Blizzard to make $1 billion in one week?
Pasted below is an interesting e-mail exchange between a World of Warcraft player and a Blizzard employee. The employee says great stuff because it appears he just wrote the response himself, rather than anything passing through the PR department that removes all content from its communications. (Anyone remember that slashdot 10 questions to Blizzard fiasco?) Anyway, his response is terrific.
The part I'm focusing on is his math that estimates there would be tens of millions of character transfers requested immediately if they allowed anyone to transfer characters from any server to any server. I also know that Blizzard circulated a survey a while ago that asked people if they would be willing to pay $40 for a character transfer. I know that sounds expensive, but people might be willing to pay that so they can actually play with their friends. (Side note: I can play with my friends in Guild Wars. Yes that game has too much instancing, but the ability to switch "servers" instantly is riduclously good.)
Ok, so $40 multiplied by, tens of millions--say 25 million--character transfer requests (remember, people will want to transfer multiple characters) totals $1 billion. Holy cow. Even if the numbers are way off and only a 10th of that is true, that would still be $100 million...for character transfers! Business-wise, this is truly...epic!
wtb solo instances with epic gear so I can compete in bg's. pst.
--Sirlin
p.s.: Why did Silithus claim to have solo content, but then have raid bosses in the quest chain? Why did 1.10 claim to have 3 solo epics with the tier 0.5 armor, but actually requires you to have the tier 0 armor first, which can only be gotten from lots and lots of 5 man content? Just call it 5-man epics if that's what it is.
Ok, anyway, here's the long paste of the two e-mails I mentioned:
find it amazing that a company such as yours cannot maintain a proper playing environment. I think that you owe every player that plays on the Detheroc realm an apology because not only is it your job to maintain the servers but also it is your job to provide a smooth playing experience free of server crashes and lag. This is not the first time that this has happened, and I don't know how many more times it will happen, but you people have a duty to fix this problem because we pay you.
-A very upset customer
And here is the Blizz response.
Hello,
I will do my best to address what I can and hopefully give you some perspective as to what we are trying.
I will address this from the stand point of server performance and character transfers. Since the realms are crowded, people are clamoring for a transfer off their server right away. There is a general misconception about how the character transfers work. While you may think this is a simple drag and drop procedure like you would do a Windows file, this is not even remotely close to the case. I cannot go into details why as that is proprietary information but I can tell you this: While we do offer realm to realm transfers occasionally, transfer from Server A to server B is a much less complicated of a process than designing and coding a system to transfer from Server A to *any* server A through Z. Multiply that by the fact that Servers A to Z will be able to transfer to Servers A to Z and there are a lot more variables involved. Multiply this by the amount of users we have, most of whom have stated they have a character they would like to transfer. Add to that the number of users that have more than one character that they want to transfer. Even at a low estimate, the number of individual requests that our system will have to handle is in the tens of millions.
Yes...tens of millions of characters trying to transfer almost simultaneously. That is mind boggling. This is an extremely high number of transaction to track simultaneously and there are very few systems in the world that can handle something like that. The short version: This is indeed a complicated, time consuming, extensive process and is not in any way shape or form even remotely close the scale of the limited transfers we are currently offering. It is the difference between busing 30 people from Philadelphia to Boston...and evacuating New York City and dispersing them to every other major city in the United States.
To address server stability, at any given moment the login server is perpetually being pinged by more than a 1/4 of a million people trying to log in during peak hours. It doesn't matter if you are NASA or Microsoft. With the sheer amount of people trying to log in at any given moment no system in the world can handle that kind of concurrency without buckling a little under the load.
But do not think we are just sitting idly by bathing in your $100 bills. This is farthest from the truth. I do appreciate you taking the time to email your feedback. I play on the same servers you do so I can understand the frustration you feel and can most assuredly empathize. I play on one of the more frequently down and problematic servers that seems to mirror the worst with its availability and population issues.
But please let me put this into perspective: the queues. This game is the most popular game in the world. Not the biggest MMO, not the biggest RPG, but the biggest game. Now while all that sounds fun and fancy, managing 6 million concurrent players worldwide is a logistical nightmare. That is approximately 1/6th of the population of California; and only slightly higher than the population of Los Angeles County. Remember cities have an entire staff of council members in each city to handle and delegate tasks to improve the flow and productivity of the city. City populations do not grow from zero to 6 million overnight. We did.
With any kind of large growth there are bound to be problems. Did we think we were going to do that? Not in our wildest dreams. So, what do we do when everyone wants to play? If the realm is maxed out you implement a queue. If you've ever been to Disneyland or any other popular theme park, what happens when the latest and greatest attraction opens up? People flock to it in record numbers. Let's take the Indiana Jones ride for example at Disneyland. It opened up 1995~1996. First day it opened it had a queue of 6 hours.
Let's say we hypothetically removed the queue just so everyone who wants to play on your particular server can access it. It's analogous to allowing every single person on the ride on at the same time. Can the ride handle it? In no way shape or form. Can you demand the designers of the roller coaster to rebuild it so it CAN take that many riders? Not even in the slightest. Also, while sure there are plenty of demands for refunds at that particular theme park most refunds will be turned away.
Is your anger justified? That is entirely up to you. I play the game on the same realms you play on and experience the same frustrations. I cannot compare my feelings to yours as you experience it differently. We've received many calls and emails from players telling us how much they're enjoying World of Warcraft and that they would just like to have a more consistent connection experience. In order to achieve this, we will continue our analysis, and we'll continue to take further measures as needed, such as login queues, patching, and general maintenance.
I understand you are angry/frustrated/disappointed/all of the above. If you are looking for specific on what we plan on doing about the problems, you only need to look no further than the General Forums: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=7352436&p=1&tmp=1#post7352436. This post discusses the hardware updates we are implementing. Also, as further evidence of upgrades we've opened up 8 new realms in the last two weeks as well as opened up an unprecendeted number of transfers to low population servers.
This gives you the scope of the task and hopefully it'll help you understand it is not as simple as just "fixing the servers now". So the end result is and will remain....we are sorry, and we are working on it. We have the most up to date technology in this industry, but the sheer numbers of players that came in droves (tens of thousdands and all at once might I add) have challenged us and are now allowing us to grow.
In conclusion, the questions you are asking are literally outside the realm of Technical Support. We have been growing at a prodigial rate to accomodate the influx of customers and we're still growing. If you've played Everquest or Ultima Online or any other MMO, you'll have witnessed every single one of these companies experienced even greater problems than what WoW is experiencing. There were even times of week long outages with no word from their community at all.
I am sorry I cannot adequately answer all of the questions you have asked. As much as I would like to address them, I have tried answering your questions as best I can. And for that I am sorry. We understand that issues like these affect your experience greatly. Technical support does not have the ability to affect any type of compensation or time extensions for the difficulties you have been having.
April 8th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
How much money does blizzard make anyway? This guy makes it sound like an epic struggle to keep the game running while I imagine they have plenty of profit in order to improve things.
Then again, companies like money, so…
April 9th, 2006 at 3:31 am
It’s not about -needing- the money. It’s about the fact that they could provide a service, people would pay for it, and it would make them -more- money, which they could invest in new talent or whatever. He’s saying that offering more options would be a good thing, in all respects. If it takes too many man hours to do these moves, the cost per move would more than make up for the cost to hire someone to do the work.
April 9th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Of course, a ton more people would be interested in switching servers for free than for paying for switching.
I bet most people would love to have free rare items and gold and such, but a lot fewer actually buy rare items off E-Bay.
April 9th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
“Multiply this by the amount of users we have, most of whom have stated they have a character they would like to transfer.”
So most players would rather transfer their characters than stay on their current servers? I didn’t realize that the majority of WoW players are typically bored with the server they are on. Interesting. Dave Sirlin is probably thinking that character transfers wouldn’t be an issue if the skill used (in the game) was stored in the player and not a virtual statistic. Time > skill, blah, blah, blah… ;-)
In the end, Blizzard isn’t concerned with hooking you up with your buddies. The servers are separated for performance reasons… and that’s the only factor taken into account when transferring characters and creating new servers. Could you imagine someone paying to go to another server only to have many more people wanting to transfer to that server (making it severely overpopulated)? With Blizzard’s primary concern of performance and stability, I highly doubt they CAN create a character transfer system that’s fair and flexible enough to demand any sort of extra payment.
Of course, players can always make a NEW character on the server they want to play on.
April 10th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
What a horrible reply. Have these guys never heard of a “load balancer”?
Who gets more hits, Google or the WoW login server? I’m going to guess Google, and that holds up just fine. What they are talking about is a very solvable problem. Multiple login servers would be an obvious first step.
It’s pretty damn sad that with the amount of money they are making they are having server problems which by all accounts are getting worse and worse.
April 10th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Hopefully the new server hardware will fix some of the issues a lot of us have been experiencing. I know on Arthas entire endgame dungeons have been rendered unplayable because multiple guilds are trying to raid at the same time. Character transfers seem to still be a long ways off. If transfers are ever available I hope they aren’t poorly done just to make a quick buck while we sit around in 1000 person queues.
I have a question about Sirlin’s post script. Anyone who frequents the cesspool that is the official WoW forums has seen that the Casual vs. Hardcore gamer debate is a hot topic. Sirlin’s concern about it being hard to compete in BGs against players in full epics is fairly standard. My question is, how can you make soloable quests that provide epics but not make raiding content irrelevant? I have a decked out rogue and warlock for raiding but I pvp on a scrubby mage in blues and greens so I feel your pain as far as getting two shotted goes. I am just afraid that WoW is already spread so thin trying to please everyone that implementing more things to please more people will be like adding weight to a sinking ship. WoW for me is a filler anyway, the lowest common denominator until a truly great game come out.
April 10th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
World of Warcraft measures everything in time (bleh). If there were solo quests that led to epics and took the same time as a person raiding would spend, then there is no problem. Let’s say this solo option did exist, and it was really hard and took a long time to get on “farm status” and mirrored raid difficulty/time very closely. Of course, given these options some people would choose to raid and some would choose the difficult solo content. What if 90% of people chose the solo content? That’s a danger a lot of people cite. I think the answer is obvious: if the two options really do have similar time/difficulty and no one chooses the raid option, then it shows that lots of people don’t think the raid option is FUN. If raiding actually is fun and people enjoy doing it, then raiders shoulnd’t feel threatened.
Please spare me any follow-up comments about how it’s an MMO and MMO means forced grouping. It really doesn’t, and WoW 1-59 proves that and shows the overwhelming success you can get when you reject the antiquated idea that forced grouping is the way to make an MMO.
There are plenty of stats (check terranova.com) showing that raiding players are a small percentage of the whole. The Blizzard-EQ development mentality gave up the original vision of a game that is inclusive to solo, small groups, and large groups. You can see it 1-59 (and that’s why the game is popular and sold a lot), and it continues to be successful in spite of the wrong-headed end-game philosophy. boo.
–Sirlin
April 11th, 2006 at 2:00 am
Sirlin, as both a competitive gamer and an aspiring game theorist I love this site but I really feel as if you don’t have the right “handle” on MMO’s.
It’s understandable considering your background as a SF2 player, a game which doesn’t require a team, but MMO’s aren’t about solo play. After all MMO does stand for Massively Multiplayer..
April 11th, 2006 at 4:20 am
I’d say that statement lacks some boundaries.
If it’s MMO period it would also stand to reason that you’d have to team up in everything up to the newbie area and transportation.
I don’t play MMO’s, but in BF2 I don’t always like to play “Follow the leader” with some random peep who I can’t understand, nor makes it clear what strategy he’s employing.
Sometimes I just want to snipe ya know…
April 11th, 2006 at 4:57 am
I think I have an excellent handle on MMOs. This is like the 90th time I’ve had to make this same arguement, and I don’t what to say anymore, but a single player game does not feel the same as an MMO. In an MMO, tere are people out there you can talk to, group with if you want, fight, trade with, etc. It’s an alive world and has plenty of appeal to solo and small group players. Forced grouping is not in the definition of MMO. It’s a wrong-headed notion that WoW itself exposes with its 1-59 game.
There are different personalities out there, and an MMO is a great vehicle to cater to pretty much all of them. Rather than being elitist and saying the genre should only focus on forced grouping, why not be inclusive and support solo, small groups, and large groups? It’s within easy reach to do so, and the main hangup is the philosophies of people who grew up on EQ thinking that MMO = forced grouping.
We’re never going to get anywhere on this unless the EQ camp can see that single player games are not the same experience that WoW offers 1-59. Beign part of a community doesn’t mean forced grouping, and group activities are not inherently superior to challenges you face alone.
–Sirlin
April 11th, 2006 at 10:24 am
“If there were solo quests that led to epics and took the same time as a person raiding would spend, then there is no problem. Let’s say this solo option did exist, and it was really hard and took a long time to get on “farm status” and mirrored raid difficulty/time very closely. Of course, given these options some people would choose to raid and some would choose the difficult solo content”
I think the problem for designers is making a solo “raid” encounter that is as equally challenging as a 40 man one.
Even if we use the final boss in Gnomeregan, a level 30-35 5 man dungeon, where players have to push buttons to stop bombs from dropping into the room, as an example - how do you quash the complexities and mechanics of a group encounter into a solo one?
I dont think it can be done.
And as for “community”, I dont think it means forced grouping at all - simply for me community in MMO is the people I enjoy playing with. MMO’s are alot more enjoyable when you have a regular core group of friends and competent players that you enjoy playing with,
April 11th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Of all the arguements against solo content, the one you bring up is the only one I know of with merit. I think it would be quite a design challenge to make difficult solo content in a game system like World of Warcraft. BUT, here’s the thing…
All the bad reasons against solo content are the ones I’ve heard from Blizzard. I kept very careful track of this over two years, and I never saw them say anything about the design challenge being too hard. It’s always stuff about how raid content “deserves” more and big groups “deserve” more and so on. In fact, there was a blizzard post a couple months ago (I really should have saved it, I think it was by Tigole) that said putting in a solo dungeon would be “easy, and take one day at most, but we won’t do it because it’s against our philosophy.” I was especially outraged by that because of course it would take more than “one day” to implement something like that. As you point out, it would especially difficult to make it work for any class. But that’s never ever what Blizzard says. Once we get rid of the BS arguements and get down to the real issue of how to actually make one or two person dungeons, then we can begin solving the problem.
Anyway, this thread was supposed to be about how Blizzard might be able to monetize character transfers and make another huge pile of money, which I’d hope some portion of would be used to make the game better. I’m all for companies making a lot of money, so my hat is off to them if they can get 25 million character transfers. Then again, my hat is also off to Guild Wars which doesn’t need such a feature in the first place.
–Sirlin
April 11th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
This is going further off tangent so I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to bring it up anyway..
Referring to Tigole and his “philosophy”, I’m not sure if you’re aware but Tigole and Foror [another designer] were both guild-leaders of prominent Everquest guilds and were essentially hand-picked by Blizzard to work on WoW. Tigole does dungeons and Foror does quests I believe, so basically you are playing a game which is designed by EQ fanatics - which is why it’s so raid focused, to the detriment of other players, such as solo players and pvpers.
A traditional dilemma in online games summarised is that - The players always think they know better than the designers the direction a game should take, and the designers are always sceptical of the players motivations for suggesting changes.
Were Blizzard on the right track by hiring two people with no prior experience in the games industry, other than having played eq?
April 11th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
(On topic…)
If they were to set up a system to charge money for character transfers, the only method I can see is… being able to transfer a character from an overpopulated server to designated selection of lower populated servers. That way, performance potentially improves on some servers and some people get to transfer to a different server. However, I’m curious as to why people want to transfer their characters in the first place. Is (or was) there a poll that determined this?
Regarding “load balancing” (brought up by James M)… Google and WoW are completely different beasts. It’s one thing to serve up (in most cases, static HTML) web pages. It’s another to dynamically alter data being sent based on a huge amount of variables (most of which are influenced by individual players) and doing so many times a second. I’m not defending Blizzard, but “load balancing” is hardly the answer.
(Off topic…)
Andrew Lee wrote:
“Were Blizzard on the right track by hiring two people with no prior experience in the games industry, other than having played eq?”
That’s a really interesting question (and situation). However, did these two guys go against the “vision” of the game… or are they carrying out a determined strategy of rewarding time and large raids as the game progresses?
I think that’s why people grow bitter towards MMORPGs, in general. You begin the game, explore a little, meet a few cool people… and you play how you want to play (solo, small group, or large raid). Then the game progressively requires you to group to receive any rewards of significance; essentially abandoning other game play possibilities (that many people enjoy). I have a theory with MMORPGs and it all boils down to “making content last as long as possible”… and the best way to slow down content consumption (progress) is to throw as many people together as possible to overcome obstacles. It even translates into the business world… it took forever when my old managers brought more developers into the project. Boy, did those projects drag. ;-)
April 12th, 2006 at 2:06 am
http://www.telefragged.com/interviews/guildwars/
Excerpt from an interview with Guild Wars developer Jeff Strain, Dec 16, 2004:
“…This game network was built from the ground up as a step forward in online gaming technology, and it provides the infrastructure for many of the unique features in Guild Wars, including on-demand content streaming, a global namespace, international play, a singular global client, and of course the ability to offer the game without requiring a subscription fee.
The technology is unique in that it is built around a “distributed confederacy” model in which our servers located in datacenters around the world work together to migrate your account and character records to different datacenters as you play…
You don’t have to pick a server and live there forever or choose a game host for your Guild Challenge battle. Nor do you have to wait in a queue to play because you happened to choose a server that is overloaded at the moment. Instead, the network handles it all behind the scenes on your behalf. All you see is that you can play when you want, with whom you want, and it all just works. Is it worth it? Absolutely!”
———————–
At the beginning of the World Preview and Beta events in late 2004 and early 2005, the game handled 400,000 players logging in at once–without lag, queue, or disconnection issues.
Why doesn’t Blizzard do this? Would it force whole-world-instancing? Would it cost too much money?
April 12th, 2006 at 6:19 am
All I have to say is, Remember Ultima Online. I played that when the Renaissance expansion came out and it was(still is) the best MMO experience I ever had. I could solo anything in the world I wanted, control what loot I got and when I got it. At most killing dragons or ancient liches took 2 people, 1 fighting and 1 healing. Having played FFXI and WoW after that the MMO isn’t the same anymore. It’s all about grouping and truly ruins the experience of those who don’t have entire nights to spend raiding or those who physically cannot sit in the same chair for 4 to 6 hours at a time.
*ends reminiscing
Anyway, WoW was great until lvl 60, FFXI was great until lvl 5, UO was great until I canceled my account. Sadly, ever MMO I’ve played since 1999 has been an attempt to recreate the feeling I got playing UO; the feeling of having control over my character and environment — the fact that other people were there was just a bonus not a requirement. Until something like UO comes out again I’ll be sticking to Oblivion and Morrowind for that feeling.
April 13th, 2006 at 12:43 am
That guy is a real piece of work. Someone mentioned Google - BINGO! Google is bigger than Jesus and it’s *never* down or even slow. When you are making millions upon millions of dollars for a service, and that service is suffering, you THROW MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AT IT! Dollars are magical, wonderous things. If you throw enough of them at a problem, it goes away (ask Michael Jackson).
He makes it sound like it’s a runaway train, out of their control. “It’s growing so fast, we can’t keep up!” STOP SELLING ACCOUNTS, YOU GREEDY PUSTULES!!! Stop selling, start throwing truckloads of cash at the problem, then IF the problem is fixed, you may begin making a profit again. Until then, consider the cash cow dry.
I swear to God, the blatant greed of some people makes me want to smash things. Since I’m not tripping over bales of untouched cash like Blizzard is, I’ll just vomit instead.
BTW I don’t play WoW, can’t stomach RPGs. I play FPS but I enjoy Sirlin’s ideas about “Playing to Win” so I visit now and then.
April 21st, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I second Sirlin’s feelings about WoW 1-59. I quit playing at the point I had to start the whole guild-worker-bee DKP crap to get anywhere else. I was a mostly solo player until that time, and enjoyed the hell out of the game, including the occasional group action; more than, though, I enjoyed to emergent social atmosphere, the player driven economics, and the shared experience of the social atmosphere that I didn’t want to participate in much, but did enjoy being around.
As for Blizzard, have a little sympathy for them: Yes, the money’s rolling in, but anyone who deals with huge server farms knows that you don’t just call Dell and order a new cluster. Especially when the check you’ll have to write has six zeros after the digit, you want to know that things will work a little better, not just hope the hardware will take up the slack. And fundamentally, if you’re not happy with it, suspend your account for a month or two so you’re not paying for them to work out their architecture issues.
It sounds like some design decisions early on about how characters are stored in the system are biting them in the ass now that they’re growing faster than their most optimistic spreadsheets. Welcome to six million user systems, where scalability isn’t nicely linear.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Dunno, what Blizz guy said makes a lot of sense to me.
The WoW architecture is set in place.
When something is set in place it becomes hard to implement structural changes to it.
Both from purely man-hours and cash standpoint, and from system architecture point of view, so that the whole system does not fall apart from the load on new features.
At some point it completely stops being the case of throwing money at the problem.
WoW system was not designed from ground up to handle 6000000 conucurrent players. So they are upgrading it and patching it on a day to day basis, to keep up with the load.
There is no suprise in problems of that scale appearing and persisting.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Sorry for typos :(
Too used to always having an Edit button lol :)
April 29th, 2006 at 2:38 am
Sirlin, after reading your comments in this and other threads, I went back and re-read your articles with a more critical eye. I’m beginning to suspect that you really *don’t* have a solid handle on team game play, especially when it comes to a game like WoW.
Certainly, World of Warcraft broke the mold set by Everquest when grouping was not “forced” on to the player base to hit the level cap. However, what you and most of these players missed, was that grouping - through all stages of the game, in every single facet of the gameplay - increases the power and ability of each and every player in that group more than any individual item, talent, or skill. From questing to grinding to tradeskills to PvP, a coordinated group is always, always, always greater than the sum of its parts. Just because you CAN solo in the game, doesn’t mean you SHOULD solo.
Let’s be very blunt: Organized, co-ordinated grouping is the optimal strategy for nearly EVERY game/sport/human endeavor that allows team-based play. World of Warcraft allows team-based play. The larger and deeper your pool of available players to group with is, the more collective resources you have available as a team for the game. This is why bigger groups with diverse rosters are better (to a point). Even “solo” quests are made considerably easier by team play - the collective resource sharing and support provides a tangible benefit; just ask any Hunter who has completed his quest for the Epic bow.
This really isn’t some kind of Blizzard-based conspiracy, either; it’s a natural outgrowth of the fundamental game design. Designing certain encounters and aspects of the game to present a challenge to the optimal playstyle allowed by the game will naturally exclude people who aren’t playing at that level. You should know this by now. You’re just not playing the game as well as you could be; as far as teamwork goes, it seems like you’re a… what was that term you used again? Oh, yeah - a “scrub”.
May 2nd, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Solo pursuits are not inherently inferior to team pursuits. Reading, playing chess, and many other examples illustrate that. I shouldn’t have to defend the concept.
If someone threw together an MMO, it’s very likely that grouping would end up being the optimal strategy. I could also imagine someone saying that playing in a non-optimal way (not grouping) is scrubby. You’d be better off grouping all the time or quitting.
World of Warcraft is not a “thrown together” MMO. It’s a very carefully crafted MMO. It’s not just natural forces of MMO-ness that make grouping better, it ***IS*** a very conscious decision by the designers to give first class loot to 40 man groups and everyone else gets scraps. There is a very, very large disparity and it’s very much on purpose and intentially designed in. Blizzard has been pretty clear about this, and I can’t imagine anyone disputing that point. Blizzard thinks groups of 40 “deserve” to get better loot than a group of 5 ever could, so they went to great lengths to ensure that’s true. It wouldn’t even matter if it weren’t for raiding loot blowing away non-raiding loot in battlegrounds.
On any random day, visit worldofwarcraft.com, click on general forums, and count up how many posts are complaining that the game is way too raid-centric. It’s usually 30-50%. It’s not just me.
Also, I don’t see this as a competitive gaming situation where strategy A is optimal, and anyone who doesn’t do it is a bad player. I see it as a virtual world that has socializing, an economy, adventuring, and yes some competition too. It’s sooooo close to being appealing to solo and small group players, and the only thing holding it back is a stubborn belief on Blizzard’s part that raid > all. There is no reason Blizzard’s design philosophy should be “if you only want to play with your group of 5 friends, then basically you should quit this game.” Very, very disappointing.
–Sirlin
May 3rd, 2006 at 1:53 am
These threads always get hijacked by people who want to believe that teamwork is the _only_ valid form of gameplay. The fallacy that raiding requires more than a minimum amount of skill is behind many arguments in favor of teamwork in games or real life. It has nothing to do with the reality that sometimes teamwork is the best option (not even Sirlin denies that), and sometimes it is not. The fallacy that teamwork is the _only_ way to accomplish anything meaningful is something incompetent people embrace and WoW’s endgame design supports. As Sirlin just pointed out, making WoW’s engame raid-centric was a conscious choice, not something left up to the inevitable flow of nature.
I don’t care whether the raid proponents value my opinion. But if you make money in the game industry, you should care about mine. Because my opinions dictate whether me (and my friends) spend thousands of dollars of my disposable income every year on clothes, iPod accessories, movies, or…yeah, video games. WoW is great for what it is, but the minute something better comes along (as it surely will), it will own my big, fat wallet. If you’re planning to follow WoW’s endgame design, if you mistakenly assume everyone wants to raid, if you plan to use the profits from one game to support other projects instead of fixing what’s broken, if you don’t know how to set up your servers, and if you make the mistake of not drawing up and sticking with a solid plan that will last you for the next few years, then I guess I’ll just start another investment account with all the money I’ll be saving by not playing your games. Or I could catch up on my Netflix list….
May 3rd, 2006 at 4:04 am
First of all, I never said solo pursuits where inherently inferior to group pastimes. However, last time I checked, World of Warcraft was not Moby Dick. Having 40 people working at once to explain Ahab’s obsession to me would be a pretty ineffective way to understand Melville’s masterpiece. Conversely, spending 59 levels running around by yourself in a virtual world overflowing with other people is a pretty ineffective way to play World of Warcraft.
You’ll hear it over and over again: “Blizzard designed the 1-59 game for casuals and solo gamers! Why do we have to raid at 60?”
Sadly, I contend that this belief about how Blizzard designed the game is fundamentally flawed. The 1-59 game is sufficiently easy that a player with limited time or access to fellow players can indeed make steady progress and hit the level cap. However, the 1-59 game becomes an order of magnitude EASIER and FASTER when tackled by an large, organized, diverse group of players. Try leveling an alt when you have ready access to a raid’s worth of other players for logistics and support - you’d quickly see just how powerful large scale grouping and organization is at EVERY LEVEL of World of Warcraft. (This is particularly evident on a PvP server, by the way.)
Why is it Blizzard’s fault that the assumptions a subset of the player base made about how to play the game from the very beginning are wrong? Why should Blizzard change the fundamental design of the game to suit them?
“Also, I don’t see this as a competitive gaming situation where strategy A is optimal, and anyone who doesn’t do it is a bad player. I see it as a virtual world that has socializing, an economy, adventuring, and yes some competition too.”
That’s a very telling quote. You’re worried about the disparity in relative power levels between players who choose a sub-optimal playstyle versus those who choose an optimal playstyle (”…to give first class loot to 40 man groups and everyone else gets scraps.”), but in the next breath you say that you don’t regard the game as being competitive. In fact, you apparently barely recognize it as a game at all.
Like it or not, World of Warcraft IS a game. A team game. It always WAS a team game at every single level, albeit one that you COULD play solo or with a small group. And, as a game, there are certain strategies that are more effective than others. You’re falling victim to the very same type of mental blocks about how to play this game that you once railed against in other games.
I’m going to keep re-iterating this point: the World of Warcraft player who organizes and coordinates with his fellow players early and often is ALWAYS more powerful and effective than the player who does not. As you correctly pointed out, this is a conscious design decision by Blizzard. What you seem to not understand is that this is a design decision that resonates throughout the ENTIRE GAME. So why is it an issue that the highest levels of the game with the best rewards are tuned to challenge those players employing the optimal strategy? Should Blizzard give equivalent (or better) rewards to those players who employ less effective strategies? If so, what’s to stop those players who are currently using the optimal strategy from exploiting this inherently less challenging content, reaping even more rewards and continuing to dominate?
(By the by, the contention that Blizzard could make a 5-or-10 man dungeon as difficult as a 40-man raid rings very hollow. Leaving aside the added room for player error introduced by having four to eight times as many people in a single encounter, along with the current focus in high-level encounters on player adaptability and flawless execution, the persistant state and massive resources available in the non-instanced content in WoW means that an organized, large group can always more effectively support a group tackling this “difficult” content than a “casual” group can. Example: the notorious “45-minute Baron run” becomes trivial - even if everyone is in green-level gear - when your guild mates supply you with all the flasks, potions, buffs, gold, and strats you need to succeed.)
But back to organization. Be it PvE or PvP, organization among large groups reigns supreme in every level and aspect of World of Warcraft. The top ranked PvP groups all succeed because they are organized - calling out assist trains on specific players, protecting the healers, communicating situational awareness, putting the skills they had to learn in PvE raids to use against the other players. Raid gear is just the icing on the cake; it’s the outward symbol of why the pick-up groups lose, not the underlying reason. The only time gear even becomes a deciding factor in PvP is against an equally well organized team. When faced with the sort of players who thought that soloing their way to 60 was a smart idea, that obviously doesn’t happen very often.
World of Warcraft demands a very different skillset than most gamers are accustomed to. It’s not the sort of active/reactive strategies and “twitch” skills of fighting games or first person shooters. WoW requires a lot of interpersonal, organizational, and time management skills, in addition to the strategies needed by each class. It is not enough to simply be “good” at your class, unless you can use that skill to effectively compliment and work with your fellow players. Blizzard reinforced that fundamental aspect of World of Warcraft’s design throughout the life of the game: Dungeons always drop the best loot for the level, groups get experience bonuses, tradeskills have interdependencies. Heck, you need 10 people (a full UBRS raid’s worth) to even START a guild!
Sadly, a sizable subet of the playerbase decided to ignore these obvious design cues until very late in the game, and now they feel as though they’re being “punished” for it. No wonder there’s such an outcry - I’d hate to spend a hundred hours on a game, only to find out I had to change my playstyle to effectively compete. However, I contend that a good player will adapt and rise to the occasion.
A bad player?
Well, I guess they’d blame Blizzard.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:53 am
I just want to point out that this isn’t the Monty Cantsin that is me. I think I basically agree with you however.
In any event, wtf, get a new nick! Oh! The Irony!
May 18th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Wrong-headed thinking like Monty Catsin’s explains the game’s current focus on raiding. I don’t know why people defend the elitist design that doing things with 39 people is “better” than doing things with 4 people. I vote for an inclusive design that supports both playstyles. There’s no reason to make it so that only people who raid get ridiculous gear in pvp (which has nothing to do with raiding). If you are good at killing monsters, you should get gear that helps you kill monsters, not players.
For the 99th time, Blizzard says the reason there are no solo or duo instances is NOT because they are hard to design (I think they are, but that’s a separate issue). Rather, the reason is that “it’s an MMO, we want forced grouping” and so forth. It’s an elitist choice. As post #23 said, as soon as a decent alternative game comes out that rewards more than one playstyle, we’ll see what happens.
Frank Lantz, I expected better than for you to agree with the “raiding is the only valid playstyle” guy.
–Sirlin
May 19th, 2006 at 7:59 am
Here’s my take on his argument:
I think he’s saying that it is an intrinsic property of MMORPG’s that they are somehow *essentially* about large-scale, cooperative, multiplayer interaction. You may be able to play through a lot of the game solo, but at its heart, the main idea of the game, its guiding aesthetic principle, is group play. So, its not an arbitrary design decision to base the end game on 40 man raids, it is a fulfillment of the game’s core dynamics – where it wants to go.
I’m not sure I agree with this argument 100% (I’m not even sure that this is exactly the argument he’s making) but I don’t see anything obviously wrong with it.
It’s not elitist to make a design choice to explore one play pattern over other alternatives - in a way that’s the essence of strong design.
I think your argument, David, would be stronger if you claimed that WoW’s design is inconsistent - by being so accommodating and supportive of solo play up front it leads the player to expect an endgame with the same features and then leaves them unsatisfied. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with designing a game that is only for 40 players, just like there’s nothing inherently wrong with designing a game that has is only for four players (bridge) two players (chess) or 1 player (supermario world).
To me this is purely an aesthetic argument, do you like the gameplay that results from the design decisions they made? (clearly in this case you don’t). So I’m a little confused by the moral overtones of the much of the language in the argument: words like elitist, better, valid, support, inclusion. I feel like a little bit of Terra Nova style virutal world-ism is creeping in here - the idea that WoW is more than just a game, and therefore has some kind of extra obligations to accommodate everyone. This way madness lies!
I decided quickly that the fussy politics and bureaucratic, do-as-your-told gameplay of endgame WoW content was definitely not for me, so I stopped playing. But I also think that there is something genuinely new and interesting in solving the problem of very large scale simultaneous gameplay and I’m fine with the fact that Blizzard decided this was the creative space they were going to explore.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Frank, it was all made much worse by the marketing and initial design of World of Warcraft being so anti-EQ. They told us it was one kind of game, it appeared to be true, then it somehow became the opposite game. So that alone is a problem.
Next, you mention that perhaps 40 man raids are a natural phenomenon in MMOGs. I understand what you mean in theory, but in the actual game World of Warcraft there is a conscious design decision to give the best rewards/time (by far) in raids and raids alone. If there were equal rewards for equal effort in other play styles, THEN we’d see what the natural forces really do. Some players would still do raids because they think they are fun. Lots of players would not do them because they think they are not fun. You’d have a much more evenly distributed and happy playerbase. Currenlty the design decision forces things into one direction only: the opposite direction the game started out in.
Finally, you are right in that I am making a pretty strong claim with the “moral overtones.” Part of my answer is that no matter what the game itends to teach (it probably intends to teach nothing at all, which is fine) it *actually* does end up teaching scary things. I don’t mean that in a theoretical sense, either. I mean, literally, that when I join up with people to pvp with, comments like “your gear isn’t good enough, you must not be good at pvp” are very real. There is widespread acceptance that time = skill, and it’s downright scary to talk to people who think that.
Chess certainly has no obligation to support 4 players or whatever, but an MMO that started out on such a good foot and went in such a weird direction…well…I don’t know what to say. If it were a normal game, like Super Mario Brothers or something, then it would be easy to just say “I don’t like the design direction here.” But it’s not a normal game, and it really *is* something special, and a virtual world and the fancy things terra nova would say. It has a huge, huge impact on people’s lives, and I want that impact to be more positive. I want it to teach that there are multiple paths to victory in life, and I want to hold it up as an example of why the game industry is great. Right now, there is a philosophical hurdle, not even a technical or logistical one, really.
If I could snap my fingers and create an equally polished MMO that embraced small group and solo play AS WELL AS raids, and valued skill AS WELL AS time, and spent more time on creating a bill of rights for its virtual space rather than a draconian TOS, then I would. I don’t really have any doubt that that theoretical MMO would be far more popular in the long run. I also don’t see who would even debate that really, or why.
–Sirlin
May 20th, 2006 at 1:58 am
- equally polished
Excellent.
- embraced small group and solo play AS WELL AS raids
I’m with you.
- valued skill AS WELL AS time
Sing it, brother!
- and spent more time on creating a bill of rights for its virtual space rather than a draconian TOS
Wh - huh? You lost me! Bill of who? I think this confusion about whether MMORPGs are games or “real” social spaces with some game-like elements is a major stumbling block to a thorough and robust exploration of the creative possibility space for this genre. Games don’t have rights, they have rules. I am personally interested in big, sprawling, complex, mulitplayer games that combine cooperation and competition, economics and politics, and complicated rich social interaction. and are GAMES thruough and through.
Of course a Tennis player has rights, for example the right to be able to sign up for a court and get a game when its their turn, or the right to play without being subject to verbal harrassment or physical abuse.
And a player in a Street Fighter tournament has the right to a fair match and the right to use any strategy not specifically excluded by the rules of the tournament.
But these rights are the proper domain of the institutions that govern, manage, and support the game - not elements of the game itself. And that’s where they belong.
If we maintain that MMORPGs are a special category of game in which all the implicit, ambiguous, and highly contested rights and responsibilities of human culture are included *inside* the game as part of the game, instead of existing outside the game and intruding or affecting the game in various ways as they do in *all* games - then we will cut off all kinds of rich territory to explore.
For example, I would be interested in an MMORPG with acutal theft in it. Where one player can take another player’s property as part of the game. (Hi Eve online!) I would like to play a game with real authority in it, where one player can command another player to do something and penalize them if they refuse. I would like to play a game where guilds have to meet in secret and can be broken up by jackbooted thugs. I want to play with stylized forms of government and culture and economics and social interaction that I would *never* want in real life.
Any talk of player rights precludes these creative possibilities in favor of a murky, ambiguous, half-game, half-social club, half-craptastic part-time job, that doesn’t really know what it is or what it wants to be (Hi Second Life!) And will end up having some games *in* it instead of *being* a game.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against people creating non-game virtual worlds for free-form social interaction, creativity, work, and so on. I’m just not particularly interested in them, and I am passioinately interested in game worlds that know they are games, understand what that means, and explore all the creative possibilities of that.
May 20th, 2006 at 2:56 am
Frank,
MMOs really do need explicit player rights. They are certainly not spaces where you can do anything you want that the game allows. Every MMO there is will ban you if you take actions to crash the server. I think pretty much every MMO bans you for racial or religious hate speech. Unfortunately, the list of things that gets you banned is usually far more reaching than those first couple examples. No matter how you slice it you ARE living under the social rules of a governing body when you enter an MMO. I don’t think this point is under debate.
So if you are living under the social rules of someone else in a very social virtual world…well, you should have clear rights such as ability to own virtual property, freedom of speech etc. The key word in that sentence is “should.” Why “should” you have those rights? Can’t the company make up any oppressive set of rules they like? They certainly CAN. Nothing illegal about it at all. Perhaps nothing even morally bad. But *I* personally judge it bad and so will more and more virtual citizens in the future.
The source of rights comes not when governing bodies decide to grant them, but when people demand them. Blizzard CAN decide to outlaw gay and lesbian guilds. But when enough people find that outrageous, those people DEMAND more explicit rights in the virtual world and in this particular case, they mostly got them.
In 50 years, when there exist some forward-thinking virtual worlds that allow property ownership and free speech and other virtual worlds that have medieval structures where the serfs own nothing, can be banned for any reason or no reason, and so on…I think we’ll see which way of thinking dies out and which doesn’t. Virtual worlds will become more and more a part of people’s lives in the future and more people will demand decent treatment.
Although virtual world companies today are free to ignore the entire notion of a bill of rights, there is only so long that such thinking is going to fly. Better to start sorting this out now.
The academics make this point better than I do. I highly recommend this article:
http://www.bu.edu/law/scitech/volume11issue2/JankowichArticleWEB.pdf
–Sirlin
May 20th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Ironically, that pdf is set to forbid printing. Can we take the lawyers you have working on orc hate crimes and ask them to figure that one out instead?
David, it’s always a pleasure to disagree strongly with someone with whom you otherwise share many points of agreement, because it can help to clarify your own thinking on what the issue actually is. This is certainly the case for me here.
> In 50 years…
I am a gambling man by nature and would be willing to wager a reasonable sum on the following bet:
In 50 years most non-game online communities, and non-game online experiences will multi-modal, combining different kinds of media and interfaces, and not primarily 3D. The vast majority of persistent, 3D virtual worlds will be games for entertainment purposes, and the objects, actions, and events in them will not be considered “real”, and will not be subject to the same laws that govern those things in normal everyday life. This will be the case not because they exist electronically, online, but because they exist in the stylized, fictionalized construct of a game, and their status as fundamentally different from normal things is an essential *value* that is worth preserving.
If I win, you buy me a steak dinner at the New York restaurant of my choice. If you win I buy you a steak dinner in the virtual game world of your choice.
August 27th, 2006 at 5:12 am
Domain Name Server Definition…
The host may also operate as a domain name registrar, but their registry services are usually more expensive than others. A colocation centre…
October 29th, 2007 at 5:46 am
Sirlin you really -are- a hypocrite and scrub about grouping.
Teaching people they can’t do anything without others is probably the most valuable lesson most people never learn. Say you.
I’ll start with a quick example, you stated about street fighter that someone in there basement not competing with real opponents will never get good. So soloing(playing alone) is worthless, and you stated such.
Lets look at the larger picture, you wake up on a bed, made by someone else. You did not make that bed, you relied on others to do it for you.
You go to the kitchen and grab some food. You did not make that food, you relied on others to do it for you.
You wash up. You did not gather that water… See where this is going?
You put clothes on….
You pull out a game for a good quickie before work. You didn’t design that game did you? How about that electricity? The TV?
You get in your car to go do work….
Note everything you did, you needed others to do. You never did anything without being completely reliant on others for your entire day, hell your entire LIFE. If games should teach lessons, then teaching that soloing is failure is an important lesson to teach.
October 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Richard Dolder, you are a moron if you think Sirlin sees absolutely no value in grouping. For every one of your silly examples about how much we need to rely on others to help us get through our day, you have conveniently ignored the argument that people should not be punished for not wanting to play with other people. Even if I needed other people to harvest trees or run the factories that made the paper on which my college exam was printed, and needed someone to prepare me for that exam, you would be an idiot to suggest that I should be forced to rely on anyone else to answer those exam questions for me. Maybe you need to wait for college to understand that.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Richard’s analogies fail because he lists goods and services that can be purchased by one’s self. If I had to call up four of my friends (or strangers) and drive to the grocery store with them in order to get food, he would have a valid comparison. If I had to meet three nights per week at a designated time with 24 other people for a month in order to build a TV, then it might be like WoW.
Sirlin, I know this subject is probably long dead to you (I’m not even sure if you read replies in these old posts), so this is more of an FYI thing. When Blizzard starts the third arena season in WoW, they’re going to be putting the somewhat competitive season 1 arena epics on the honor vendor, so someone who plays mostly (or only) through solo joining battlegrounds (like myself) will finally be able to gain fairly competent gear. It’s not optimal, but it’s finally a decent effort by Blizzard for reasonably fair gear match-ups in the battlegrounds. I just wish it weren’t going to be almost three years too late.