World Of Warcraft – How It Has Almost Killed MMO Gaming

It seems that Blizzard forgot what a successful MMORPG was, before they opened the door to the whining masses. In the days before WoW, an MMO that drew in a quarter of a million players was legendary. They were amazingly fun to play and their development teams were able to crank out tons of content; This is one of the things which was so good about Asheron’s Call…all of the updates and new content which were constantly being pushed out.

So Blizzard, being overcome with greed and not wanting to lose those precious casuals began to ruin their game for the hardcores. I mean, several million casual players and 13 year olds pay more in monthly fees than a few hundred thousand hardcores, right?

Now the MMORPG realm starts to become flooded with casuals. Blizzard releases Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and each time they pump out another “major update”, they make the game more and more casual. It’s to the point now where a person with no MMO experience (hell, no GAMING experience for that matter) can jump right in and be running end-game content, finding themselves on equal footing with people who have been playing for 8 years, in a scant few weeks.

What does this have to do with the near-death of MMO’s? It’s simple. Now that the MMO world is flooded with casual players and World of Warcraft has set the subscription bar so high by allowing their game to be taken over by a bunch of cry-babies and bored housewives, other developers don’t feel like they’ve been successful if their MMO doesn’t reach and maintain a player base of millions. These developers spend so much time and money on building huge, powerful networks and server clusters and marketing blitzes that they forget what is really important in the long run…

Gameplay.

Now the internet is flooded with scores of MMORPG’s and MMOFPS’s and MMOthisandthat’s which have no gameplay value at all. You spend money on buying the game and pay for your monthly subscription only to find that once you’ve hit “level cap” there’s nothing to do. SWTOR is the most recent game to have made this massive error in planning and they’ve suffered drastically for it, with subscription numbers falling off at a breakneck pace and even though they promised that they would support the game and continue to make new content and update the game for years to come, they’ve had to can the majority of their development team because they aren’t getting the funds to support them.

It also doesn’t help that as soon as people saw the interface, they started screaming “WoW Clone” which, as I have demonstrated, is a silly thing to say but at the same time I also have to admit that Bioware went far above the usual MMO developer in their blatant ripping-off of interface and gameplay elements which didn’t help them either because, again, there was no end-game content to support their player base so the hardcores and casuals alike got dropped on their collective asses as soon as they hit level 50.

Why does this happen? Because of the dangerous precedents which have been set by Blizzard and World of Warcraft. Their willingness to sell out their original vision of the game in order to appease the masses created a cycle from which MMORPG’s and, to a lesser degree, other MMO’s in general may not be able to escape.

Board members set lofty subscription goals because they think an MMO is supposed to have 10 million people playing it. They think 10 million people are supposed to play because WoW sold out and managed to gain that many players by making their game a no-brainer that a neurotic monkey with one eye and a frontal lobotomy could be successful at. When these board members, who know SQUAT about gaming get together for their meetings, they tell the developers and the publishers that they have to set up massive server farms and be prepared to get nuked because, by god, they’re going to take down the king of the MMO’s and they’ll have jillions of subscriptions by holiday of next year.

Now those developers are forced to build those big farms and spend lots of money in preparing for something which has only happened ONE TIME in the entire history of the human race and isn’t likely to repeat any time soon. They have those same board members (who, again, wouldn’t know an MMO from an RTS from a GPS if they had a 12 page spreadsheet on the subject) harping at them to hurry up and get the game out (usually in time for the holiday season because they think that’s the only time people buy games) so they have developers working 38 hours a day trying to get the game functional for release but this means that they have to ignore a lot of the bugs and glitches in the game as well as ignoring end-game content.

Of course, since WoW also spoiled those casual players, we now have millions of MMO players out there who are so impatient that the slightest delay in getting a bug fixed or a patch released leads to screams of “I’m going back to WoW, whaaaaaaaaa!” which makes the board members even more nervous about their Christmas bonuses and makes them push even harder…

See what I mean?

If we could roll back the clocks and force Blizzard to make a different decision when the whiners started whining and the cry-babies started crying and the housewives started getting bored, we might still have MMO’s which are targeted at and built for the hardcore players. Sure we may not have MMO’s with 10 million players but we also wouldn’t be faced with 8.5 million of those players being fickle, impatient children but we’d almost certainly have MMO’s which are better thought out, better designed, better executed and a lot more fun. Like they used to be…Back in the day.

If you’re not an MMO player from way back…If you don’t remember exploding chests going off and guards coming to kill criminals and making breastplates out of bug shells and tinkering your armor to make it better and being a battle-mage and running Blackwing Lair with a 40 man raid group and all of those amazing things which happened before WoW rammed a dagger into the back of the MMO community then you won’t know what I’m talking about and for that, I feel sorry for you.

Or maybe I don’t…You don’t know what you’re missing so maybe it’s not that bad for you. For now, all we gamers can do is sit back and hope like hell somebody makes a good MMO for us to play. There damned sure isn’t one out there right now.