Is World of Warcraft a hardcore game?

Counter-question to yesterday's post is provided by Nils, who thinks that World of Warcraft became more hardcore over time. While I would be tempted to niggle over the details if I were to dissect his post line by line, I must say that overall I agree: For me as a player with a more casual than hardcore mindset, World of Warcraft is less interesting now than it was 6 years ago.

Unlike Nils I would argue the point not feature by feature, but rather by looking at the Bartle types. If you were to take the four Bartle types Achiever, Killer, Explorer, and Socializer and you would attribute two of these types each to "hardcore" and "casual" players, I think most people would agree that casual players are more likely to be interested in exploration and socialization. And World of Warcraft over the years has become a less social world in which there is less to explore. People don't get to explore leveling zones any more, because when they enter the zone and swat a fly, they get 1 million xp and a message that they just outleveled this zone. The high-level zones of Cataclysm are admittedly slower, but their extremely linear structure makes exploration unfeasible as well. If you were to try to explore a Cataclysm zone, you would either find empty areas which will be populated by NPCs only once you are at the correct point in the quest series, or you would find NPCs with whom you can't interact unless you reach that point in questing. And while I am not quite as negative about the Dungeon Finder as Nils is, I do agree that it comes to the detriment of socializing and making new friends.

Now obviously part of any MMORPG getting less interesting to explorers over the years is that content to explore is limited. "Been there, done that" is the death of exploration. But to reinterpret what Nils says, many of the features introduced to World of Warcraft over the years are more likely to appeal to Killers and Achievers, than to Explorers and Socializers.

The saddest statement about online friends

I think I already remarked a couple of times that online games and social platforms have somewhat degraded the meaning of the word "friend". But today I read the saddest statement ever about the kind of friendships you make in online games: Zelmaru of Murloc Parliament advises people to not play online games with their real life friends, because it would "eff up the RL friendship". I'm not saying that he is wrong (there is a reason why I quickly gave up on trying to play WoW with my wife), but as a testament to the quality of online friendship I find this really depressing.

Now THAT is a banhammer!

Jagex reports that their new software to ban bots from the Runescape servers was so successful that player activity dropped by 60%. As 90% of these botters were playing for free that isn't much of a loss for Jagex, but in consequence they are merging server, bringing the total number down from 172 to 139.

I knew Runescape had bot problems for many years, but I wasn't aware of the size of the problem. If more than half of their server load came from bots, it is surprising that they didn't write that bot-removal software earlier. There is maybe in lesson in this story that games with a Free2Play business model are more susceptible to bots, because the botters can set up a lot of accounts for free.

On the other hand I've always said that the very best way to prevent botting problems is to make a game which isn't repetitive enough to be played by bots. Everybody wins!

Is World of Warcraft a casual game?

Keen is writing about Richard Garriott, who is writing about companies like EA and Blizzard having missed the boat on casual games. Richard Garriott thinks: “The only reason Zynga exists is because people like EA, people like Blizzard, failed to step in.” Keen on the other hand thinks: "Blizzard has done more for the casual movement than any other company with any sort of interest vested in MMOs. Blizzard managed to take what was originally, for years, a “hardcore” genre of complex mechanics and reduce it to the least common denominator. World of Warcraft is the definition of accessibility and as close to a casual friendly experience as it gets."

Me, I do think that many bloggers have a rather unrealistically high expectation of where exactly the "least common denominator" is. The most simple Zynga games, like Farmville, are probably very close to this imaginary "least common denominator". World of Warcraft is several orders of magnitude more complex. There are thousands of games which are more complex than Farmville but less complex than World of Warcraft in between these two. Thus I don't agree that WoW today is "as close to a casual friendly experience as it gets". Case in point, the general assumption is that Mists of Pandaria will make WoW *more* casual friendly, which wouldn't be possible if it was already as casual friendly as possible.

That is not to say that Keen and all the people complaining about the next WoW expansion don't have a point. What is certainly true is that if you draw a line from Everquest to WoW 2004 to WoW 2011 (and SWTOR 2011) there is a clear and steady trend away from hardcore. The only mistake is to think that we are for some reason already at the bottom of this trend, and it won't continue from here on. There is no reason whatsoever which would prevent Blizzard from continuing this trend with *every* future patch and expansion, making World of Warcraft even easier and less hardcore every year. Just look at games like Free Realms to see how much less complex and more casual friendly a MMORPG still can become.

Where will that end? Unfortunately for the hardcore, they do not play Zynga games. I believe that to understand trends in gaming, you need to be open enough to try everything. Which is why I play everything from hardcore PvP games to Farmville, even if many of the games I try out turn out to be not to my liking. Because in this case Zynga games, unexpectedly, offer a message of hope for the hardcore gamers: The trend for Zynga games, and other Facebook and browser games, is to get *more* complex on average every year. It turned out that Farmville was *too* simple, and while easy enough for everybody to learn wasn't interesting enough to keep people playing. The much maligned casual gamer and Zynga games customer demanded something more complex. Which means the long-term trend points not towards a bottomless pit of zero complexity, but towards a compromise somewhere half way between Farmville and World of Warcraft.

While I find that good to know, I don't think this will make the hardcore players happy. We still have many years ahead of us before games reach that compromise. And during that time the "l33t skillz" of the hardcore players will go up, while the challenge on offer will go down. These are very simple market forces at work here. You don't need to be an economics major to understand that hoping for a game which has the level of quality which requires a hundred million dollars to realize, and at the same time is inaccessible to anybody but the most hardcore elite player, is likely to end up in disappointment. The only financially viable solutions are accessible big budget games, or low budget hardcore games. This isn't the result of some evil conspiracy of game developers to make players dumber. It is the inevitable result of a market in which prices are effectively capped, and making an online game for the maximum number of players possible is always more profitable than making a game for a select elite.

Richard Garriott is right in saying that World of Warcraft isn't a casual game yet, but Keen is right in saying that WoW is getting ever more casual, and other games will follow in that direction. As much as some people would like to see online games as a lifestyle, the truth is that these games are products, and are subject to market forces. As a business decision, Mists of Pandaria is brilliant. Even if that means that the genre is moving away from what their most avid fans wish. History has a tendency to repeat itself, and what happened to movies since Jaws is going to happen to games as well.

Not a game post

Benjamin Franklin once said that "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Smart guy, old Ben. This week's massive drop in stock prices all over the world is a direct result of the markets believing that he is right. Europe offered Greece a deal in which Greece is forgiven half of its debts in exchange for enough austerity measures to not just pile up new debts endlessly afterwards. The Greek prime minister surprised everybody by insisting that the Greek should vote on that in a referendum. And most people believe that this will end badly, that the Greek are unable to vote for acting responsibly, and would rather just default and not pay back any of their debts. They would "vote themselves money" in the short term, although the long term consequences of that might well be less favorable for Greece.

Most people mistakenly believe they live in a democracy. In reality nearly all "democratic" countries are in fact republics. That is people can't vote themselves money, they can only vote for candidates for offices promising them money. That does slow the money voting into your own pocket down a bit, but doesn't stop it. Politicians everywhere promise "earmarks" and other forms of pork to the people voting for them. Even right-wing parties, who would like a slimmer state, always only talk about lowering taxes, never about what services they want to cut when the state has less money. The result is that just about every republic is in debt, usually around one annual gross domestic product (GDP). Which means it would take all the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a year to pay back the debt. And because the debt is so huge, countries spend a considerable chunk of their money just to pay back interests.

Debt can be useful. You might want to take out a student loan so that you will have higher earnings later. You might want to take out a mortgage and pay it back over the years while already living in your house, instead of saving up 20 years first and buying the house then. But the important thing is that debt should be cyclical: You get into debt when you earn less than you spend, but that is balanced by a foreseeable future in which you earn more than you spend, where you pay back your debt. Countries apparently don't work like that. The current stated goals of various governments is to borrow "only" about 3% of GDP when times are good, which then usually leads to deficits of about 10% when times are bad. It is easy to see that a cycle which always stays in the red and only goes from "little new debt" to "a lot of new debt" without ever reaching the "repaying debt" phase is going to come crashing down sooner or later. Not just in Greece, but the USA and everywhere else as well. You simply can't live on borrowed money forever. At "best" you can postpone the day of reckoning, which basically means leaving the repayment of the debts to our children and grandchildren.

I would like to live in a country with a positive budget, with a plan to pay back all its debts over the next 20 or so years. I am willing to discuss whether that positive budget is best achieved by having higher taxes, or lower spending and entitlements, or both. Unfortunately none of the candidates I could vote for in the republic I live in is offering any of these choices. I only get to choose between those who want to make new debt by lowering taxes without reducing entitlements, and those who want to make new debt by increasing spending and entitlements. I don't think that is okay, and I don't even *have* children.

It's a deal

If you buy a book and finished reading it, you have the right to resell that book. If you had spent the same money to see the movie instead, you would have no such right, even if it was technically possible to tape the movie while watching. Although in both cases you buy access to intellectual property of the author, in the case of the book you buy it as a physical good, while in the case of the movie you buy it as a service. Video games have for many years fallen on the book scale of things: In many legislations it is not only legal to resell used video games, but it is even actually illegal for game companies to prevent people from reselling. But MMORPGs are legally considered like movies, that is a service and not a physical good, and thus game companies are allowed to prevent you from reselling your account.

That understandably has made the people selling single-player offline games somewhat jealous. If they could only turn their games into services instead of physical goods, they would solve all their problems with piracy and reselling and thus make a lot more money. And that explains the current trend towards games which are at their core single-player games, but all suddenly end up offering lots of online services: Online achievements and rankings, online social network functionality, online PvP, and even online cooperative gameplay for games that wouldn't work well as PvP games. Other games are incomplete on the disc in the box, and then have a code for a downloadable content (DLC), which can be used only once. And then there is digital distribution of games on platforms like Origin or Steam.

Of course some people are very upset about this development, because by adding all these online functions to games, the game company is taking away your right to resell your old games. And (whisper it) they also take away your "right" to copy and pirate games.

But that is not the only way to see things. Not everybody is interested in reselling or copying games. My old games tend to collect dust in a cupboard until I realize that they aren't working on the current version of Windows any more, at which point they go into the garbage bin. The most useful I ever did with my old games was giving away a whole bunch of them to a "recycling station" where people give away their old stuff and others can get it there for free. Thus to me and people like me, games as a service instead of a physical good has no disadvantage. Which is one reason why I'm buying most of my games from Steam these days and do away completely with the physical good.

In exchange for giving away my right to resell games, I do receive better online functionality. Of course how useful that is depends on the game. But in some cases I do receive something for nothing, because I get some online function I like in exchange for a right I didn't use. It's a deal. I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good deal for everybody, because some people might well need to resell their old games to finance the next one, and might not be using the online functions. But this is the deal on offer, and everybody is free to take it or leave it. Expect to see a lot more games with online modes in the future. And you might want to sell your GameStop shares.

The Daedalus Project

There is a lot about MMORPGs that we don't know. Lots of arguments on blogs like this one, or on various other website or forums, are made based on anecdotal evidence at best. Look for example at the famous "if you play Horde, then you are an evil person" debate, which was based on a the reaction of a single 3-year old on seeing undead. Wouldn't it be better if we had broader statistical evidence on questions like what choice of avatar says about a person? Well, it turns out you can contribute to gathering that evidence. The most famous MMORPG statistician (not much of a title, I admit) Nick Yee is continuing work on his Daedalus Project. And you can participate. Fill out the survey, spread the word, and we will know more about questions like these.