WoW is Dying

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I started playing World of Warcraft on launch day in November 2004.  Back then, it was a great progression from Everquest in that is was more player friendly, better graphics and was overall a better system.    It did maintain the nose grinding raiding mentality of the day though.  When the first expansion came out, raiding was the #1 priority and because of gating, maybe 5% of the entire population saw anything but their town gates.  It was a flawed system that catered to a super small minority.  Next expansion, Lich King, swung the pendulum the other way.  Gear was easy to get, raids were pretty easy too.  By the end, people with skill could faceroll the final boss.  A lot of people who had been with the game for the first 4 years thought this was ridiculous and to be honest, based on the game’s history, it was.

We’re now 6 years in and there are 3 main expansions, each with 4 content updates each – so 16 or so modules in 6 years.  Contrast to ANY other game with over 200K subs and you get an expansion at max every 18 months and multiple content updates within. Rift is 6 months old and has had 4.  With the ease of single player content in WoW, people can hit max level in a week of play, see every dungeon in 2 weeks and perhaps attempt to raid for another month.  At best, any new content is completely worn out within 3 months yet WoW has insisted upon a 6 month cycle.  People burn out and leave.

Late last year the recent expansion came out, Cataclysm, whose goal was to to simplify stats and talents yet increase the difficulty of mechanics.  This meant you needed a lot of skill to succeed and for the tanks and healers, this was a huge pressure that simply did not exist for 2 years.   Quite simply, the game is standing at a point where a bad tank (20% of the smaller groups or 5% of the largest) take 100% of the blame of failure.  This has caused huge burnout and as numbers have shown, WoW has lost 1 million customers since the expansion came out about 9 months ago.  Sure, they still have 11 million left but 1 million people is $15,000,000 a month lost.  Any game but WoW would love to even break the 1 million player mark.

So WoW has issues, core fundamental issues, that have been ignored for a while now.  Many of the original devs have left due to the change in vision and started their own games.  Free to Play games (DDO, LOTRO, AOC) have shown that you can have tremendous success with simplified modular games.  Pay to play games have faltered incredibly in the past yet Rift seems to be taking a different path where WoW has evidently been lacking.  They listen to players and have a general need to appease all of their players, not just the hardcore raiders.

What is WoW doing to combat this?  Backtracking of course.  Huge threat changes to make tanks easier to play.  A possible new expansion with a mind blowing casual focus.  Customization options for armor and weapons.  A new patch schedule.  4.1 came out after 6 months, 4.2 came 4 months later and 4.3 looks to be 3 months after that and it would be the final update.  That means the next expansion is due in February-March 2012.

A game company doesn’t completely reverse its method of operation on a whim, it smells the blood in the air and makes drastic changes to the core mechanics.  It’s done this every major expansion, adding to the core combat of the game while completely ignoring the communal aspect from the start.  Every game that has had success since has seen this as a tremendous weakness and has fought to combat it.  I think we’ve reached a point where we can honestly say that Blizzard killed WoW.

 

EDIT: I wanted to add a bit more about raiding.  A particular website keeps track of WoW raid boss kills, world of logs.  In the past expansion, 12,000 kills were recorded for the Lich King – the final boss.  The tier before that had maybe 20,000 kills.  Think about those numbers.  With an average of 20 players per attempt, that’s less than 250,000 people, excluding those who did it multiple times, who saw the final encounter.  Best case, 2% of the player base.  Even the current content has only upped it to 4%.  How sad of a state it is that such a tiny percentage is the target market.

Update to Feb post

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I’m back!

DCUO – as expected the servers merged this week.   A lot of new content, still lots of bugs.  I give it 6 months to go free to play or close.

Rift – a million active subs, a great game.  I just don’t have time to play.  It really is quite good but there are too many grinds in it currently for my tastes.  I think WoW has spoiled me into thinking I should be raid ready in a month of playing, not 3.

Dragon Age 2:  Demo was fun.  Game, not so much.  All the fun was gone from the first one, which admitedly was just the strategy part.  Ugh, so much potential wasted.

Infamous 2:  Great game, great story.  Tons improved over the first one.  Way way too short and the game is balanced upon plateaus.  You start weak in a zone, finally get an ability that makes all events trivial for about 30 minutes, then move to a new area.  Repeat 4 times.  I can see this being further improved upon but its still damn good.

FF13:  I played this last fall then again during the summer.  After the first time, I still have the same reservations about the way too linear story but I tried a different approach to combat.  The 2nd last boss (the last one has always been a joke) killed me consistently with a random death spell for an hour – which is one of the dumbest mechanics I have ever seen.  My characters were about 95% maxed too by that point.  The near thing about the linear aspect though is that the bosses are balanced since the game knows just about how powerful you will be at any given time.  Contrast this to past FF games where you could powerlevel early on for a huge advantage or conversely, need to grind in order to progress.

SW:ToR

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So this is the new Star Wars video from Gamescon in Germany.  If you weren’t aware, the game is in beta currently so I would expect it to come out in November.  What does that have to do with anything?  Well, the graphics and movement and zones are pretty much all done.  Content being worked on is likely just raids and dungeons and building whatever dynamic content they can.  Basically, what you see here is what the game will actually look like.
Second, the way the skills work is likely static.  Sure, there might be some tweaks but the lightsabers will work like you see them and the lightning too.  What may, or rather should, change is healing.  If healing is anything like what’s in the video, I can guarantee you won’t see healers in the game.

Third and this is the saddest part, this looks identical to WoW, EQ, Rift and all that jazz with a new skin.  A crappy skin at that.  You know that feeling in a game where your character does something and you go ‘Wow, that was amazing?’  Shouldn’t we be seeing the best the game has to offer at this point?  All I could think of was meh…

On the flipside though, I have been reading that there will be 200+ hours of single player content.  Something like the content of KOTOR x3, which is really nice.  I think I’d pick it up just to play it until I run through that content.  I can see the level cap is 50 and current games (Rift is one) let you reach 50 in about 40 hours of playtime.  This is both an advantage for those who don’t want to take years to reach the cap but a bummer in that it’s rather fast.  200 hours equals about 8 days or about what WoW vanilla took back in 2004.  Except WoW had no story and it was a 100% grindfest from 30-50.  It will be interesting to see how this works out instead.

Final summation:  Sad to see this video.  It doesn’t inspire confidence at all. Happy that there’s supposedly a lot of content though.

A month just like that

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Been a while since I last updated.  First, since the last update I’ve been at home on parental leave with my daughter.  That is piles of fun and I wouldn’t swap it for the world.  I feel sorry for people who don’t get the opportunity.

Game-wise a few things.

DCUO – 31 days after it launched the game emptied.  The first patch did hit yesterday though, with a fair amount of new content.  Is the game sound?  Close enough.  There are still some pretty nasty bugs, horrible grouping tools outside of being in a guild and a lack of general things to do at level 30, which takes a week to get to, tops.  I’ll check back in 5-6 months but I expect server consolidation by that point and maybe some sort of store added.

Rift – Lord.  I wrote 3 guides for this game and it’s not even out yet.  It does what Warcraft and Warhammer want to do but without the baggage of years of crap.  Warhammer failed (there are only 4 servers left I think) because it ignored PvE.  WoW is failing because it removed the community aspect of the game and took a left turn on the last expansion to correct the errors of the previous.  Rift gives people a fresh take on PvP, PvE, dynamic content and choice.  Time will tell how well people want it.  The only real competition is SWTOR and I am having a lot of trouble seeing that game be a success the more I hear of it.

Dragon Age 2 – The demo came in yesterday.  It looks amazing.  It plays amazing.  So many things have been improved.  Bioware makes great games because of the story and I doubt I will be disapointed here.  Now I just need to find the time to play it!

Finally, house renos.  We’re starting this weekend and the entire main floor is being redone.  That’s quite the task but it will be fun!

I Like Games!

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No secret here, I love games.  Let’s knock off a few…

Rebuild – A browser flash game where you have to rebuild a city in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  The first time I played I got trounced so I then went to easy mode and tried a few things.  Now with a good strategy, you can get through hard mode without too much trouble, you just need to balance everything and always, always make sure your base is defended at the end of every turn.

Rift – Sort of like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online.  Fantasy setting, great visuals, dynamic content (rifts appear in the sky randomly and attack the world).  The Soul system allows near infinite customization of play style.  Great buzz about the game too.  I bought it to play the beta and I’m writing a few guides for it.  Might not be the next WoW but I think there’s room for it.

DC Universe Online – DC Comics online, so a superhero MMO.  It’s available on the PS3 too, so it plays more like a multiplayer twitch game than a huge MMORPG.  Actually, I bought it and have been trying to upgrade to Windows 7 at the same time, so all I’ve seen is the loading screen and youtube videos.  Good press here too as it appears to be a step up from City of Heroes and the crud that is Champions Online.

Plants vs Zombies – A tower defense type of game where you plant, uh, plants in order to stop zombies from eating your brains.  Made by PopCap, the makers of eternal crack Bejeweled.  Of all the devs in the entire world, these people know how to make fun.  Wife is addicted.

World of Warcraft – I got my Rogue to 85 rather quickly then with 40 minute queues to play in groups, I leveled my Shaman to 85 as well.  I modified my gold making methods to pull in about 10,000 gold per day (average coin drop from a kill is like 1-2g for perspective) and I’m realizing it’s more of the same but with a larger amount of crappy players.  When the expansion launched, it added a new layer of difficulty to group play where you couldn’t just smash any old button, you needed to pay attention.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see that 25% of the group playing population is not accustomed to that and you get times where it feels like you’re playing with chimps.  I also realize I don’t have hour blocks to play with a daughter to take care of, so my play is very sporadic.  I find I don’t mind that one bit.

New Toys

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Christmas time means cheap electronics.  It’s actually the only time I buy electronics since the discounts are so big and I can “suffer” through the old stuff for quite a while.

My current 5.1 all in one sound system is lacking any HDMI and doesn’t upscale.  This meant I needed to use component cables for everything and with a lack of inputs, I needed a switch.  After 6 years, it’s time to upgrade.  Pioneer – VSX 1020k 3D ready, 7 channels, 6 HDMI inputs, upscales to 1080p, Ipod connector, multi room capable as well.  Basically all the bells and whistles I need for quite some time.  Given that all my gear now works with HDMI, I need a better projector too!

Well actually, I just need a projector.  The Blue Hue isn’t getting bigger but it is getting stronger.  Given that it’s near impossible to find any projector with component, I needed one with HDMI.  Since I have blue ray, I figured might as well go 1080p/3D ready as well.  Here comes the Epson 3850.  Optical zoom, better contrast, great luminosity and most importantly, a larger throwing area.  It was the cheapest 1080p I could find that would throw 118″ over a 15 foot gap.

The receiver should be here in a few days, which will have me rewire quite a few things.  Projector next week and that will be that.  Oh, I need a new HDMI cable too.  Found a 16 footer for 10$.  More expensive than I’d like but eh.  People who spend anything above 20$ for digital cables are getting ripped off.  Monster makes amazing speaker cables but they make digital cables with a 1000% markup.

WoW: Cataclysm

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, with no TV and no internet, you know that World of Warcraft is launching its newest expansion, Cataclysm.  The game celebrated 6 years this week and let’s face it, the game needed some tweaking to the areas that were 6 years old!  So, they unleash a dragon, destroys the world and they rebuild then entire game from levels 1-60 (max will be 85), which covers every zone that was over 4 years old.  Pretty impressive and ballsy.

Did I mentioned 12 million players play the game?

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New Toy

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I love gadgets but it takes me a long time to mull the decision to buy one.  A really long time.  It took me 3 years to buy a PS3, 6 months to get a hockey net and pad and way too long for insurance.

So, the other day I picked up an e-reader.  Specifically the Sony PRS-650.  It’s third generation, 6 inches, e-ink and supports the epub format.  Third generation means a stable and fast platform.  Damn it looks nice.  6 inches is the size of a decent paperback.  It’s really comfortable in the hand.  E-ink means it takes a battery charges to change the page but not to keep the page.  So when it displays something, it’s not taking any power, which is different from an LCD screen (Nook Color, Galaxy Tab, IPad).  2 week battery life on a single charge is nice!  Also, since e-ink doesn’t use a light source, it’s very easy on the eyes.

Epub is the industry standard for ebooks.  Nearly all readers support it, except the Kindle.  You can borrow books from the library in that format and they come out great.  Oh, it’s also touch screen, which works amazingly well.  The only thing lacking is wireless but why do you need wireless in the middle of a book?  It also takes SD cards up to 32 gigs and has an internal memory of 2gigs.  A book is about 500k or less, so even the stock memory is good for 4000 books.  If you were to put audio books (yes, that’s supported too) or huge PDF files, then I guess you would need more space.

They’re on sale at Future Shop right now, so if you can find another store that stocks them and does price matching (Best Buy is where I got mine), you can get an even better deal.  If you do a lot of reading, then it might actually be worth your while.