Welfare epics

First of two posts today on the subject of rewards: Dyslexic wrote me to ask whether I would comment on the "welfare epics" issue, where Blizzard in the last patch made season 1 epic arena PvP gear available for honor and battleground badges, thus giving far more people access to them. So lets have a look at epics, and who gets them in World of Warcraft.

The basic principle for rewards in a MMORPG should be that equal effort rewards you with equivalent rewards. But MMORPGs have a certain interest in encouraging people to play together, and thus group activities are generally better rewarded than solo activities. The main sources for epics in WoW are raids and arena PvP. You can get epics by reputation grinds, crafting, or battleground PvP, but generally you will need to play more hours solo to get something equivalent to an epic that a group would have gotten faster.

Making the season 1 arena gear available as battleground PvP rewards moves somewhat away from that design. Battleground PvP is a borderline case between solo and group. Technically you are in a group, but nobody has to organize that group. People treat it like solo play, you log on, decided you want to do PvP, click on the NPC, wait in queue for a while, and off you go. It can be done with little or no planning. And in the worst case scenario you lose, and *still* get rewarded with one badge and some honor, while the winners just get more of both. Arena PvP is much more organized, you need to get a team together and agree with them when to do your battles. The organizational effort is much bigger, although the actual PvP isn't any more demanding than battleground PvP.

And there lies the base problem: should organizational effort be rewarded so much? Does somebody who spent 10 hours organizing and 40 hours doing arena PvP deserve a better reward than somebody who spent 50 hours doing battleground PvP without much organizing? Or should the same amount of effort spent be rewarded with equivalent epics?

On the one side of that argument is the fact that if you organize an arena team, or a PvE raid team, the cohesion among these players will be much better. The social experience is better, people are more likely to make friends, and friends lead to a better longevity of the game. In a battleground often everyone of the 10 players has the impression to be grouped with 9 idiots, who all think the same of him, but that is just the result of a lack of organization. There is very little cohesion and not many new friendships formed. The same is true for PvE, where the pickup group is an infamous source of countless anecdotes and ridicule. But in fact most of the time it is just a lack of communication. There is no magical mechanism that directs all idiots into pickup groups and all good players into well organized guild groups. More often than not it is the real-world environment that determines whether a player can commit himself to a regular arena team or raid group. If somebody doesn't know in advance when he will play this week, at what times, and for how long, his participation in all sorts of organized events is limited, and he'll automatically be more often in pickup groups and battleground PvP. That doesn't make him a worse player than somebody who knows he play every evening from 8 to midnight, and can organize teams around that schedule.

So for me it is fine if arena gear can be gained by battleground effort. After all, there is a mudflation, and the season 3 arena gear is much better than the season 1 one, so the organized play is still somewhat better rewarded. I can't subscribe to an attitude saying that only organized play deserves epic rewards. And I'd like to point Blizzard in the direction of Warhammer Online, where the concept of public quests looks like a battleground for PvE. Wouldn't it be great if we had PvE content which would be to raids like battlegrounds are to arena PvP? Log on, sign up, wait in queue and go PvE raid? But just like battleground PvP has been designed somewhat differently than arena PvP, that sort of pickup raid design has to be modified from normal raid design to be viable. That some elitist jerks will look down on the rewards as "welfare epics" is only a sign of their lack of character, and doesn't make rewards for less organized play a worse game design idea.