World Of Warcraft – How It Has Almost Killed MMO Gaming

For the next 2 years, the world was buzzing with news of Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. Everquest 2 had the support of all of the die hard Everquest fans and World of Warcraft was setting the internet alight due to the massive popularity of the Warcraft RTS games and Blizzard’s penchant for releasing breathtaking cinematic trailers in all-out marketing blitzes.

When the time finally came, EQ2 and WoW dropped 2 scant weeks apart from one another, with EQ hitting the market first on November 8, 2004. Here’s a peek at what it looked like.

November 23, 2004 saw the release of World of Warcraft, and the beginning of the downfall of MMO gaming. When WoW released it had more bugs than the Amazon basin and was soooooo slooooooow that it could take 8 hours for a looted item to show up in your inventory. People don’t remember this because most of the people playing WoW, today, were not around when the game first hit the shelves so they have no idea how painful the World of Warcraft launch was…Let’s just say that it earned the nickname “World of Warcrash” for quite some time.

Note that at this point it is nearly impossible to find a screenshot of WoW from the early days, without a ton of addons all over the UI but this one is close.

Now that I’ve made my point about the “wow clone” argument, you folks can drop that since there’s no such thing and calling anything a “wow clone” just shows how little you really know about gaming. Now I can move on to how WoW has put a knife in the back of MMO gaming.

When MMORPG’s first came out, they were geared almost entirely toward what we refer to as “hardcores” or hardcore gamers. Those gamers were known for spending lots of time playing their characters, working in groups, studying the mechanics of the game and working very hard at building their characters into formidable killing machines.

Ultima Online was a full PVP, full loot environment, meaning that if you got killed, your body dropped and everything you were carrying dropped with it, leaving you open to losing all of your stuff. In Everquest, you would lose XP and have to run naked back to your body where you could easily be killed again, causing you to lose more xp and making you do another corpse run. Asheron’s Call had you resurrecting at the lifestone to which you were bound and would take away one or more items, half of your pyreals, and a percentage of your life force, which would cause your skills to decrease.

When WoW came out, there was almost no death penalty. You would not lose xp, you would not lose items, you would not lose money. All you would lose was some of the durability on your items, which could be repaired back to full with no penalty simply by visiting a vendor.

This began to open the MMO realm to “casuals” or casual players. Casual players are those who don’t play much and, when they do, tend to play with specific groups of real life friends. They don’t get into the game’s lore or history, really don’t care much about the story line and just want to have some fun running around killing some “mobs” (the jargon for mobiles, which comes from the old days of MUD’s and is used as a synonym for “hostile NPC’s” or “monsters”).

As WoW grew in popularity, due to the increased interest in the game from the casuals, the hardcores become more involved due to the increased number of players in the game. As that popularity grew, it also meant more money for Blizzard which would allow for more development dollars and time and this resulted in Blizzard pushing out some legendary end-game content for World of Warcraft in the form of Molten Core and Black Wing Lair.

The problem was that the new content was for hardcores. There’s no way casual players would ever be able to gain the type of equipment, skill and guild connections to be able to make it through those end-game instances. This was awesome for the hardcores because it set them aside as elite players who were able to achieve feats and goals that casuals would never be able to dream of. Unfortunately, it turned the casuals into self-righteous, whiny little cry-babies who got butthurt because they could get the “phat lewtz” that their hardcore contemporaries were sporting.

As time went on, the butthurt grew and the casuals started threatening to leave WoW. Unfortunately, Blizzard caved. They created the dungeon finder, started making every boss fight a DPS-race, where strategy and tactics didn’t matter, they allowed things like “gear score” to pervade their game, which gave casual players the idea that a person’s worth is defined by the type of gear they wear and not their understanding of game mechanics and strategy and the game devolved into being no more complex than: click the finder, get a group, do lots of DPS and don’t stand in the fire.

lolwut?