World of warcraft is dying and how to save it.

Sadly only about 14% of the player base has the testicular fortitude to play Trolls.

Sorry, I can't hear you from my FLYING METAL BOX!

See, storylines are another sticking point, and actually they've been a sore spot for gaming as a whole. To tell a good story, you need to impede the player's freedom. But then the player's demand freedom, which means there goes that cool setpiece or that epic showdown with Shao Khan that you invisioned.

There was actually an incident that highlights this point back in... I think it was either Everquest or Ultima Online. It was way back when, so I think it was Ultima Online. Anyway, the servers had a storyline going about some dark army that was conquering the land, invading town after town. Now, one townfull of players decided they were gonna get together and actually beat back the army. Cool, right? And they fought the battle and actually won. The problem though is that by winning, they screwed up the storyline. So the devs went ahead and programmed it so that the town was destroyed anyway. That pissed a lot of players off and many of them quit playing.

I mean granted, you could argue that the devs should've adapted their storyline to fit what actually happened, but depending on how far ahead they had planned it, that might not be easy to do. I mean, if your plot calls for Luke Skywalker to join the rebellion but he somehow dies on Tatooine, then what do you do? Just drop him and randomly introduce someone else to be Darth Vader's son, and excuse it by saying Darth Vader had an active libido (one of the benefits of the dark side, no doubt)?

I dunno. I'm sorry to have turned this into a complaining thread, but just... to me, the whole concept of an MMORPG just doesn't work. I mean, the most basic way to do one would be to just build the world and let all the actual storylines and drama and stuff be the result of the players, but if you do that most people will sit around doing nothing and just get bored. It's a whole genre built on a series of catch-22s.

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It's not that it doesn't work, it's that it's hard to get it to work. It takes a lot of effort in programming and writing and scenario design and everywhere else. But considering how huge World Of Warcraft has gotten it's understandable for the players to want to demand the best. World Of Warcraft has been growing in leaps and bounds towards a functional storyline, with phasing, long questlines that involve actual lore characters that aren't raids you need to spend half your waking hours working towards and god forbid some actual choices to make. Still not there yet. Then again the old republic might be beating it to the punch on all fronts.

There are some hiccups though. World Of Warcraft does seem to have some Did Not Do The Research within it's own ranks, Tyrande for example had an Establishing Character Moment when she ambushed a bunch of orcs and humans who where teaming up to fight demons just because they where tresspasing on her forest. Now she's a peaceful Love Freak let's all get along type. And don't get me started on Garona and the other crap the comics spewed.

edited 2nd Nov '11 7:43:38 AM by ShirowShirow

Wow this thread reminds me of the World of Warcraft forums. I had to check and make sure my browser URL said "tvtropes".

I think that Runescape really pulled that off pretty well with some of their Quest-storylines. Certain areas change through the player's interaction (such as Zanaris and Ardougne), giving it the feel that the player is progressing the storylines. Also, by only opening up certain new areas through the completion of certain quests, it seemed that the player was doing the exploring/diplomacy (Tirannwn and Morytania). At the same time, there is no immediate over-arching plot in the way of the Alliance/Horde conflict or the example above about the dark armies, which means that it doesn't have to "explain" all the time what is going on outside the player's interaction.

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@ Neo Crimson: We are the 14%.

Blizzard has been experimenting with multiple questline options recently (in both the Mount Hyjal questing and the Hallow's End event). I hope they expand on that for Mists of Pandaria, because it has a lot of potential.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Well, there's certainly one big question that many players will have to pick: Will your Fluffy Pandaren be Smooth Blueberry or Spicy Jalapeno flavored?

That's one thing that could be expanded on quite well into choices for other races, classes and factions.

edited 2nd Nov '11 8:19:33 AM by ShirowShirow

Eh, I thing Garona existed before the comics

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Xan-Xan/

She was. And she was great there.

In the comics... I'll just put down They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot and Chickification and leave it at that. I could rant about it for a loooooong time.

edited 2nd Nov '11 8:23:46 AM by ShirowShirow

Ironically, calling for more interesting quest design is in some ways a call to go back to vanilla design ideals. That was back when World Of Warcraft's devs still decided to use class-based quests to provide meaningfully-differentiated content for different players. Unfortunately, they decided that it was too much work to design an entire quest chain for one class, and have since sworn off the concept, preferring to jam in as many generic, 'anyone can complete this' quests as possible. This severely restricts your ability to design meaningful scenarios, since you can't build a quest with the expectation of anything other than the most basic of player capabilities being present. Everything has to be one size fits all.

I do think it's best for World Of Warcraft to be allowed to have its natural aging process like every other game, though. If the devs found a way to magically rejuvenate the thing, we'd have to deal with another decade of game designers promising to overthrow World Of Warcraft, failing and then having their projects canned due to not being the same miracle in a bottle that Blizzard managed by accident. The mmorpg genre is likely to be much healthier and more progressive once the idea of 'beating World Of Warcraft' no longer exists as a hurdle to crash into. I want to see a successful D&D 4E mmorpg, a successful Warhammer mmorpg, and I don't think I'm going to see those things as long as World Of Warcraft still exists to inflate expectations to unrealistic levels. And I would be rather happy to see the last of the big monthly subscription games be supplanted by the much superior free to play model.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

I feel the troll players pain. Gnomes are similarly under-represented but proud D:

How is 14% underrepresented? If it was 100% even each race would have under 10%.

I honestly liked the blood elves lore. Thats why I made one.

Then every loser had to ruin it for me.

Same with Death Knights, I had to work extra hard to prove that I wasn't your average deathnoob.

Sorry, I can't hear you from my FLYING METAL BOX!

I assume the percentage refers only to Horde players? Although the average in that case would be 16.6% now that each faction has 6 races, so it's hard to see 14% as particularly bad.

It's important to note what server, too. There are, for example, more Orcs in Pv P servers for some reason, although they're still outnumbered by those freakin' blood elves. On wyrmcrest accord, a good RP server, pretty much allt he horde races hover at 5% population (Overall stats) whilst blood elves are nearly 20% of the entire population, alliance or Horde. So one fifth of all people on this server are blood elves. That statistic gets doubled if you just count Horde races.

It's... A nightmare. On the server i played on, lightninghoof, RP night in Brill once had literally nothing but blood elves. Well, there was a forsaken in the corner. And me. /spit-ing on everyone who broke lore. I ran out of saliva quickly.

Apparently many of them where offput by me merely being a female orc at that.

edited 2nd Nov '11 12:58:03 PM by ShirowShirow

How is 14% underrepresented? If it was 100% even each race would have under 10%.

Don't forget that you're taking alts into account. That's not 14% of players playing a troll, that's 14% of existing characters being trolls. I, for one, boast five trolls on my main server, including my main, plus four more I don't play anymore. You'll still never see more than one troll from my roster online at a time.

What matters in this life is much more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too. - F. Rogers.

Well, SWG got canned. So I can empathize with the WOW players who are concerned about their game, even if I don't particularly care for their game.

SWG died long before Sony adn Lucasarts agreed to terminate it, though. All good things must come to an end - ideally, in a graceful way to avoid jumping the shark or whatever.

My two cents to anyone in the industry who is out to make a new game? Don't limit yourself to the old tried-and-true formulas, but don't casually dismiss them as outdated or trite, either. SWG had soem really nice things in it (crafting was incredibly complex). I haven't played WOW, but I'm sure it had some really good ways to approach things, as well.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Honestly, I don't think World Of Warcraft peaking would actually be particularly hazardous to its future, not with all those monthly fees coming in. What *could* be hazardous, however, is Activision's possible responses to World Of Warcraft peaking, in some desperate attempt to keep it growing.

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The features advertised in the expansion seem like they're aimed more at player retention than attracting new ones, so I think they're going about it pretty prudently for now.

edited 2nd Nov '11 4:13:59 PM by Clarste

Activision has no legal sway over Blizzard Entertainment. In fact Blizzard is contractually shielded from Activision's meddling for all its IPs.

He might want to but Kotick can't touch Blizzard's stuff without being on the wrong end of a breach of contract suit. (The Blizzard legal team is VERY good at what it does pertaining to contracts.)

You can play alliance BE on RP servers?

'Speaking of which, I've recently seen a blue post in response to a player deciding between alliance and horde that this is now not the best time to pick horde because up to freaking 85% (on some servers) of new characters lately are BE.

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Two ideas:

1. Air of Mystery mentioned something on the last page about being able to do different stuff like plant misinformation. Makes me think of Just Cause 2, where you cause chaos. How about something where you gain XP by screwing around like that?

2. When it comes to big MMO events, they could do something like Team Fortress 2 has with Events: Have them last a while, be advertised and have special stuff appear for the event, like the annual Scream Fortress Halloween Event. Spiral Knights kinda has something like that with the Gates system, where you can fight a Boss until the Gate it appears in is swapped out after a while.

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel

Why? Sure, we're all complaining, but I think we're making some good points about stuff.

Oh, shit, I was just thinking about Just Cause 2 while I was playing for one major reason: all the damn walking. Okay, I know it's important to have a huge world with a good sense of scale, but damn do you do a lot of walking around in World Of Warcraft. I wasn't used to it, 'cos in Just Cause 2 you can just grapple-hook around.

And maybe they could do more events like they do for holidays, except at random points in the year. Say, you're about level thirty or forty and you get to follow an epic quest that takes you all over Azeroth doing cool stuff like fighting traitors to the Horde/the Alliance or whatever. You wouldn't have to do it if you didn't want to, but it'd be specifically designed for a whole heap of players. Kind of like how That Guy With The Glasses has a huge team-up thing every year of the site's anniversary.

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:59:22 PM by AirofMystery

I think the major limitation that World Of Warcraft (and even the newest MM Os) are laboring under is that player actions can't be allowed to drastically change the experience of other players. No sinking a starter town into lava or permanently offing a major boss with essential loot without advance notice.

It does go a long way to isolate griefing but it also creates a degree of detachment from the game world. Good for power gamers and metagame lovers but a straitjacket for people who want epic RP.