You see, I am the type of person who doesn't really like people--stupid people in particular--and it seems that WoW attracts just those. I play this type of game for the adventure, and I like to play with a select few individuals: my wife, my best friends, and my brothers. Of course, we're all adults with real lives outside of the game, so our play times don't always line up. This means that if I want to get ahead in the game, I must group with the stupid people mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. The reason for this is that in WoW, getting ahead means getting better gear, and getting better gear means having to face challenges that require more than the two or three people (whom I like) that I find online when I'm on.
So because of this I am relegated to either "farming", or playing a character who isn't quite at the maximum level in the game, which means repeating a bunch of game play that I've already done. What I wish WoW offered was something more than the end game that all players of the game know, but I really don't think that this is going to happen. I found a really good write up on the WoW forums that summarizes how I, and many many others feel about WoW. I am going to quote it here, as the moderators over at the WoW forums have a tendency to kill threads that say mean things about Blizzard. The thread, by Lilyth of the Feathermoon server, is titled How to Kill a Game in 15 Easy Steps.
15 Easy Steps:
1. Ensure that only warriors specialized in protection can tank, and that every group/raid instance requires at least one protection warrior. You are certain that players love to be pigeonholed.
2. Ensure that protection spec'ed warriors cannot do any significant damage to mobs or other players, effectively eliminating all enjoyment from the toon outside of MT in a raid setting, and ensuring the player has to either level an alt for making money, or depend upon the charity of a guild for repairs/pots.
3. Ensure that all four classes capable of casting a heal have a "dps tree" for leveling, but make equally sure that it's unviable for end game raid use so that they will be forced by the player community to stay specialized for healing. You are certain that players love to be pigeonholed.
4. Ensure that those players specialized for healing classes cannot do any significant damage to mobs or other players, effectively eliminating all enjoyment from the toon outside of healing in a raid or instance setting, and ensuring the player either has to level an alt for making money, or depend upon the charity of a guild for repairs/pots.
5. Create four DPS classes. Make them compete for raid spaces in a limited number of raids which are largely limited by the number of available and interested heal-bot-spec healers per server. This ensures that they are on a never-ending quest to frantically up their DPS by whatever means possible (including attempts at marginalizing other competitive classes), to ensure they retain their raid spots.
6. Fail to create a valid, plottable path for growing characters outside the initial "leveling" process. Implement convoluted attunement chains with the intention that players see this as "advancing".
7. Fundamentally change character classes *after* your customers have put significant time and energy into their characters. Shrug and tell them to start over - if you tell them anything at all.
8. Amidst all the pigeonholing and forcing of dps-less specs for warriors, priests, druids, paladins and shaman, implement a PvP system into your PvE game that pits these players against the DPS classes. Subsequently spend most of your time buffing and nerfing classes for PvP reasons, while blowing off balance in the PvE game.
9. Fail to recognize that at the core, despite any protestations, human beings play games to "win", and to enjoy the process/anticipation of winning. In a never-ending MMO, "winning" is defined as "improving my character, whether it's a level up and a new spell, or a new and better item". Consequently, be sure you upset as many players as possible by putting little "progressively better" gear into the game, thus ensuring people are only getting side or downgrades even from the most difficult raid encounters available.
10. Itemize your instances so sparsely that player communities are forced to set up convoluted rules for distributing the items amongst their raid memberships, and spend many an hour tallying and tracking said loot systems, as well as managing the attendant conficts.
11. Ensure the encounters in your raid instances are so stupidly difficult vs. available gear that your playerbase has to use artificial means to defeat the encounters. Frustrate your players by requiring them to spend many hours "farming" materials for these artificial performance enhancements. Turn your game into a part time "farming" job, ensuring that DPS classes have it easiest and prot/healing classes have it worst.
12. Develop in a vaccuum. Never under any circumstance establish dialog with the enemy- er I mean customer. Studiously ignore unsolicited feedback, after making sure you don't solicit any. Don't assign liasons to player groups. And if you ever do venture out into the real world, remember to remain very vague and use phrases like "we never intended that" and "working as expected" to spout off regardless of the subject of discussion. Play dumb if anyone asks how/when you tested the subject of the discussion before implementing it and/or changing it.
13. Educate your customer service personnel in the fine art of insulting your customers. Ensure that the people who pay your salary feel ignored and marginalized.
14. In particular, do whatever you can to forment conflict between the customers (because naturally, if they’re largely occupied fighting with each other, they won’t have much time to complain to you or about you, will they). The PvP system is a useful tool in this regard.
15. Through a combination of the first 14 steps, ensure that your customers get a bigger kick out of discussing a competitor's upcoming product than they do discussing yours. The killing blow, as it were.
15a. Polish your resume and send it to the developer of the competing product.
15b. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Even though this was likely intended to be somewhat humorous, there is also a serious side to it, and it really does a good job of summing things up. It is primarily for the reasons above that I am turning to Warhammer Online on its release day.
