Looking at what’s happening in WoW is beginning to give me a curious feeling that I only experienced before in one situation – thinking about my ex-girlfriend. It goes like this: first comes an urge to inflict physical harm, then a realization that even thinking about it makes you slightly ill with disgust, and finally an exasperated indifference. I suppose it’s a standard reaction to feeling betrayed by someone or something that once was important.
And not unlike the girlfriend parallel, coming to see Blizzard and their product for what they really are (or have become) is refreshingly liberating. It makes you wonder why people still play the damn thing when they have to grope for reasons to do so. It’s an addiction, plain and simple, just like “love”, and it becomes self-fulfilling. The player is no longer playing to level up or collect gear or defeat bosses – he’s doing those things in order to keep playing.
I think that’s the source of the dreaded “nothing to do” syndrome which (if the forums and my own experience are to be believed) is afflicting WoW right now. If you have an important goal that takes a lot of work to reach, you’re going to bend over backwards to get there. Which is why people such as myself sacrificed school, social interaction, work and a lot of other little and not so little things in order to level up, gear up and raid. The damn thing drew you in – the goal of becoming more powerful and defeating a string of complex encounters in a (considering Metzen, blissfully blurry) lore background can be intoxicating.
As I’ve said before, this “give players a goal” approach seems to have been forgotten in some back room at Blizzard. Now it’s all about the “fun”, which means playing the game for its own sake. If playing the game is the goal, there’s nothing much that needs to be done to achieve it. Just turn on the computer, fire up the program and there you are. Objective accomplished! Except now, you need to find an excuse for being there. And finding excuses is always harder than finding something that needs doing. But since finding an excuse is easier than actually doing something, it turns out to be a net win in the end, right? Right?
In EVE the only tangible goal is to make money – but it’s there, there are plenty of ways to do it, and most importantly, it’s impossible to have “enough”. I understand a lot of bored people are taking that approach to WoW. Maybe it’ll become a more money-focused MMO in the future – I can see that being a smart move by the devs, considering how messed up their “beat bosses” model has become.
The fact is that Blizzard have very clearly shifted gears from trying to draw players in, to milking the players already in for every penny they can extract. Is such a policy cause or consequence? In my opinion, both. It’s a positive feedback loop that’s certain to sink the game eventually. Maybe that’s the objective.
In any case, it’s good to feel WoW slowly washing out of my system. A guy in my guild, a really nice fellow and very competent player, even tried to “cast” the Scroll of Resurrection on me. Problem is, with the state the game is in, and having realized it, it was pitifully easy to resist. Too bad. He really was a nice guy.
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