Greeting Musers
I mentioned in my last post I quit WOW because the consequences of playing WOW were no longer worth the benefits. When I attended my IT end of year meeting & mentioned this to another ex-player he concurred this was the same reason he had quit. Though we briefly spoke about it, we began to discuss the issues with the game that lead us to this choice.
Before I begin though I need to explain my list. As an IT systems geek, I have to look at the big picture in order to solve problems & to grade issues. This has lead me to be cold at times when a user is having problems with a BlackBerry, but as they're bosses boss knows I have to support all of our company's BlackBerry's for the America's. But it does give me an insight into the how's and why's on system's, such as World of Warcraft.
The main issue with WOW is the same issue many other systems face. It was built to solve a problem, was hugely successful & is now being forced to do things that the original designers never intended it to do. It has attracted user's who were not familiar to the architecture of the system & had to be adjusted to support them while at the same time keeping it's original user's happy.WOW has now become bloatware.
Before I go into this lets talk about why WOW rocked. 1st though MMO 101: All subscription based MMO use a standard currency: Time. He who can put in the most hours (or who can afford to pay someone to put the hours in for him,) is He who is on top. When WOW launched in 2004, it was successful because it greatly improved on the MMO Currency exchange rate . Prior to WOW MMO's were awful in this regard.You don't get a term like poopsocking if a game is an enjoyable romp in the woods! WOW's designers took the currency rate & cut it in half . A dungeon that took 4 hours in Everquest now only took 2 hours. A raid that took 8 hours now only took 4 etc. This made it possible for what i think was WOW biggest success: The democratization of MMO's
By cutting down on the amount of time required to play the game WOW opened up MMO's to people who had avoided them due to the draconian requirements. A 25 year old male gamer who avoided EQ\UO because they had a full time job, social life etc. could now afford the time requirements of WOW. Yes he would have to give up something else to play the game but now he could delve into the MMO environment that he had avoided for fear of the consequences. While this was in itself a tremendous improvement. WOW greatest success was far more sublime.
Over the years people have written about WOW's success and listed the many things that the game improved on compared to existing MMO's I have found though that with successful systems it's always the unassuming things that lead to their success. For example Facebook over took My Space because it was easier to use. That's it - End of Story. It was an easier for someone with little computer experience to use Facebook than it was to setup a MySpace page.
WOW became the top dog because it allowed people with no MMO experience to start playing the game without jumping through hoops. Prior to WOW required a user to either a.) Know someone who would help you along b.) Read up prior to setting up a character or c.) Suffering from griever's or PK's until you learned the ropes. WOW changed this. People who had never played a video game were able to load it, login & learn how to play. This feature + the cut down of time requirements + all the other improvement that WOW presented is why it still has 12 million user's playing it.
In my next post I'll go into the details of how these great improvement have lead to it's current sad state
Until another day
The Musing Moonkin
In my next post I'll go into the details of how these great improvement have lead to it's current sad state
Until another day
The Musing Moonkin
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