PLZ, SCROLL DOWN 4 TLDR IF U DIDN’T TAKE UR RITALIN 2DAY AND READING HURTS. THX KIDS
And now for those of you know how to read:
The goal of any MMO developer is to keep people locked into their game and paying money for the
privilege. I’ve stated that obvious thing because what it means when you relate it to what players want (or think they want) isn’t so obvious to most people who enjoy games of this genre.
World of Warcraft taught the industry many things – don’t ignore your casual player base, appeal to the broadest audience possible, make your game convenient to get into and easy to return to. It taught these things with such severe force that these new lessons confused old understandings of what made MMOs interesting to begin with. Yet these new lessons were not what made WoW successful. Not by a long shot – in fact, they were the seeds of its ruin.
Who here played classic Everquest? I didn’t – my first MMO was Dark Age of Camelot. But I knew enough about it to understand how it catapulted a very niche type of game into broader public interest. You were never done with Everquest, and it didn’t easily forgive you for falling behind. Each new raid and even expansion they banged out frequently required a lot of gear and adventuring from former content to have any chance in later environments. It was a steep, steep climb, and the developers realized much too late just how impenetrable their game could be to new players.
Skip forward some years and many mediocre MMOs of lesser influence (and a few oddballs, such as Ragnarok Online, which achieved modest success their own ways) and World of Warcraft hit the scene, achieving unparalleled success. It is interesting to consider that vanilla World of Warcraft did not achieve its great status by being kinder to casuals. It was more player friendly in other ways. Quests kept you interested in the mindless grinding you were doing, from level 1 to level 50, and provided a sense of direction, keeping players focused and excited about their journey. WoW’s customer support was spectacular. Its world was fresh, artistic, and was simply better designed than anything MMO players had seen to date.
Their endgame content model, on the other hand, was straight out of Everquest. You had to do Molten Core to do Blackwing Lair, you had to do Blackwing Lair to do Ahn’Qiraj, and you had to do Ahn’Qiraj to do Naxxaramus. And you needed 40 raiders for each of these dungeons, no less and no more. The time investment to clear all of that was insane, and only an extreme minority reached the top before The Burning Crusade hit, and the gear ladder reset. That fact gave Blizzard doubts regarding the longevity of their success.
WoW’s developers thought to themselves – shouldn’t more of our players see the content we made? Won’t they start quitting if we don’t give them the opportunity to do everything in our game? But they weren’t quitting – that’s the funny thing. WoW just got more and more subscribers, even with their raid content less than completely accessible to casual players. Casual players complained bitterly about being unable to participate in whatever was cutting edge at the time – but they didn’t quit. (Yet.) They kept playing, and people kept joining. The game continued to grow at spectacular rate. Why?
It’s incredibly simple. Most casual players entertain the fantasy of tackling more grueling content at some point or another, as long as the rewards are enticing, and the content itself is fun. Many of them go on to do this, and achieve moderate success raiding with like minded individuals a few hours a week. Players tend to complain about the things they don’t have, but as long as they might have them, and there are means of getting these things eventually, far more players will keep at it than quit.
Yet WoW’s growth didn’t last forever. It slowed, stopped, and deteriorated in tandem with changes designed to ensure everyone could see everything the game had to offer. Raid Finder and the creation of “easy mode” raids was the mortal wound that killed WoW. It gave every player regardless of skill and time investment a means of experiencing and clearing, without focus or meaningful effort, all of the content Cataclysm had to offer.
The Mountain, then, had climbed itself for the players. These players found themselves at the top without new content to experience, and they weren’t interested in trying the hardmode raids just to get bigger numbers for the sake of bigger numbers. So they started quitting, and WoW’s long, slow death by blood loss began. (Hey FF14. Looking at you, pal!)
TLDR STARTS HERE:
Now we get to the point of all of this ancient history!
What makes an MMO successful is the degree to which it motivates its entire player base to keep playing. This is what I call the climb. This sense of motivation requires somewhere to go. That’s the mountain. If the climb is too easy, everyone will quit. If you’re at the top of the mountain, there’s nowhere left to go. But if WoW is any indicator, the climb can remain too difficult for the majority of your players, and they won’t quit. They’ll complain. Dear god, they’ll complain – your forums will be a swamp of complaints. But they’ll keep playing, and paying, which is what really counts.
The lesson of WoW’s failure will teach the industry something equally valuable to what was learned from the lesson of WoW’s success. Catering to casuals too much will kill your game. Catering to casuals not at all will also kill your game. (see: Everquest)
The ideal is The Mountain with very few at the top, but the climb upwards engaging and accessible most players. Never let them reach it – just keep them wanting to do so, and make sure they’re having fun all the while. (Also, never let them know that they’re not supposed to make it up.)
…
Huh.
Why did I waste an hour writing this? Kotaku should pay me $20 to run this jumbled mess, or something. PM me!