[WoW] Recycling old content
I'm having a blast at the TBC private server. Some people attribute our delightful remembrance of the past to nostalgia, and our desire to relive those moments as an ultimately futile one. For most people it might be the case, I won't deny that, but what does it tell you, the fact that I feel completely realized in, literally, the past? I would think that it means that the past was rightfully better than the present in the case of the MMO genre.
The MMO genre has evolved into an "alone together" singleplayer theme park from which there seems to be no turning back. Bethesda's latest endeavour is a horrifying mess that bespeaks of the little idea the developers have of what appeals to MMO player and Bethesda's own fans. They are aiming for a WoW-clone, not even from the time WoW was successful; similarly to SW:TOR, they will draw from the current design of WoW, lacking its polish and long career, adding some uninformed features that innovate very little and in the wrong direction.
In this hopeless climate, what can MMO gamers turn to? Perhaps GW2, although I remain sceptic. On the other hand, we've got projects like Psychochild's, who could have been a great contribution to the genre, but that haven't gotten as much attention as they deserve. All other AAA-MMOs are drone-like following a trend that I will never understand, and that has proved to be a failure.
And yet there seems to be some appeal about the solo part of MMOs, as Azuriel and Bernard argue. Nevertheless, I think that catering to that huge demographic that visits an MMO for its singleplayer content will neither give the company as much money as fostering social ties, nor be healthy for the genre itself, which would turn into a three-monther as SWTOR did. I remember the time where solo play was a choice which did not hurt the multiplayer aspects of the game. Having singleplayer (leveling, farming), multiplayer (dungeons, raids, arenas) and alone-together activities (battlegrounds) meant that people who wanted to play alone could do so, as well as those who are more social but need some time for themselves. What we cannot do is espouse the current design which polarises casuals and hardcores and forces most of the playerbase into alone-together activities (LFD, LFR).
The problem is that, although I can think as alone-together MMOs as a valid choice, especially for that demographic that can't participate in the social part of them, there is no such choice when all are designed this way. I wouldn't count EVE, it makes me very uneasy. There are no multiplayer MMOs anymore (some years ago, the epithet would have been redundant, now it is a necessity).
What about old-content servers? Officially supported vanilla, TBC, even Wrath servers. This has been discussed multiple times, and Blizzard would never agree to it because it would mean implicitly admitting that their game has been led astray. Nevertheless, 2.4.3 is their game too, why not offer it along with Cataclysm and everything else? I am certain that it would attract a lot of veterans back into the game. Some of them might give it a try and discard it altogether, as time passes and nothing leaves untarnished, but many others would, like me, enjoy their second ride (as we're talking about MMOs as theme parks). Most of my guildmates at Feenix agree that they would definitely pay a subscription to Blizzard if they would open "nostalgia servers." After all, nothing beats Blizzard's server stability (at least that's what I thought before error 37) and customer support.
What could they win from this deal? There seems to be a much larger number of people who have played WoW but not any more, than people who are currently playing. Some of them are people who have tried the game/genre and didn't find it appealing enough, but many others are veterans who are dissatisfied with the current course of the game. Most of the newest additions to the MMO market are either PvP-centric (GW2), or repeating the model of 3.0+ WoW. I don't know yet what to think of the oddity of The Secret World, but the emphasis placed on the quests makes me suspect of a one-time ride kind of MMO, much like SW:ToR. Another big win for Blizzard would be that these servers could be self-sustained. They wouldn't need to add any content, and shouldn't force any patches in either, to keep the experience the most genuine. The players would have to admit some inconveniences for the sake of not disrupting the experience. For instance, although the double specialization is much cherished, I would not allow it into TBC, just for the sake of immersion. These servers could provide a huge amount of money too if Blizzard implemented paid migrations from older content into newer. Imagine a player who starts in vanilla and, one year later, has finished all the content. She might want to keep advancing with the same character, and could do so paying for a migration into a TBC server. How can Blizzard not hear the ka-ching! of this idea!?
There has to be something that prevents them from carrying out this project. What could be the potential losses? Well, I am not sure about financial losses, but there would be some major consequences to this undertaking. Blizzard would be admitting that their game was more appealing in its earlier versions, and that could finish off the moral of the company. For WoW to keep going, they have to maintain the illusion follow the idea that what they are doing is the best course for their game. There would be certain difficulties at the pacing of the patches in the nostalgia servers. Nothing that a good brainstorm couldn't solve, nonetheless. Shall they open the servers with all the content, pace it, keep opening new servers for those who missed the first wave? It might be somewhat costly, but I am fairly certain that they would recover their inversion on the first week.
Would you want to see something like this happening? Or do you think that perhaps there will be a messiah-MMO around the corner soon enough?
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I think it’s kind of funny when you talk about your love for TBC and the supposed failure of SWTOR in the same post, considering that so much of SWTOR is basically “TBC in space”. :)
As for why Blizzard doesn’t support older versions of WoW, I think the main deterrent is probably support issues. It’s easy to say that these older servers just wouldn’t be updated, but people would still run into bugs and require customer support for various issues. I imagine that it would be quite a pain if CSAs needed to be trained in working with the details of five different versions of the same game.
Shintar recently posted..Explosive Content Completed
How can SWTOR be TBC in space? I don’t see your point. What is there to compare between the two?
Still, I think that the cost of teaching a team how to handle various versions of the same game and the servers and all that wouldn’t be as high as the profit that they would turn from returning veterans and migration fees.
What is there to compare between the two?
Lots of group content while levelling up. Having to travel the world instead of being teleported everywhere. Small group content as alternate endgame progression to raiding. Talent trees. (A friend of mine who plays a Jedi Guardian jokes that it’s basically completely identical to the TBC Prot Warrior.) Basically, where Bioware copied WoW, more often than not they copied an older version of it instead of the current one. Obviously they are still different games, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the ex-WoW players that I know in SWTOR liked WoW best during BC.
Still, I think that the cost of teaching a team how to handle various versions of the same game and the servers and all that wouldn’t be as high as the profit that they would turn from returning veterans and migration fees.
That’s the thing though, we don’t really know that. I mean, I’m very much in the “it’s not just nostalgia, the game really was better back then” camp, but at the same time I believe that the vast majority of people wouldn’t actually enjoy going back. Which is why I can’t blame Blizzard for not wanting to bet on it either.
Shintar recently posted..Explosive Content Completed
Well, as Christof said, in TBC there was a whole new game after the leveling finished. In SWTOR they placed so much emphasis in the personal story, the singleplayer experience, that people are expecting a similar game later on, and find a less polished raiding experience than in WoW. If you attract the customers with a singleplayer experience, they will consume it and get done with it, and then unsubscribe, having formed no social ties. That is what happens in the current theme park model of MMO, and to most games that adhere to it. They can survive and make money in their own way, as “alone together” MMOs, but they would be hurting the genre if that is the only option that is offered. Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of the upcoming titles (AAA at that) espouse this mixture of singleplayer but in an online environment, which is not quite social, as I had discussed before. If it were just SWTOR or just WoW, I wouldn’t have any problem with that course of development. But it is the entire MMO industry.
“I believe that the vast majority of people wouldn’t actually enjoy going back” There are dozens of private servers of vanilla, TBC, and even Wrath content – that is many tens of thousands of people who may pay a subscription if they were offered those servers officially. I still think the endeavour would be fruitful.
In TBC the game was fun when you were at the max level, in SWTOR you unsuscribted.
TBC had challenging heroics and karazhan, a place to explore, and early on no pvp to gear up for those, so it was challenging dungeon runs with your friends or people who became your friends.
When I was max level in SWTOR, I knew one other player, and only that because I knew him RL and we coordinated to play on the same server.
First, thanks for the shout-out for Storybricks. I’m hoping we can keep something good going. :)
So, to answer your question: why won’t Blizzard open up a retro server? It’s more than just hurt pride in admitting the older game was better, it’s the additional costs to support multiple server configurations. The potential loss comes from them having to have a larger support team to support a new server type and have two different development paths.
It does require more support. There were plenty of bugs in TBC, etc. that were fixed in subsequent expansions, for example. In order to maintain their reputation, Blizzard would have to fix bugs in the older version. There would also be the demand for some small features to be ported back, too. For example, some of the graphics engine upgrades from WotLK might be nice, but that could break some assumptions of the old code.
Let’s be honest here, WoW is obviously not Blizzard’s focus currently, and the dev team is probably pretty small. Requiring the support of a separate server and client for the retro version might increase the dev support costs for WoW 25-50% per retro version they introduce. Would a TBC server really increase revenues 25-50%? Unlikely.
There are also community issues as well. At what point in TBC would you have the server? Launch? Right before WotLK was released? Would you include inscription if it were later (and the fascinating ways that completely altered gameplay and the economy)? What version of the talent trees would you use? What happens if they did turn a profit initially, but then people decided they were bored with TBC and the numbers no longer support the servers? Can they close the retro servers down gracefully, or would the community view it as a betrayal?
So, it’s not just a simple case of grabbing some old code out of the repository and setting up a new server. Lots of problems on the dev side to consider.
Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green recently posted..I can see a darkness. There are shapes moving in it, but what they are I cannot tell.
“Requiring the support of a separate server and client for the retro version might increase the dev support costs for WoW 25-50% per retro version they introduce. Would a TBC server really increase revenues 25-50%? Unlikely.” What do you think are the costs of maintaining and developing WoW, and the revenue of the studios? Even with a bigger developer team (with additions that should only take care of bugs which have probably already been fixed in later versions), the costs wouldn’t be as high as the benefits of a rise in… let’s say 1m subscribers.
Regarding the support for those servers – I would only fix the bugs and let the features come by themselves with subsequent expansions (so no inscription or new talent trees in TBC). But what you said about server’s stage and closing… it seems like a difficult thing to manage. WoW never had the most flexible servers system, but it still could be done: I would have one server progressing at the rate of the expansion, and a new one opening once the end has been reached, but without closing the old one until enough time has passed (a year?). It would imply migrations and a lot more of fluidity than current WoW servers have, but it is necessary to keep that old content alive. You cannot stay forever in a vanilla/TBC server, new content has to kick in.
That is the only thing that makes me a little sad about playing what I currently play – it will last one year, one and a half, and then what? If there is no MMO appealing to us multiplayers, where can we go? :)
I’m not sure what the current WoW support costs are. They’re probably cut to the bone, as Blizzard did do a round of layoffs recently. Plus they’re focusing on the new “Titan” project, so most of their MMO developers are probably on that project. But it doesn’t matter if they could afford it or not, Activision is a public company and if they are going to increase the costs they have to show that they will increase their income by a similar amount, or at least a better amount than spending those resources elsewhere. Would a few more developers working on the retro servers be more profitable than those devs on a new Call of Duty game? I assume Activision has done forecasts and decided it is not.
I hear you about MMOs appealing to multiplayers, though. You’re preaching to the choir here. We’ll see how things go.
Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green recently posted..I can see a darkness. There are shapes moving in it, but what they are I cannot tell.
I believe you are too close to the fire to judge the problem of WoW and games like it.
Grouping is not enjoyable to a majority of players. The bread and butter of games now are the “Casual” players who jump on, socialize with chat, do a little questing and maybe a dungeon. These people don’t need itineraries to socialize as some hardcore players need in order to make socializing easier for them.
What we are seeing is a mainstream audience actively changing the gaming standard. And that new standard does not hold raiding and end game dungeon activity as the most important aspect of gaming. Either the industry moves to accommodate these people (the majority) who are paying them or they lose.
And it looks as if the industry is losing now. It’s disintegrating. The mainstream players will move on. And if there is anything left, the hardcore can go back to their backwater games where they can be cartoon gods with continually obsolete play gear.
“hardcore can go back to their backwater games where they can be cartoon gods with continually obsolete play gear.” I consider myself pretty hardcore, or rather determined, a less charged term, and I don’t consider raiding a game about continuously looting new gear. There is much more to that. It is about the community and the bond you form with a group of people with a common goal.
I would like to direct you to a post by Spinks that I only discovered yesterday, which prophesies what would become of MMOs if soloers took over. You see, the soloer in an MMO also enjoys its community aspects, which are maintained by the more social players. If the latter leave because the game no longer caters to them (see WoW with its introduction of LFD and LFR, muddling up too essential social activities), there is only a community of “alone together” players, which is the same as saying that they like to see people playing in the background of their screen, but do not care about community. There has to be a balance to allow soloers and more social-oriented people (and also hardcore, which is not the same as the previous), and that balance had been found in TBC. Subsequent expansions made the game more “accessible” (I believe it was accessible enough as it was), but at the same time they trivialized the content (the game became aberrantly easy) and turned raiding into a revolting repetition (10 normal/heroic, 25 normal/heroic) just to allow most people in. I was fed up with raiding so many modes of the same dungeon. I felt completely alienated. The game was setting me aside more and more.
For each solo player in my guild that mainly came for the raids, we had 0.1 truly social players who helped it growing, who created and actively participated in events, who made the world feel alive. That community should never be lost, because they are what keeps the game from disintegrating.
“Grouping is not enjoyable to a majority of players.” But the MMO genre is, or was, inherently multiplayer. It needs sustaining by a community of social players that will create that atmosphere that soloers also enjoy. If you remove or water down features that promote socialization, you end up with aberrations such as current WoW, where everything is accessible and instant, but there is no sense of community whatsoever. You could be playing any lobby game at that, after so much jumping into random dungeons (and now raids!) with strangers.
I don’t say that solo play should be abolished. Not in any way. Solo players can be catered to (and have been; what Blizzard did was convert a feverishly multiplayer genre into something more open to solo play), and solo play should be an option. What we cannot have is an entire game and an entire genre revolving around singleplayer content. What keeps the subscriptions flowing are the social ties that group-content fosters. We need a balance, or our genre of choice will become other than MMO.
Hardcore players are in the same position as PvP players. The majority in games do not spend hours trying to bash one another over the heads nor do they want to spend the equivalent of a job trying to complete the newest raid.
These are niche areas now in games.
Many people are mistakenly thinking that solo players are not socializing. They are, they are socializing all the time just not in forced grouping for content. You have to understand why games are failing because the raid/hell dungeon mode is no longer appealing to the people paying the biggest chunk of change to the developers now. WoW learned its lesson real, real quick after it free bled players during the latest expansion. As far as SWTOR goes, it wasn’t solo play that hurt it. It had all to do with the ability lag problem (the main reason why I left).
I’m not saying that raids or dungeons should die. They will continue to exist for their niche fans. However I believe game developers should stop gating story content behind them. Because as of right now the majority of paying customers can’t see the end of the story for each expansion. That is ridiculous and self defeating for any game.
As of right now, MMORPGS must revolve around single player with more soft options to socialize (housing, events) because that is what most seem to want. The game environment is changing, it is being forced to change.
I played at the tail end of TBC in WoW and I never found it balanced. TBC was divided between glorified raider at the top and the rest of the jackasses who pay money for nothing. I’m glad all games are hitting hard times, perhaps it will cause them a change in thinking and developing. Or maybe not.
“TBC was divided between glorified raider at the top and the rest of the jackasses who pay money for nothing.”
I have to disagree. As someone who loved 5-man heroic content and ran that 90% of the time, TBC’s 5-man content was very enjoyable and challenging. Outside of Karazahn, I barely participated in raiding at all during that entire expansion and still had a lot of fun.
Then WotLK came out and ruined 5-mans by making them face-rollingly dumb. So… for me it was the weakest expansion for the type of content -I- prefer, and ended up being the expansion that got me to finally quit WoW after having played it since day 1.
Pai recently posted..[BBC: Guns, Girls, & Games]
“I have to disagree. As someone who loved 5-man heroic content and ran that 90% of the time, TBC’s 5-man content was very enjoyable and challenging. Outside of Karazahn, I barely participated in raiding at all during that entire expansion and still had a lot of fun.”
This just shows how the game has moved on from TBC Wow. The audience has changed.
The majority felt dungeons that were a little simpler, quicker and allowed everyone to experience the expansion story line was preferable to the gated content of TBC. The audience grew during WOTLK. When WoW tried to go back to a TBCish dungeon/raid dynamic, they lost a lot of subscriptions.
There needs to be a balance. There also needs to be more innovation than just raids or hard dungeon modes at end game which is the equivalent of putting everyone on a hamster wheel. We’ve all grown beyond that now.
I don’t agree with you in that raids and hard dungeons are detrimental to the enjoyment of the gamers. WoW made the MMO genre accessible to a many people for whom the strict grouping dynamics of the previous games such as EQ were too much, and it was done masterly by Blizzard, by allowing some solo content (even exclusive solo playstyle if desired), while giving the players a great incentive towards raiding and following the storyline. During the time of TBC, the game experienced a massive growth; it was during mid Wrath when it started to shrink, during to various bad decisions that ultimately harmed the community (LFD, unchallenging content, repetition of raids in several difficulties, which results in burn-out, etc).
I believe the story weights a lot more when you are experiencing it with many more people, after having invested some time and effort, so that the result is much more epic. Otherwise, if the story is completely accessible to the solo player, what is the point of the MMO after all? Shouldn’t a singleplayer game be more suited to tell a story about your character influencing the world she inhabits? MMOs are (or used to be) about the community shaping collectively the world, which is the absolute opposite of the solo experience in which you are acknowledged as the only hero. That is quite unconvincing and, frankly, why would we want that?
WotLK was when WoW made it obvious that the devs had come to the conclusion that all the content before Raid Dungeons was just a speedbump with no intrinsic value, so 5-mans and leveling content should be as mindless and short as possible to funnel people up to ‘the real game’. That was what turned me off the most, frankly, since to me the 5-mans WERE my endgame.
Cata just continued the trend of watering down the content before level cap, which conflicted with their attempt to make 5-mans harder because now the game was pulling in two directions — trivial buttonmash easy mode up til level cap, and then all of a sudden players who had become used to easymode 5-mans in WotLK got hit with the challenge hammer and turned off.
Blizzard lost the plot. We’ll see if they’re finding it again in MoP, though personally I doubt I will go back anytime soon regardless.
Pai recently posted..[BBC: Guns, Girls, & Games]
Everquest (Sony Online) managed to run old content servers pretty well. Admittedly, the servers were “progression” servers. Twice!
Bugs got fixed, some of the new changes got included. This could be done by Blizzard I am sure.