Today is the first birthday of the Burning Crusade expansion of World of Warcraft. The most noticeable thing about this event is the missing expected guest at the birthday party: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion. Blizzard clearly failed their declared goal of one expansion per year. WotLK doesn't even appear to be anywhere close, the best guess for it's release is November 2008, 4 years after the release of World of Warcraft, and thus bringing the average to one expansion every two years. Blizzard is famous for being obsessed with quality, which is a good thing. But I can't believe they couldn't have used some of their $500 million profit to hire a bunch more people and get expansions out faster. As a WoW expansion is like printing money, a guaranteed 10 million box sales, I'm sure there is a strong business case for producing expansions faster. And the players would certainly like it.
The Burning Crusade turned out to be better than I originally thought. Nevertheless I do stand to my statement from last year that while TBC is nice enough, it doesn't offer sufficient content to occupy everyone until the next expansion. But lets have a look at what the Burning Crusade offered us over the last 12 months.
Of course on release a large number of people were mostly interested in leveling up their characters to 70. Leveling up from 60 to 70 was fun: the quests were of somewhat higher quality than those in the old world, and the loot and quest rewards were much, much better. Only point of criticism on the leveling game is low replayability: Every single level 60 character, Horde or Alliance, goes through the nearly the same quests in the same Hellfire Peninsula zone. Blizzard realized that flaw, and Wrath of the Lich King will have multiple entry zones.
At level 70 the endgame of the Burning Crusade turned out to be in many respects better than the level 60 endgame. The reputation grinds were less grindy (unless you hate instances). The number of possible 5-man instances to go to was larger. And if those 5-man instances got too easy for you, you could always visit them in heroic mode for better rewards. Subsequent patches added daily quests, which made farming money feel less like a treadmill and more fun. Crafting at level 70 was more useful than at level 60, but that turned out to be a mixed blessing: Yes, you now could craft really nice epics which weren't totally useless compared to the other loot available, and that was good. But the downside of that was that you obviously can't give out epics too easily, so getting them involves a lot of farming primals, which gets boring rather fast.
The Burning Crusade raid endgame wasn't such a big success, at least not from the point of view of the majority of players. Reducing the size of the entry level raid dungeon from 40 to 10 players didn't achieve it's stated goal of making raiding more accessible. It turned out that in an average guild a 40 man Molten Core raid contained a mix of more dedicated and less dedicated players. There was a certain amount of room for "slackers", not everybody had to be at the top of their game all of the time. While that was a bit annoying for those who did most of the work in a raid, overall the system was good for the social cohesion of a guild. There was a possibility to take less experienced people on a raid and teach them the basics of raiding on the go. The entry level raid of the Burning Crusade doesn't have room for slackers, as there are only 10 people in the raid. There is less opportunity to take friends, or to train newer players. As an added problem the higher level raids after Karazhan required 25 players. Many guilds had one A team breezing through Karazhan after a while, and a B team that was still struggling. So when the A team wanted to move on, they found that they were lacking 15 people for the next raid dungeon. Some guilds managed to organize their Karazhan raid groups better, having two or more groups of equal strength instead of an A and B team. But in many other guilds the A team left to join another guild's A team to have enough players for the following content. The system was responsible for a large amount of guild drama and reshuffling. Fortunately that sorted itself out after a couple of months, and the introduction of another 10-man raid dungeon, Zul'Aman, helped too.
But if you were to log on tonight an count the percentage of players in raid dungeons, you'd notice that there are less people raiding nowadays than in the level 60 endgame. PvE raiding is now relatively less popular, for the simple reason that PvP has become more popular. This is a simple result of PvP mudflation: Arena seasons are much shorter than the time between two expansion in WoW. And every new arena season introduces even better rewards. And to make sure that new players can keep up with people in season 3 arena gear, season 1 arena gear has been made available for honor points, and is relatively easy to achieve. While Blizzard shouldn't have allowed Tigole to belittle them as "welfare epics", fact is that it is now easier to get a nice set of epics from PvP than from PvE raiding. That confirmed a widespread suspicion that some people were just raiding for the phat loot, because now these people aren't raiding any more, they are doing PvP.
PvP being relatively more popular isn't necessarily a bad thing (even if on underpopulated servers it makes it hard to find PvE groups). After all the Warcraft background is one that would presume a lot more PvP to take place. And as a defensive move against a wave of upcoming PvP-centric games, making PvP more popular in WoW is certainly a clever idea. Unfortunately if the people doing the PvP are only there for the phat loot, you can expect a certain amount of exploiting going on, and PvP is less safe against exploiting than PvE is. There are people doing AFK honor farming in battlegrounds, people buying themselves a spot in top arena teams, win trading (also called "smurfing"). So while now more people are doing PvP, the players who actually enjoy PvP for PvP's sake are less happy now, because the exploiters spoil their fun. Blizzard is well aware of the problem, but their first attempts to stop AFK honor farming haven't been very successful, and they have to come up with new ways to stop PvP exploiting.
The Burning Crusade didn't add new classes to the game, but it added one new race per faction, and via this new race made the classes that were previously restricted to one faction available to the other. So now there are bloodelf paladins for the Horde and draenei shamans for the Alliance. With the new races came new newbie zones up to level 20. And patch 2.3 added new quests in the level 35 to 40 range, where previously there weren't enough of them. Also leveling from level 20 to 60 has been sped up with the patch. All this lead to many people leveling alts nowadays.
So all in all the Burning Crusade has reason to celebrate on its first birthday. Things didn't go flawless, but well enough. Subscriber numbers went up when TBC was released, then went down a few months later, but went slightly up again after the summer and are pretty much stable now. This was helped by a lack of serious contenders in 2007. The coming months risk being harder for World of Warcraft: if Warhammer Online is released well before Wrath of the Lich King, the combination of not much new happening in the old game and the promises of a new game could lead to a noticeable migration towards WAR. Evil tongues say that the relative release dates of WAR and WotLK are of such importance that neither side dares to announce a fix release date. Images of Wild West gunfighters staring at each other at high noon in the main street of Tombstone for hours without moving come to mind, waiting for the other to draw first. Let's hope that under these conditions Wrath of the Lich King makes it before the Burning Crusade's second birthday.
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