Signs of hope?

I barely dare to entertain the possibility, but a few things in MMO-champ today made my dying WoW spirit flicker. First, Rob Pardo hinted that he would be getting "deeply involving [sic] with WOW again."

Now, I'm pretty sure that at some point I read an interview with Rob Pardo, after his appearance in Time Magazine as "one of the 100 most influential people in the world." In said interview, he spelled out Blizzard's design philosophy - first make the game deep and compelling, then worry about accessibility. He identified that (rightly, in my opinion) as one of the big reasons, possibly the biggest reason, for the company's success.

Unfortunately I can't find the interview to save my life. I'd like to, because it displays something that I think Blizzard's been getting sloppy on... it was a pretty simple page, with yellow or orange background, a picture of Pardo in front of a PC, and in the interview he talked about his daughter playing a warlock or some such.

It's probably a far shot, seeing as Pardo was already lead designer for the previous expansions that damaged the game for me. But who the hell knows, maybe his coming back would signal the return of some measure of "elitism" to the game, to counteract the sickening trend of using the lowest common denominator as a benchmark.

**DISCLAIMER** Let me state very clearly that I don't want to "ruin everybody's fun." However, I do believe that there must be real differentiation between players and characters in order for the game to be compelling. One of the best ways to do that is for there to be a large potential difference between them, in each of WoW's many dimensions. That way more people can dedicate themselves to something that might make them feel a sense of accomplishment. Of course, it also means that you'll feel a nagging sense of jealousy, because you can't be equal to everyone at everything. But I think that state of affairs, far from "ruining the game," is a fair price to pay. ** END OF DISCLAIMER **

Another thing that made me look up in disbelief is this tweet:

"It's often easy to make players happy in the short term but not the long term, even though the latter is more important."

This was in response to someone complaining that no longer having increased run speed in ghost form was annoying. Wait... wha? Blizzard is cutting back on "quality of life" and putting their foot down? I'll be goddamned!

Then there's this tweet:

"People keep saying there was a blue post confirming the periods of time in which Galleon can spawn? T or F? I can't find any." - Player

"I dont't [sic] know if we posted that, but it doesn't seem like the kind of think we'd want to spell out. Game needs more discovery IMO." - Ghostcrawler

You mean you want to encourage people to stick their necks out and experiment? What happened to Blizzard "We don't want players to think too hard, it might fry their brains" Entertainment? Not that I care, not at all. It can go die in a corner and lay there, its dark deeds remembered only as mistakes not to be repeated.

And just to make sure I'm not wistfully cherry-picking the facts, let me just go and pick a random tweet to see what design philosophy is implicit in it.

Well, darn. Got a PvP conversation about Pummel/Heroic Throw silence effects. Since I know so little of PvP, it's hard to bootstrap any insight on overall game design from that... still, let's try.

"Silence on pummel was just as skillless as h-throw silence + cc spam and also having two spell reflects." -Player

"We don't think HT silence is "skillless." It was just too much with all the other tools and we didn't want to hurt e.g. mobility." -Ghostcrawler

That's kinda technical. Still, it says something that he's parrying the accusation of silence being "skill-less." One of the rallying cries of the bads is: "X doesn't take 'skill.' " Here GC is thinly implying that "skill" consists of using the available tools to solve the problems at hand. Saying that an aspect of the game is "cheap" and needs to be nerfed/removed is a lame excuse. In other words, L2P.

But this is GC, and he has a habit of taking a "L2P" stand on design issues, even if sometimes he's irritatingly ambiguous, trying to lead people to obvious conclusions without spelling them outright (that might be the work of the evil PR department). GC took a stand on dungeon difficulty in early Cataclysm, making a very polite post that nevertheless screamed "stop complaining and L2P." I still go back and read it sometimes, and I always applaud. But in the end it didn't do any good. The "gimme my weekly valor!" crowd ultimately had their way.

So yeah, in spite of this alarming urge to go and install WoW again, I think I'll stay skeptical a bit more. I hope I'm wrong and things really are looking up, but as I pointed out, many of the things on which I place much of the blame for WoW's current underwhelming state are still in place with no sign of being mitigated or removed. Namely: easy leveling and the dungeon/raid finders. Actually, I'll add to that list the complete obsolescence of old content as soon as a new patch comes out.

Plus, this is the beginning of an expansion. WoW is naturally at its best at such times. Things are new, and there are relatively few bored people clamoring for "quality of life improvements" so they can go back to piling up alts and buying valor gear. This kind of thing typically picks up after the middle of the expansion pack. Then the nerfs start.

If, against all odds, things are still improving several months from now, I might just come back. A good proxy indicator would be their stance on flying in Pandaria at 85. If they're still holding their ground on that issue by, say, February, it might be worth reconsidering my stance. We'll see.

The social aspect of WoW, from a nerd's standpoint

In my journey through WoW and social games in general, mostly I tried to play solo whenever possible, and only grudgingly joined a group when there was something I wanted badly and couldn't be done by myself. Sometimes such behavior led to a good deal of wasted time, but it was also gratifying when successful. For example, killing the keepers in the Altar of Zul. Good times...

Eventually I realized that killing undead by the hundreds in Andorhal and hoping for a world drop wasn't really the right way to play the game. Aiming at greater achievements, I mustered enough willpower to leave my little shell and search for a raiding guild. And even though I never really managed to reach the loftier heights of WoW endgame, it was still pretty rewarding to meet people and learn to work with them.

By contrast, it's implicit in WoW's modern design that players are supposed to play with their friends from outside the game, if they want to play with friends at all. Other gameplay options have been steadily transformed into an anonymous, streamlined experience - first dungeons, then raiding, and now even group quests.

Like I pointed out before, Blizzard likes to say that such things actually improve the social aspect of the game by making it easier for more people to meet and play together. I don't know if they actually believe it, or if it's just the CM party line, but a bit of digging shows that's really not how it works.

At least part of what drove players to meet each other was necessity - there were obviously many things in-game that couldn't be accomplished without teaming up. Because there were transaction costs involved in such teaming up, people tended to band together with guilds and friends lists. And even those people who were not in your close-contact group wouldn't always be complete strangers. You'd cross them leveling up, in the city, in trade chat. This generated the elusive "feeling of community".

To nobody's very great surprise, except apparently Blizzard's CMs, reducing the need for interaction didn't have much of a positive effect on WoW's community. People can play without the hassle of having to deal with other people, and so they don't. In that respect, the only recent counter trends are real-ID friends lists and Challenge Modes, which actually require teaming up. That and normal/heroic raiding are the only remaining bastions of voluntary interaction amongst players. And again, as Blizzard likes to point out, relatively few people do these things.

In my view, whatever socializing still exists is nowhere near enough to make up for the lost server communities. Those were an integral part of the "sense of belonging", which is now in shambles. The game no longer feels like a self-contained parallel world, which was, for me at least, a major reason for sticking around. Nowadays WoW is more like Diablo: get in, find a random group, kill things, get loot, brag, get out. All very efficient. And boring.

Once upon a time, the game won me over as a "prosthesis" of sorts for my sorely deficient social life. Now it's just another game. An old one at that.