Wonderland: BlizzCon pics
It’s very big, bigger I think than I was expecting, but also very anti-social: everything that you could want (clothes, food, playmachines) has a MASSIVE queue, and then there’s lots of blank space in between.
It’s funny how apt a description this is of World of Warcraft itself, in some ways. Like game, like con? A pity that the con can’t be instanced. 🙂
I had dinner with the folks from Kingdom of Loathing just the other day — they play quite a bit of WoW — and we spent a long time talking about the ways in which design choices select for players and the way in which players gravitate towards design choices. Referencing WoW specifically, we talked about how much the game selects for people who come to it with friends, and how unsocial it can feel for someone there by themselves. The case was made by them that you don’t want to meet all those people anyway. 🙂
No one game fits all, of course.
2 Responses to “Wonderland: BlizzCon pics”
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This really sounds like my current WoW experience. I started playing about a month ago when a friend started an account. Whenever I can, I play alongside him and another friend of his, and it’s a lot of fun. Any time he isn’t around though (which is most of the time), it’s a very lonely experience.
I don’t outwardly fault Blizzard for this though. If I truly felt compelled to, I imagine I could find other players with whom to interact pretty easily. The thing is, the culture I see in WoW reminds me a lot of the AOL chatrooms I would poke around in back when I was 15, and this sort of social environment just holds absolutely no interest for me today. Without any effective tools to navigate the social landscape, I feel like the chances of finding those like-minded individuals who are assuredly out there are extremely slim.
I’ve come to think that, lacking a good set of “social tools”, my best bet for future MMOs will be to attach myself to a pre-established community, such as Something Awful, Penny Arcade, and what have you, who often have very sizeable presences within online games.
Due to the ease of leveling in WoW, there simply is no reason to ever group with anyone until you reach level 70. Of course, at level 70 you do need to start developing social skills to get groups and even join a guild but sadly by then it’s too late. In MMO’s like WoW, you don’t need to make friend or care about your reputation as it has no bearing on whether or not you can advance your character.
In group based games like EverQuest, you could not afford to be an idiot and you constantly had to work on your social skills in order to get admittance into groups. As an aside, soloing classes such as necromancers were notoriously the most anti-social of all players back in EQ because they could afford to be. Those types of personalities ended up gravitating to solo play because nobody would tolerate them.
Even individual player skill is pretty much a trivial concern in WoW. Witness players who suddenly find that they need to learn how to play in a group/raid at level 70 are confused and ill-prepared to say the least. If raiding is the end destination and the de facto “real” game in WoW, then the level 1-70 experience fails utterly to prepare the player for what lies ahead. Well designed games should teach and prepare players for the content that lie ahead by presenting the player with progressively harder challenges. Of course WoW does not do this until the raiding game.
For me, online games are should really be all about community. A truly successful MMO implements game mechanics that promote group interdependencey. If a player is not playing a MMO to benefit from socializing and playing with other people then why are they even there? Even the most decked out player would find the prestige of his gear all but meaningless without an audience to appreciate it.
In the real world, humans form bonds because no one person can do it all alone. We need each other or we perish as a species. However, in virtual worlds players always take the path of least resistance and end up soloing if they can get away with it. Yet there is very little joy in actual soloing and very little point in playing a single player MMO — which is exactly what Blizzard has created at least from levels 1 – 70. Blizzard has really robbed many new MMO players of one of the joys of MMO gaming: socialization. What a shame!
As far as the culture of the players in WoW, it simply the worst of any I have seen of any MMO and barely even qualifies to be called a “community”. I shudder to think of the community that the games that dwarf WoW will be like as they appeal to the lowest common denominator out there. By creating MMO’s with broader appeal you end up creating a player culture that is potentially so destestable and banal that it reaches the tipping point and becomes it’s own worst enemy. It seems the more popular a MMO becomes, the worse the community becomes. I really hope that the future of the MMO business lies in smaller, more niche based virtual worlds.