the form of “BattleGrounds” and these are available on ALL servers. There’s no distinction between PvP and PvE servers here. No reason to pick one instead of the other.

But still, what those numbers show is that the players are split in half. If one half of these players has chosen the PvP servers IS NOT because they want to play in the BGs, because these BGs are available on all servers. Makes sense?

So what is the distinctive trait between PvE and PvP servers? The world PvP. Half of the players have chosen a PvP server because of the “world PvP”.

Those players are there despite that kind of unique PvP offered in the PvP servers is almost non existent and was completely neglected by Blizzard.

Those aren’t just players who want PvP. Those are players that are there for a form of PvP that Blizzard doesn’t even support.

I don’t think this is a negligible detail. The very significant conclusion is that the players are asking for a type of PvP that Blizzard is NOT SUPPORTING.

And don’t fucking tell me that EVEN in the PvP servers the “world PvP” is almost dead and everyone just plays in the BGs. OF COURSE, but this happens because of the lack of support to a WORTHWHILE ALTERNATIVE. The players can only follow the best route available and this depends on what is offered. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a DEMAND for other forms of PvP. A demand that Blizzard ignored till today.

It’s like a seed. Players arrive with expectations, then they have to adapt. In this case Blizzard just didn’t take advantage of the expectations of those players.

Now the other wrong premise (in the sequel):
The PvP servers are emptier than PvE servers.

This is also false. I don’t have exact numbers but I’m sure that the number of active players between PvP and PvE are near. The proof of this is that Blizzard not only launched an equal number of PvP and PvE servers when the game was released, but continued to do so since then. It’s obvious that there was a demand since the number and type of new servers is determined by population requirements.

On the other side it is true that a good number of PvP servers have a very low population. But even here there’s a reason.

This is a trend I observed since the very beginning and that can be generalized to other games:
– In the PvE case the players tend to move on the servers with less population, where they have less competition (divergence)
– In the PvP case the players tend to amass on fewer servers, looking for good-sized communities (convergence)

The result of this is that the PvE server have usually a better distributed population, while the PvP servers have sharp highs and lows, with servers overcrowded and servers that are basically empty. The players tend to converge instead of diverge as in the PvE servers. Such is the nature of PvP, without other player you can just stare a wall. So the players look for playable and popular environments. Instead in a PvE server, beyond your guild, everyone else is insignificant if not an annoyance. This is why it’s much simpler to ask a raiding guild to move on a “clean” server, they actually desire it. While it’s much harder to make a consolidated PvP guild to move on a underpopulated server. It would be a sacrifice.

Yes, the players joined and still join the PvP servers with set expectations. I’m one of them. These expectations may be deluded but they are still part of an original motivation. The form of mixed PvP and PvE in WoW is still what drives the players to the PvP servers because it can be extremely fun. It adds a variation to a kind of gameplay that instead would be monotonous and dull at times. It enhances the social fabric and interactions, it makes the zones become alive. It makes the game feel more like a “world” where the players have some significance instead of ignoring each other. The environment becomes much more part of the gameplay in a open PvP field than in a static PvE pull.

This doesn’t mean that it is always as fun as it can be. I believe that a huge improvement would be to get rid of levels, but this would be off-topic here. The point is that the players are there for a potential that isn’t fully delivered.

A seed momentarily without water.

(continues here)

I don’t really know what to think.

I don’t really understand how a Producer’s letter for a mmorpg can start with this resonant objective:

Dispersing the Population

I mean, it’s just wickedly wrong.

I know the reasons, the situation and all the rest. I know what it means and why they talk about this.

But think to what a mmorpg really should be. There’s obviously something that just isn’t working as it should.

Something at the core.

At least this is followed by something better:

The new zones added to the game in The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth’s current land mass by 25 percent. To insure that Azeroth continues to feel vibrant and populated, we will be increasing the player caps on all our realms by the same percentage.

EDIT: I was thinking about this. They are adding another starting zone for each race so the “space” for the entry levels will be upped of 1/3, which means 33%. I also guess that there will be less content in percentual connecting the early and late game, leaving more of it for the 60-70 range and the endgame.

Now if we think about the expansion it’s quite obvious that there won’t be many reasons to reroll new characters. I suppose that the large majority of players, or returning players, will log in their level 60s and rush to 70. This means that 90% of the newbie characters as the expansion launches will be of the new race. So we will have an overload of one noob zone while the other three are deserted. In the longer term all four will return to their semi-empty status.

The rest of the players will be once again packed at the cap, or moving toward the cap. Considering that 90% of this endgame is trapped in private rooms, the percent of the land mass added won’t really matter much. There will be another temporary overload and then another stagnation at level 70.

Considering that the current cap is around 3200 players the 25% increase will bring it up to 4000.

—
They also say that this summer they’ll finally open the character transfer service and they hint they’ll use this as another way to balance the servers.

Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player’s will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag.

I’ll return on these arguments because they are of a general importance and Blizzard’s workaround is lame at best.

Anyway, it’s quite sad to read a producer’s letter just about hardware issues.

“Yes, two years have passed and we are still swamped trying to unfuck a fundamentally flawed infrastructure.”

Gaming Steve has friends at Blizzard. And he doesn’t skip an occasion to repeat it.

So here some largely anticipated guesses about the cross-server battlegrounds that some of us were expecting and suggesting since beta:

Blizzard is hard at work right now creating new enhanced Battlegrounds servers. These servers will no longer be regulated to a single realm, but cross-linked across Realms to create an diverse PvP experience! Right now they are planning on linking 16 realms together per Battleground server for massive PvP action. You could imagine how this can really help out the Battlegrounds situation, not only will the queues go much faster but you’ll finally get a chance to fight across Realms.

And the best part? This enhancement is going to be released very shortly; most likely by patch 1.12 or 1.13 at the latest.

Then he starts to rave about worldwide tournament when I’m still waiting Blizzard to back up the claims during beta:
After the european launch we’ll give you the possibility to choose where you want to play.

The european launch was one year and a few months ago. The european servers are still inaccessible with an american account. And vice-versa.

Of course the problems of WoW’s PvP aren’t just about the queues. But to understand that you would need to have a clue.

P.S.
Interesting to notice that he says the expansion release could slip to early 2007.

I had reported that there was attrition between Blizzard and The9, the chinese operator. Now it seems that the divorce can become more than a rumor:

Blizzard Re-Evaluating World Of WarCraft Chinese Partner

In an intriguingly cryptic press release, World Of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment has announced that it “is currently actively exploring and discussing cooperation opportunities and further expansion of its business with local potential partners for mainland China”, implying that it may be evaluating other partners than current Chinese distributor The9.

In fact, Blizzard’s statement also indicated that it has invited The9 to negotiate in a bid to distribute the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion set, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and to discuss its release in mainland China, which is currently planned for next year.

This article on Gamasutra also mentions the server problems that the chinese operator had. Bad service? Is maybe Blizzard complaining for bad service?

Not really. Those server problems were related to “a large-scale raid involving nearly 1,000 players”. Aka the opeining of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj. One fucking thousand players. Of course the server blew up. That event on Mannoroth crashed the server more than THIRTY TIMES in the span of a few hours, and we had much less that 1k of players in the zone. What is sure is that Blizzard cannot complain with The9 for poor service with a straight face.

In fact the chinese servers and general infrastructure seems much, much more solid that whatever Blizzard has done in the USA.

So it’s really all about the money greed, Blizzard saw the huge success the game had in China and decided that the price The9 paid for the original licence was too low. They upcoming release of the expansion was the perfect occasion and they decided to ask The9 to buy a new, special licence for it. Of course The9 refused, they distribute the game in a different way and the updates have always been offered for free for these kinds of game. Their licence is valid for four years and they were expecting it to include everything. So they opposed to this new request from Blizzard and Blizzard answered threatening them to split the expansion in a standalone product and offer it to someone else.

The result is that Blizzard now decided to put the expansion on auction, so that The9 is now forced to compete with other companies to have the rights to run it. It is very best way to get the most out of a cash cow. Instead of setting a price you can just watch the companies competing against each other. It’s a win-win for Blizzard. WoW has already benefited from a *huge* exposition thanks to The9. More than two millions of players of the total six that the game has worldwide are now in doubt. What will happen to the accounts and the servers if the whole game switches operators? And who “owns” those accounts, Blizzard or The9?

At the end the loss is always of the players. The other option is absurd: in China the standard WoW and “The Burning Crusade” could split in two games ran by two different operators.

There’s a screenshot leaked from beta that is circulating right now. It shows a character selection screen and a warrior murloc fully modeled and equipped, it even has the might helmet adapted to the shape of the head of the murloc. The server names says “Exp_US_test”.

As a fake it is way too complex. I’m going to believe to this one. The E3 is near and I bet it’s where Blizzard will reveal the alliance eace. Enjoy your month+ anticipation ;)

From Q23:

A buddy of mine who worked at Blizzard described the planned WoW expansion E3 trailer an in an IM:

10:57:15 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: starts with a scene underwater
10:57:18 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: the dark murky depths
10:57:32 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: then a gnomish submarine sinks and crashes into teh ocean floor
10:57:44 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: a few murlocs go inside and find all the gnomes dead
10:57:57 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: but the “TV screens” are still playing
10:58:09 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: with some gnomes say, “Are you tehre? are you there? Hello?”
10:58:16 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: and then the murlos look all confused and one of them mimics it
10:58:34 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: the words first come out strange and bubbly
10:58:46 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: but then the others chimein and after a few more tries, it sounds like almost perfect gnomish!
10:58:50 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: fade to black
10:59:07 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: a few years later, there is a thriving murloc community built around the gnomish submarine
10:59:15 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: it looks like they are rebuilding it!!
10:59:30 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: then you see a crew of murlocs get in teh gnomish submarine
10:59:52 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: they are piloting it back to an Alliance port, surrounded by an army of swimmig murloc escorts
10:59:58 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: it loosk like an invasion!
11:00:04 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: the alliance comes out in force
11:00:09 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: tense moments
11:00:18 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: mages, knights, paladings, etc, ready to fight
11:00:34 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: and then teh hatch opensup, and a murloc pops out speaking perfect gnome
11:00:42 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: “We come in peace…and to return your ship!”
11:00:48 AM EXBLIZZDUDER: the Alliance looks stunned and we fade backout

Of course, I assumed he was just messing with me. HMMMMMMMMM….

P.S.
The 1 April is tomorrow. Maybe Blizzard wants to fool us. Maybe not.