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.