Mudflation in WoW

In a comment to the "why do we play" post Oz mentioned his fear that World of Warcraft would go down the mudflation way that Everquest did. Interesting point to discuss, so I'm making a post about it.

Mudflation is an inevitable process in which the value of your equipment gets worse relatively to what the others are wearing if you don't play for a while. Imagine you and your friends all have tier 0 armor ("dungeon set 1" as it's officially called), and you quit the game for a couple of months. You come back and you still have tier 0 armor, whose stats haven't changed at all, thus you are exactly as strong as you were before. But your friends have started raiding Molten Core in the months you were away, and are all wearing lots of epic items. So if you play with them again, you *feel* weaker.

The same thing happens between players spending less time in the game and others spending more time in the game. The players spending less time fall behind, there is a growing gap between those players who play most and get the very best gear, and the players who play casually. So although two players might both be level 60, the gap between them might be so big that they can't realistically play together. If they go to easy level 60 content, the better equipped player will find it trivial and be bored. If they go raiding Onyxia together the same deep breath hitting them both kills the less well equipped player who doesn't have the fire resistance gear to withstand it, while the well equipped guy just shrugs it off.

Mudflation is often aided and abetted by developers adding new content. For example patch 1.11 adds the Naxxrimas dungeon to the World of Warcraft. This dungeon is tougher than anything existing, and the loot in there is better than anything existing. Thus the gap between somebody getting the Naxxrimas loot and somebody stuck for some reason at tier 0 armor is growing.

Is this an inevitable fate of World of Warcraft, having an ever growing gap in power level between the casual players and the hardcore players? I don't think so. Think what will happen when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out and the level cap of the game is raised. Presumably even the casual player will buy the expansion and level up to 70 playing solo and small groups in a reasonable time. I have posted an previous estimate that the average player will take 200 hours to get from level 60 to 70. But during this 200 hours his effective power (his meta-level) will grow at a relatively fast rate. At level 70 he will be stronger than a level 60 player who spent twice that time in raid dungeons. Of course the hardcore players will have reached level 70 in half that time, 100 hours, and will already have been raiding level 70 raid dungeons for a while. But because increasing your meta-level by raiding is so excruciatingly slow, the gap between the casual player and the hardcore player will narrow after the expansion, not widen.

So as long as Blizzard will raise level caps in future expansions, the gap between casual and hardcore players can be kept more or less constant. Any patch that adds high-end content without raising the level cap will increase the gap. But every rise of the level cap will narrow the gap again. There is no reason why World of Warcraft can't have a level 100 or even 200 in the far future. Mudflation might not be dead, but there are ways to control it.