diary of an indie game developer

 
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Mr. Morhaime, tear down this wall!

I’ve been meaning to write about WoW’s Great Wall-sized social barriers for a while now, but Blizzard’s latest announcement of cross-faction transfers (for a fee) seems as good a time as any.

A while back, some devs decided to try World of Warcraft as a sort of “golf” for game developers.  It rapidly failed– not because most of them didn’t play WoW, but because most of them couldn’t play together.

The chance that a given player in the U.S. is on your same WoW server is less than 1%.  Then, the chance they’re on your faction is about 50/50.  The chance that they’re at a character level, equipment level, and commitment level to go out and productively kill something with you… well, combine them all, and they’re miniscule.

Of course, that’s not what WoW’s about.  Warcraft is about finding one group of enablers to play with regularly.  It’s not social like Facebook– it’s social like a cult, or the mob.

What a lot of would-be WoW-killers don’t realize is that it’s tough to pull people out of their cult– and if they leave, it’s not to join another cult.

The next “WoW killer” needs to be more subtle, more Facebook.  And you’re seeing plenty of it already, sneaking in through games like Call of Duty.  A Call of Duty player wouldn’t tolerate it for a second if the game said, “sorry, you can’t play with that friend– he’s on a different realm.  Oh, and level up, and reroll Horde.”

Yes, you’ll lose some of the strong bonds of something like WoW.  And maybe you can’t pull off some of the same persistent world coolness.  (If you decide to just “ditch realms”, how do you design or implement a world for 100,000 people?)  But modern, multiplayer shooters are showing you can still create a strong, enabling community out of that.  (Heck– so are the old shooters.)  They just need to figure out how to charge a monthly fee.

As a thought experiment, what would happen if WoW just made server transfers and faction transfers isntant and free?  Maybe a touch more griefing, though I’m not convinced.  The impact on server economies would give the hard core auctioneers more to do, not less.

One of the biggest losses would be the loss of the “big fish in a little pond”.  How can you be the third best guild on your server when guilds can jump from server to server on a whim?  Many game services, such as XBox Live, offer a friends-only top scores list, but that’s a bit trickier with WoW’s structure.  Plus, it’s not just the technical aspect– it’s walking around with that guild tag over your head, or recognizing the other folks in other server-best guilds, or with rare (on that server) gear.  How do you create that “little pond” again, to regain all the social pressures and rewards that come with it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 5:45 am and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Chad
    Server transfers still require you create and level up a character. I'm still waiting for a WoW that I can just boot up and jump into a 3-5 hr instance with a some friends and some pre-rolled/equipped characters that are thrown away after we log off. I'd pay 1$/hr for that. Would WoW's gameplay hold up if you aren't in it for the persistence, random "community", loot, or leveling? Hard to say.
  • I think that would be an entirely different game, albeit a potentially fun one. I think an online D&D campaign runner tool could be a ton of fun (and Wizards really should have made it by now).
  • Re: bad behavior, I probably participate in a lot fewer PUGs than most, so don't see the cases where the down sides would arise. Or, when I do PUG, I already expect total fail. :) I also think there's an important distinction between free server transfers and name changes-- I think the latter are more destructive. With the proper tools, unique and permanent handles could provide some useful level of information.

    I love the idea of tiny WoW (well, new-WoW) realms, and I think it's interesting that the idea and its opposite can both work. Either you work with established communities (as do Facebook, XBL, etc.), or you establish a new community.

    One's more casual, and one's more hard core-- I simply don't play WoW enough to build up a social reputation. If I did, though, I'd love to try out the mini-realm idea, perhaps with realms tailored to play styles and times.

    You certainly see the "more exclusive" behavior on XBox Live, where folks often enable voice only among their friends list. Then again, that's basically the worst implementation of permanent handles possible-- there are no tools whatsoever. The only effect is that you know you're grouping with the same asshole who teamkilled you repeatedly last time, and can't do a damned thing about it.
  • JM
    "As a thought experiment, what would happen if WoW just made server transfers and faction transfers isntant and free? Maybe a touch more griefing, though I’m not convinced."

    I think the impact on player behavior might be greater than you expect. Even at the large server populations sizes currently, the effects of the semi-closed reputation system are keeping certain 'defect' behaviors in check. Fully open reputation systems (ones where you can enter and re-enter under a new name at any time) always become a race to the bottom. If we then add in the proclivity WoW players have towards being young, male and slightly socially maladjusted, I can only imagine that the trend would be accelerated. I suspect you would find guilds stepping up to cover the difference, becoming more exclusive and more skeptical of "outsiders."

    I do think the whole "playing with your friends" problem does need to be solved, and, as you pointed out, it is more than just being on the same server. I would actually love to see what would happen if WoW servers were even smaller, say, 200 people. Impossible to do with the large land mass that WoW has, and of course things like finding a group would be hell, but it would be interesting to build a game which really creates a "where-everyone-knows-your-name" feel. It would be something less like a world and more like a Village of Warcraft.
  • "The impact on server economies would give the hard core auctioneers more to do, not less."

    Oh my, you just hurt and excited that part of my brain that likes to corner the market on virtual goods. Its a good thing I stopped WoW awhile ago, or I'd be in big trouble if this ever came along.
  • The short answer is, they can't. Mostly because the answer for scalability right now is "Oh, right, we'll go have multiple instances."

    I've never played WoW. I have many friends that do, and I've considered it a couple times, but of course, they're all on different servers and so to play with any of them would mean multiple characters that I'd have to grind in a semi-parallel way. Forget that.

    It's just poor software architecture meeting (becoming formulaic) game design. We'll design this game to have a certain level of scarcity, and we'll add in extra checks to keep people from power-leveling, and we'll add in extra checks to avoid gold farmers, and we'll add in extra checks to make sure people didn't just put something heavy on the spacebar, and we'll put in extra this and that and these and those and holy crap, we need to nerf that class!

    Remember IRC? EFnet and DALnet and all sorts of others proved that you could transfer data readily through a distributed network of servers....some time before large multi-user environments like this were considered desirable.

    I think you're basically right that there's some game mechanics that are pretty artificial ruling things (like the factions), but I think the problem of multiple servers is a technical one; I think this idea of multiple instances can be broken. It's not an easy problem...but a potentially solvable one.
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