Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Rise of the Leet King

I received the following letter from Blizzard today, and I need your help to decide what to answer them:
Dear Blizzard Customer,

We are writing you because you are, or have been in the past, playing World of Warcraft. We also know, thanks to our Warden spy software we installed on your computer, that you have been complaining on some blog, or forum, about World of Warcraft being too easy, and having become even easier during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Well, as you are on to us, and we need your help, we decided to tell you a secret: Making World of Warcraft easier in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was a deliberate business decision based on our design for our upcoming second MMORPG. That second MMORPG, working title "Rise of the Leet King™", is going to be a very hard MMORPG. That way we'll cover all the MMO market, having one very easy and accessible MMORPG for the mass market and new players, and one very hard and challenging MMORPG for the veteran players.

Unfortunately our design team has run into a problem: We have some ideas, based on our experience as serious Everquest raiders, on how to make a MMORPG really hard. But some of the team say that certain features of Everquest wouldn't be acceptable any more for our Rise of the Leet King MMORPG. Thus we are sending out this survey to all of you who complained about World of Warcraft being too easy, so you can tell us exactly in which way you would like your dream MMORPG to be much harder. We compiled a list of possible options, and would like you to tell us which of these you would like to have in a hard game (multiple mentions possible), or, if you have any idea how to make a MMORPG hard that isn't listed, please tell us that one too. The options are:
  • Slower leveling: Make the time to gain a level or any other reward much slower, so it takes about 2,000 hours to reach the level cap, like in Everquest.
  • Experience loss death penalty: Lose about 10% of a level every time you die, including the option to lose levels, taking you days to recover.
  • Item loss: The possibility to lose items, either through death or from wear and tear.
  • Harder soloing: Making mobs much more powerful, so that soloing an even level mob is likely to end up with your death.
  • Faster reaction times required: A combat system in which you need to press the correct blocking key to mitigate damage in fractions of a second. Repeated failure to do so will end up in your certain death due to that lack of skill. Everquest didn't have that, we came up with that one by ourselves, based on the popularity of fast reaction requirements in raids.
  • No instances, slow respawn times: Every mob and raid boss only exists in one copy per server, and only respawns after several hours. If you want to kill a raid boss, your guild better be there before any other guild.
In expectation of your answer what exactly you want when you complain about World of Warcraft being too easy, yours

Tigole
I think they sent that letter to me by mistake, I want neither of these options, having already experienced most of them in Everquest. So I'm passing the buck to you: If you have ever been complaining about World of Warcraft being too easy, please tell me, how exactly should "hard" look? If you are a reader, you can answer in the comment section. If you are one of many blogger having complained about World of Warcraft being too easy, how about putting your answer on your blog? Just mention the Rise of the Leet King, so we can find your blog post on Google.

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