If you wondered why all of Blizzard's recent development on World of Warcraft favors the hardcore player and the excessive grinder so much over the casual player, this bad game design might be caused by a bad method of testing. Blizzard just announced a World of Warcraft Test Realm Contest in which people are invited to test the 1.10 patch between now and the end of March. You get rewarded if either you reach level 50 in 3 weeks, or you farm the most honor in Warsong Gulch, or you level the largest number of characters to 25. The prize is a beta-slot for the Burning Crusade expansion, which should tempt quite a lot of people.
Winning is easy, you just need to play over 100 hours per week for the next 3 weeks, starting with freshly made level 1 characters. How that could be relevant for testing the big changes to the level 60 dungeons in the patch 1.10, nobody knows. And of course that is a contest to which people with a life outside WoW don't need to apply. If you reward grinding and farming like that, all the players in the test will grind and farm to the best of their ability. Any data that Blizzard can learn from observing them will be complete skewed towards a grinding behavior. It scares me that this is what they are basing their future development on.
The longevity of a game is *not* based on how fast the most motivated player can level up. Longevity comes from keeping the average player motivated at the leveling speed his Real Life ® allows him to achieve. If you test for all the wrong things, no wonder that bad game development results.
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