WoW Classic: Alt-itis

Posted on September 30, 2019 by SynCaine

One of the big surprises related to WoW Classic for me has been my enjoyment of playing alts. Back in Vanilla I only had my Orc Warrior, and later had a lvl 19 twink undead Rogue. But I never got a second character even close to 60 originally, and when I came back for TBC I also only leveled a single character (goat Shaman) to the cap. Back then my focus was on raiding, helping to run a raid guild, and doing the million little things to make raid progression happen.

Right now in Classic I have my human rogue at 38, a human Pali at 15, a gnome Warlock at 13 (might retire him), and now a night elf Hunter at 14. I don’t care much about reaching the end-game of raiding, in part because I’ve seen it, but also because it ‘doesn’t matter’ this time around. I know it also didn’t matter back then, but it felt like it did. There are no illusion of the sort this time around.  The journey IS the game this time around, and what a wonderful journey it is. One that feels different on each alt, even if they overlap in some of the quests and dungeons they run.

Each alt also offers a different view into what makes Classic work. The hunter is my latest character, and I’m somewhat obsessed with him right now. I’ve always liked pet classes in an MMO, and the Classic hunter is pet-class perfection. The need to feed them, the fact that they eat different things, the skill training, the decision to focus your hunter as a beastmaster or a marksmen, the fact that the hunter isn’t a pure ranged dps class, even just the fact that one of your bag slots is a unique ammo pouch that can also be upgraded. So many different mechanics, and they all come together to make playing a hunter feel like you ARE a hunter, killing bears because you need the meat for your pet, or you go fishing because your cat can eat fish, which itself is a huge bonus for taming a cat vs a different animal.

Taming rare spawn pets is itself a game within the game, and one that is exclusively of interest for just that one class. Every other class sees that rare spawn animal as bonus loot; a hunter sees it as a valuable find to tame. All in the same world, without the whole thing being overly staged or force-fed to everyone. Hunters are also on a constant loop of taming something new to learn its skills, and then passing those skills off to your ‘favorite’ pet. It’s another unique class gameplay loop that just works.

All of these mechanics matter and you notice them because Classic isn’t faceroll easy. If everything scaled and you could succeed with minimal effort, you wouldn’t feel the push to keep your pet strong, to make good decisions on talents, and to ensure your gear is staying decent. But because even in the teens the game does challenge you, you care about all of that. It feels good to get more comfortable controlling the pet, of knowing when to heal it vs when to continue dealing damage to end a fight. Plus the pet being an agro magnet if not controlled correctly is a challenge that is again unique to the class (and Warlock I guess, if using melee pets).

In my last play session I had a quest to go into a cave of Nagas and pick some mushrooms. Typical stuff. But I was entering the cave a few levels lower than the mobs, and the density was tight. This made it basically impossible to progress, especially because the ranged Nagas wouldn’t move, but sending in the pet would draw additional agro and lead to death. So I grouped with another hunter, and even with the two of us the entire trip into the cave was a death dance of killing Nagas fast enough to keep pace with the respawns, all while pushing further in to get what we needed. The final item you need is guarded by two mobs that are significantly higher, and we ended up sacrificing our pets to loot what we needed and attempt to run out. We died halfway out of the cave, and then just escaped after our rez, jumping out of the cave and down a waterfall to safety. Classic creates moments like these all the time, especially if you let it (don’t always do at-level or below content).

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 5 Comments

WoW Classic and TFT, by the numbers

Posted on September 27, 2019 by SynCaine

Lets talk numbers on a late Friday afternoon!

First up is info from Riot on the success of Team Fight Tactics, the non-WoW game that I’m still playing heavily. The big number is that 33 million accounts play TFT a month. That’s silly big, and then you realize that TFT isn’t the most popular game mode in LoL (Summoners Rift ranked is), and yea, LoL still has more than 100 million active accounts. Remember when we thought WoW having 12 million accounts was massive? How cute was that? Anyway I’m very excited for the future of TFT, because my god is it a ton of fun.

Speaking of WoW, over at TAGN Wilhelm has his monthly SuperData post up, and while I consider their ranking lists junk (the list is only who gives them numbers, but is presented as a view of the whole gaming space), there was a note that clearly came directly from Blizzard that WoW revenue is up 223% (how oddly specific eh?) in August compare to July. As I stated over at his site, here is why that number is crazy; current Retail players that play/played Classic aren’t factored into the revenue increase (already had subs), but do count towards the number of people playing Classic. So on top of all those who switched or double-dip, you have 223% MORE people also jumping into Classic. It’s no longer a conversation of whether Classic is bigger than Retail, its now a conversation about how much bigger. My guess is its about 70/30 right now Classic/Retail, although that 25 minutes of new content the last Retail patch added might swing things back in Retails favor…

If you’re Blizzard, and more specifically, if you’re a shareholder of BlizzActivision, aren’t you not-so-gently nudging Blizzard execs right now to focus on the real breadwinner in the WoW family? Some people in Blizzard might have thought we don’t want that, but now that our wallets have slapped them in the face about 223 times, I’m guessing they are singing a different tune.

Posted in Blogroll, League of Legends, Mass Media, World of Warcraft | 1 Comment

WoW Classic: First month and the game is still growing, but for how long?

Posted on September 25, 2019 by SynCaine

We are a month into WoW Classic and a few things are shaking out. The biggest IMO being that the population hasn’t gone down since launch, and if anything is still growing, as Blizzard continues to open new servers. Of course some people have quit, but the overall trend is still going up, much like with Vanilla way back in the day. It won’t continue like Vanilla did for years (more on that below), but I don’t expect the growth to stop during month two either.

Why the growth won’t stop yet is a two-part answer. First, the road to 60 and being ‘done’ with even the pre-raid content is longer than a month or two for most people. Of course someone hit 60 in 3 days, and of course any guild that wanted to beat the current raids ASAP are already ‘done’, but those people are just outliers, and not at all representative of the average. No, the average gamer playing Classic still has plenty of content to go, and that goes for just playing one character. If we include alts into this, the road is easily 3-6 months longer.

The second reason I still think the population will grow is because more and more people will be pulled into the social circle of the game. When friends see that those currently playing are still going, and having a good time, they will be more likely to jump in themselves. Games like this can spread like wildfire (see ARK, PUBG, LoL, and basically any other major multi-player hit in the last dozen years), and this is WoW’s second go-around in that regard. Vanilla started with a base of about 300k people, maybe less, and the millions eventually logged in because a friend was playing, and then another friend, and so on until ‘everyone’ was playing WoW. That’s just how multi-player gaming goes, and Classic has the added advantage of not only being a good game, but one that will keep you playing for months and months, extending and expanding the time and reach of the social hooks.

Why Classic is so good is another interesting topic, tackled most recently by TAGN here, with a link to a similar post from Bhagpuss that can be found here. Others have made similar posts with their own flavor as well. Ultimately Classic reminds people that WoW in 04/05 was not just a really good game, but a really, really good MMO. And a good MMO, as most of us know, ends up eating most of your gaming time and attention, along with pulling in everyone else in your orbit. The virus that was WoW is back, and in a big way, for both an older generation and a newer one as well.

I mentioned above that the growth won’t resemble Vanilla, and I say this because Blizzard currently doesn’t plan to support Classic with additional content save for the expected phased rollouts of some raids and battlegrounds. While those are important, they simply aren’t as big or impactful as the more frequent patches Vanilla got back in the day, and an MMO that isn’t being updated and expanded isn’t one that can be expected to grow or even retain the majority of its playerbase.

And even if Blizzard does come out and say they plan to support Classic beyond just adding the remaining content, what would that look like, and how would it be received? I’ve posted before that personally I want a new full-fledged expansion, and not TBC. I want the rest of the missing Azeroth zones added, I want new raids beyond Nax40, and I want the missing content holes like class quests, sub-60 dungeon options, and zones like Deadwind Pass being finished, filled in. But can New Blizzard add content to Classic that won’t reek of Retail design? And even if they can, would that require even more servers so some can stay truly Classic? What would that population split look like?

I’d like to see Blizzard try. Worst-case its Retail-like content, Classic players hate it, and we move on. If they don’t try, Classic players will move on anyway, because without new content you can only play Classic for so long until you ‘beat’ it. Either way, I think they need to say something ‘soon’. Perhaps that will be the big announcement at Blizcon in November?

Posted in Blogroll, MMO design, World of Warcraft | 5 Comments

WoW Classic: I’m a Pali, and I auto-attack things

Posted on September 19, 2019 by SynCaine

I never played a Paladin in WoW. The biggest reason for this was that I played Horde at release, and was never big on creating alts. When TBC came out, I rolled a space goat shaman. Now that Classic is here, and my goal this time around is less about the end-game and more about just enjoying the trip, alts seem like a much more favorable thing. My main is a 32 human rogue, and my original alt was a gnome warlock to play alongside my wife’s gnome mage. However the pairing of two casters, both cloth wearers, isn’t ideal.

In comes the possibility of a paladin. There as been a lot said about how boring a paladin is to play, being that you auto-attack things instead of spamming skills like say a rogue. And this is true; at level 1 a paladin starts with a heal (Holy Light), and a 15 second buff that adds holy damage to your auto attack (Seal of Righteousness). That’s it. When you level up you get your first aura (Devotion Aura, an armor buff) and then finally at level 4 you get another buff (Blessing of Might) and Judgement, a spell that uses up your current Seal to do something. Using up Seal of Righteousness results in a short-ranged damage ability.

At level 4 here is how every combat plays out: Have seal running, use judgement to start the fight. Re-apply seal, auto-attacks. Mob dies. Every. Single. Time.

Now here is the thing; I don’t mind that. At all. Outside of PvP combat and maybe some boss/raid encounters, WoW isn’t an ‘action combat’ game. The slower pace allows for efficiency on when to use your abilities, rather than measuring who can hit the keys/mouse the fastest like in a FPS. Now yes, the Pali at low levels is taking that to the extreme, but again personally I don’t mind. Especially not for an alt as something else to play alongside a rogue. Perhaps by level 30 I might, but for now I enjoy the simplicity of mobs dying via autoattacks from a giant two-handed hammer to the face.

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 7 Comments

Million Lords Review

Posted on September 17, 2019 by SynCaine

I receive a decent number of invites/requests from developers to try their game and post feedback here. I decline/ignore most, but not all. One such request I did not ignore was for a game called Million Lords, which is tagged as a Mobile MMO RTS. I’m writing about it today because I find it a very interesting game, yet one that I don’t know if I can recommend or even say if I like. That said, I’m still playing it, so that says something.

Here are the basics of how the game works: You start with a capital city and a small number of troops. You use those troops to attack other cities, and if you have more troops than they do, you win the city. Gold is another resource, and its sole use is to upgrade the level of a city. Higher levels mean more defenders and more troop production per hour. Each combat (attack or defense) gives you XP, scaling to how many troops were involved. Each level up you get a talent point, along with a bunch of troops and gold. The talent point is spent upgrading stats like Attack (20% attack gives you 20% more troops when attacking), Defense, Gold Income, etc. Every five levels you also get an item chest that has 5 random items. Items come in three types (weapon, shield, belt), and different items of different quality (normal, rare, epic, etc) give you increases to the talent point trees. So for example a normal dagger can give you one point worth of attack, one point worth of gold income. A different weapon might give you troop movement increase, or defense. Items can be upgraded as you get more copies of the same item, which increases their power.

The basic gameplay flow is you gather your army from around your cities into one group, pick a city to attack, hopefully win, and repeat. You level up, expand, defend, gear up, repeat. Initially you will have some easy NPC cities, but shortly you will be fighting other players. When those players attack you, you upgrade that city to increase its defenders, and hopefully successfully defend the city. There is no gameplay around attacking/defending beyond selecting who to attack; the troop stack (represented by a flag) travels to the city, and then combat resolves itself. There really isn’t a lot of gameplay here overall, yet again for some reason I still find myself logging in daily and playing a bit.

Here are the major flaws of the game as I see them right now.

For starters, the whole ‘upgrade a city to defend it’ mechanic is just dumb. You will get a notification on your phone that someone is attacking you. Usually that attack arrives in 5 minutes, but that depends on the size of the attack and the distance to travel. If you are able to get into the game before the attack hits, you upgrade your city enough to beat the attack numbers. This is generally easy to do as troops are a far rarer resource than gold, and city defenders instantly appear when you upgrade. The result is when you attack, you aren’t hoping that you can beat the number of defenders, but rather you are hoping the other player isn’t around his phone to upgrade his city in time. If you can monitor the game 24/7, you win!

Another issue is that the biggest source of new troops is leveling up, not city generation. What this means is that those who can attack more level up faster, which gets them more troops faster, which lets them attack more. If you ‘fall behind’ this loop, you will be so under leveled you have no chance attacking those higher level players (a lvl 30 player will have 100k troops. A level 40 players can upgrade a city to have 2m defenders). Higher level players can’t attack those much lower, and lower players hitting up get bonus XP, but that doesn’t balance out as well as you might hope, because losing an attack still puts you way behind on troops compared to winning. And a successful defense is a huge XP boost compared to a loss.

There is of course a cash shop, which primarily sells item chests. Remember you do get chests from leveling up, but you can also buy them. I received a code for $90 worth of gems, which converted into 100 item chests (500 items total). Opening all of those gave me 4 legendary items (the highest tier item), which are significantly stronger than even epic items, of which I got maybe a dozen of. Remember that more copies of an item increase its power, so if I was to buy another 100 chests, maybe I’d find a copy of one of my existing 4 legendary items and it would get stronger. As you can see, if you really go nuts on spending, you can buy a lot of power that isn’t realistically achievable via just playing.

All of that sounds bad and unfun, right? And again, I’m still playing a few minutes a day. There is something fun/rewarding about taking a city, even if you know you succeeded because you got lucky and that person didn’t respond. Defending feels good as well, even though you succeeded because you upgraded in time. I can’t explain it, and perhaps tomorrow I’ll stop because the game is broken. Or maybe they fix it (simple fix to the city issue: remove defenders, boost the production bonus way up, and make the game more about having troops defending rather than the level of the city being the primary factor of defense strength), and once fixed this might be a more enjoyable mobile MMO that you can feel good spending a few minutes with each day.

If you are at all curious, the game is free to download, and if you use my friend code in the North America server (DB2C2888C2EED7C3) you get 200 gems and I get rewards based on the number of referrals. Already mentioned but just to repeat: I was given a code by the dev for $90 worth of gems.

Posted in iPhone, Random, Review | 6 Comments

WoW Classic: Two dungeons, two different games

Posted on September 16, 2019 by SynCaine

In the last few days our guild ran two instances, Shadow Fang Keep and Gnomeregan, and the two experiences nicely mirror the differences between WoW Classic and Retail IMO.

For SFK, our group was a bit higher in levels than is recommended, and as SFK is intended to be a horde-side dungeon, we didn’t have any quests beside a Paladin on his class quest. The result was that we facerolled the instance without issue, and the experience was mostly focused on seeing what the bosses dropped for loot. The whole thing was over quickly, and I can’t recall a single boss mechanic or area of the dungeon that sticks out (which is a real shame because on its own, SFK is an awesome dungeon).

For Gnomeregan, the situation was basically the opposite. As a group we were below-level, which meant every pull was its own challenge, and we wiped more than a few times. It also led to a slower pace of progress, giving us more time to appreciate the environment and chat in Discord. We all had the dungeon quests, and that means people collecting what they needed, and hoping we got enough of everything for everyone (we didn’t).

Even on the bosses that didn’t have complex mechanics, we were still cautious and, you know, paused before a boss to make sure everyone was ready. The loot was nice, but making progress felt like the real reward.

Progress eventually stopped towards the end, in a tunnel with higher-level dark dwarves. Anytime we had a bad pull here, the result was a wipe, and its an area that getting the pull correct isn’t automatic. Lots of patrols, lots of odd agro, and all in a very tight space. We also had a WoW Classic moment where our Huntard wiped us when his pet decided to agro half the entire dungeon. We called it a night having wiped on the final group before the final boss, as the earlier areas began to respawn.

SFK was easy, boring, loot focused, and the mechanics or player skill didn’t matter. It was Retail. Gnome was harder, slower, how we played mattered, and ultimately we ‘failed’, needing to come back and try again. That’s Classic.

I don’t know how Blizzard or other devs can push people to run dungeons closer to the Gnomer experience vs the SFK one, but they should. I know there are players who think they want the faceroll easy experience, but they don’t.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, MMO design, World of Warcraft | 7 Comments

WoW is dead. Long live WoW!

Posted on September 12, 2019 by SynCaine

WoW Retail, born Nov 23rd, 2004, has sadly passed away at the age of (almost) 15 on Aug 26th, 2019. Cause of death: WoW Classic. RIP in peace.

Ever since WoW Retail become a monster hit sometime around 2005, ‘WoW killers’ have been announced, launched, and found lacking. WAR couldn’t do it, Rift wasn’t the title, SW:TOR sold you hotbars, and on it goes. Regardless of what other MMO launched, WoW Retail always remained the top dog, even as it lost its way following WotLK and went charging head first into the dumpster fire that is the current game. The grip of Azeroth, even terribly watered down, was still strong. Not 10m+ subs strong with good content and a growing user-base, but still considerable to take for a 1-3 week spin every 6 months when content was added.

Then on Aug 26th the one true WoW killer arrived. Its name was WoW Classic, and its Old Blizzard design (with New Blizzard expectation management…) reminded the world why, back in 2004, so many fell in love with Azeroth. It wasn’t the welfare epics, the complete silence of LFG, the faceroll of raidfinder, the space goats, the Horde Paladins, the timetravel-inspired lore bastardization, or making every class a hybrid dps/tank/healer reskin.

It’s a reminder that the world in WoW is the star character, not you oh generic hybrid iLvl placeholder. It’s a reminder that even if you think you don’t want ‘collect 15’ quests that require killing 60 mobs because the drop rate is 5% (math checks out), you actually do. That dying because of a careless pull at level 5 is important, regardless of how initially frustrating it may seem. A reminder that a quest with a cloth item reward for your warrior that sends you across 5 zones, and that during that quest you are walking 99% and doing anything BUT walking 1% of the time, is not a ‘design flaw’ to fix and sanitize. A reminder that content which pushes players to play together, by nudging those who insist on going solo into social situations, is healthy game design for an MMO, not a ‘carryover’ of old and outdated thinking. And that those who completely refuse to group can’t see the end of the story and the cool big bads like Rag or Onyxia, because fuck you this is an MMO, join a guild asshat!

I can understand the frustration of the few remaining Retail players as they look at their guild rosters and see ‘last online Aug 26th’. It always stinks when a better game comes along and takes most of your population. Its even worse when that better game is from the same company as your current game, and suddenly you go from the star pupil to the redheaded stepchild of the family. No one wants to be the Heroes of the Storm of a company, yet here we are today, with Retail and HotS sitting at Blizzard’s kids table, muttering under their breath about how unfair it is that the more successful, better looking, much smarter WoW Classic child is the favorite now and gets all the love/attention/budget/respect.

It double stinks that all these years you kept saying how Retail WoW is great, and that those who claim Vanilla design was superior are just wearing rose-tinted glasses, and now Classic is here and you are forced to realize you were wrong, we were right, you stink, we rule. That must sting. Maybe not as bad a sting as your server being turned off to make room for more Classic servers, but still a bad feeling. I’d suggest running a raid with the quarter of your remaining active roster, just to take the old game for one last spin. May I suggest the ‘updated’ post-Cata Deadmines? I hear its a real hoot! And as you mindlessly pull the whole room and AoE it down, know that it’s not your fault that Retail is dead, sometimes mom and dad just drift apart.

Well, I mean, it actually is your fault. You asked for welfare epics because you were jealous as I danced on the mailbox in my raiding gear while you looked up in your poor person blues. You complained that walking to a dungeon entrance was a burden you couldn’t handle. You said that rogues should have a heal because you have no friends and playing a priest is like, really boring. You pointed out the ‘flaw’ in having to commit to a talent build with respec consequences, and had that ‘flaw’ fixed when talent trees were removed to make the game ‘better’. Every quest SHOULD have a reward you yourself can use, damnit, and that quest should show you exactly where to go and require you, at most, to spend 5 minutes in total. Who the hell has more than 5 minutes to play these days when we all have to take care of our 6 kids? This isn’t 1965 is it? Don’t you have a phone?

The glass-half-full view of Classic killing Retail is that perhaps this saves the overall MMO genre. No longer will we get WoW clones based off the inferior and flawed version of WoW that is post-WotLK. Perhaps the next WAR/Rift/SW:TOR will be a Classic clone, and by default already be a better MMO because of it. That’s a win/win for everyone besides the sRPG players that cling to the corpse that is Retail, right? And since we aren’t grouping with those solo heathens anyway, do they actually count? The answer is no. No they do not.

So a big congrats to Blizzard for releasing a WoW Killer! That’s a huge accomplishment that should be celebrated by all! It’s always a tall task to take down the market leader, even if in this case the market leader is long past his prime and a shell of what originally made him great. Hey, it still counts!

And my most sincere and heartfelt Thoughts and Prayers to Blizzard that WoW Retail is dead. What a run, this almost 15 years! And to the few remaining Retail players: You think you want to keep playing that version of the game, but you don’t.

Posted in MMO design, Rant, Rift, SW:TOR, Tobold being Wrong, Trion being Trion, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 19 Comments

WoW Classic: It’s not a hard game, but it does reward player skill

Posted on September 5, 2019 by SynCaine

As we continue to see mountains of feedback about Classic via blogs and forums, one topic keeps coming up that is being misunderstood and/or misrepresented: the difficulty of WoW Classic, either as its own entity or compared to Retail.

I’ll focus this post on pre-raiding Classic because that is currently what most of the conversation is about, and because in the previous post I already touched on raiding a bit. Let me start by being very clear; its not difficult to hit level 60 in WoW. Literally anyone can do it given enough time. The same goes for any singular piece of content; there isn’t a quest so ‘difficult’ that people can’t complete it. There isn’t a dungeon that remains unconquered by the majority. Pre-60 there is NOTHING in WoW that would be a challenge to anyone serious about a challenge in videogames. WoW has nothing remotely close to being as difficult as say hitting Challenger in League of Legends, or even beating the average single player game on the highest difficulty.

With that said, one major reason why Classic is fun is because it isn’t faceroll easy. Starting right at level 1, you simply can’t run into a group of mobs solo and expect to survive. When you are doing at-level content, you are always at least aware of where mobs are, about what you are pulling, and what keys you are pressing. Now don’t get confused, once you do those things, killing a mob or two is ‘easy’. But that itself is the point; you have put in the work to get a decent pull, so your reward is being able to kill said mob without too much fuss. That ‘simple’ combat is also its own strength; you really don’t want the most basic aspect of your MMO (combat), that you hope people experience for hundreds if not thousands of hours, to be tiring or require near-constant button mashing.

A game can require both some thinking and be relaxing, and that is exactly what most of the combat in Classic is (or can be).

There is another aspect of this conversation that I feel many are missing; just because at-level combat is simple, doesn’t mean that the game never requires you to play better, or that you can’t challenge yourself and be rewarded. If you player better-than-average, you can tackle higher level quests/mobs, which means you level fasts. If you are above average, you can complete a dungeon at a lower level, getting more value out of the drops and again progressing faster. Crafting isn’t ‘hard’, but putting some thinking and networking into it means you can progress it faster, get more useful things from it more consistently, and also be a bigger help to your guild.

The opposite is also true in Classic; if you aren’t paying attention or generally play below-average, you will progress slower. You will die more often which delays you. You will cause dungeon wipes or will only see success once you are higher level than is intended. If you don’t do some basic planning around crafting, you will most likely see it as ‘worthless’ because you can never craft anything useable for your level.

And again, even that below-average player will eventually hit 60, eventually max out a crafting skill, and eventually beat every dungeon. But that’s not the point. Difficulty in WoW isn’t about absolutes. It’s not about whether you can beat a dungeon or hit the level cap. It’s about how long is that journey? How many failures/deaths did it take you? How much success did you see going above at-level content consistently? Classic asks all of that, and just as importantly, rewards those who do play better.

Classic is really hard when you are level 20 trying to solo complete a level 24 quest that requires you to kill higher level mobs in tight pack. Or at least can be hard if you do try it solo, and at level 20 instead of at 24, and you don’t have a guild providing you with at-level crafted items and dungeon drops. If you do, it’s easy, but at that point look at how much effort you have put in to make the game easier?

That’s not a game I’d call easy.

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, MMO design, Rant, World of Warcraft | 4 Comments

WoW Classic: The case for an expansion, and I don’t mean TBC

Posted on September 4, 2019 by SynCaine

We are just over a week in, but considering Blizzard is STILL opening new servers and now offering server transfers, I think its safe to say that Classic has been a hit beyond what Blizzard originally projected. How big of a hit we will likely find out during financial reporting (where good news is always celebrated, and bad news is ignored and/or spun), and there is always the question of retention. But let’s assume retention is good and the success of Classic results in Blizzard investing further in the product, what could that mean?

The seemingly obvious choice is to plan for the release of the original expansions, starting with The Burning Crusade. I say seemingly because I don’t think this is as obvious as people initially think. For starters, I fully believe Classic is as big a deal in large part because Retail WoW is so different (read: bad), and so moving Classic towards the bad version of WoW, even one expansion towards it, wouldn’t be great. I’ve argued in the past that WotLK, the second expansion, is when Blizzard really lost it and WoW started to decline (it did decline in terms of subs, and IMO declined in terms of design with things like welfare epics), but even TBC isn’t a ‘great’ expansion, with its 10/25 man raid setup, and the overall zone design being worse than the better zones of Vanilla.

What Blizzard really can’t do is do nothing. People would eventually leave the game, and Blizzard does not want to let a hit just die on the vine, especially when that hit is what originally pushed the company from a nice studio that made hits into a mega-corp. A second helping of $15 a month-fueled WoW success? You’d have to be SOE-dumb to ignore that.

Which leads us to the most interesting possibility, a new expansion for Classic. Take the lessons learned from 15 years of mostly ruining WoW, actually analyze why Classic is a hit, and then do what an expansion should do; give people more of what they like.

Keep the level cap at 60, but introduce something similar to EQ’s AA system, where you still earn XP and ‘ding’, but the power increase is more minor. This would allow those who are currently struggling with Classic-era raids a better chance for success (Nax40 isn’t going to be beaten by the vast majority of raiding guilds in Classic, you can bet on that), without all of the usual ‘reset’ problems of a level increase.

Add more content. Duh right? Fill in the world map with the missing zones, and they don’t all have to be level 60 zones. There is plenty of room for ‘filler’ content in Vanilla, and seeing it actually filled would be great. Same goes for new dungeons. Give people a real reason to level an alt in addition to working on a main. It’s already something that Vanilla was great at, so improve that strength. Give me a fitting ending to the Defias storyline with a level 30ish dungeon!

Adding new races, classes, and crafting professions is all fine, so long as it’s not space goats and Horde Paladins. Worgen, goblins, ogres, etc all already exist, use those. Death Knight and Demon Hunters? I guess, so long as they have that same ‘feel’ as Classic classes, and aren’t played like a fighting game simulator or Dance Dance Revolution. Don’t make all classes good at all things either, ala Retail. Rogues don’t heal!

Of course add more raids, and scale them as needed to keep everyone entertained. Nax40 works so well, even in its too-short lifespan, because it was so goddamn hard initially. Do more of that, and then adjust everything as needed as time goes on so the bleeding edge raids eventually become mid-tier and so on. If new raids are actually hard and progression guilds struggle, I could even see WoW become a big thing on streaming platforms should progression raiders allow it. How many views would a Method stream get for their first attempt at the final boss of the final current raid?

Finally, get some of the good ideas from future expansions into Classic, like a guild bank. Yes Vanilla didn’t have one, but its pretty hard to come up with a good argument against them. Dungeon finder? No, of course not, but again, we KNOW plenty of good reasons against that. Multi-spec? Yes, maybe, if handled correctly.

Sell me that expansion already Blizzard, my $80 for the collectors edition is waiting.

Posted in MMO design, World of Warcraft | 6 Comments

WoW Classic: Deadmines have been run, a server queue has been spotted

Posted on September 3, 2019 by SynCaine

As a guild we ran the Deadmines on Sunday and again on Monday night. Both runs were successful, though the Sunday run had a few wipes and had to deal with respawns, while the Monday run was clean start to finish. Personally I walked away with the Defias chestpiece off VC, and since I already had the boots, I bought the other three pieces off the AH to complete the set. Optimal use of money? Of course not, but hey gotta look good right?

Deadmines is one of the better, if not the best dungeon in WoW IMO. It has enough mechanics to keep it interesting and challenging, but none of the encounters feel like playing a dancing simulator. You can brute force it if you go in at a high enough level, but you can also achieve rewarding success below level with the right group and the right player skill. The beauty of the design in Classic isn’t that encounters are success/failure hard, but that things will scale down for you. If you are really good, you can tackle content under geared or under leveled. If you aren’t as good, you can still ‘grind’ someplace else and come back when you are strong. This is true even for solo questing; if you play your character well, you can efficiently fight harder mobs. If you lack player skill/knowledge, you might have to fight at-level or below mobs, or run away when more than a single mob is pulled.

It’s why Rag and Onyxia have already been beaten; those who actually care about world firsts have the skill (and the ‘how’ for all encounters in Classic is already known and well-documented), and so are able to beat those encountered even without having anything close to the optimal gear. At the same time, those encounters will still cause countless wipes to the average guild, yet allow those guilds to eventually progress as they slowly gear up. That’s not a flaw or a commentary on how ‘hard’ Vanilla was; it’s a highlight to its brilliant design (which itself was maybe accidental, who knows).

One of the reasons I think AQ40 was as unpopular as it was compared to other raids was some of the encounters lacked this build-in scaling. Either you did the mechanics dance perfectly and won, or you lost. Nax40 required both; perfect execution AND near-perfect gear, but Nax40 was intended to be ultra hard, and its why back then those world-firsts actually felt ‘important’, and its why Nax40 wasn’t cleared the first weekend it was released like so much raid content in later-day WoW.

Back to the Deadmines, it’s lengthy, but every piece of the dungeon makes sense for the theme, and the whole thing tells a great story (as does the main quest-line involved). Not all dungeons are like that in Vanilla (looking at you Ragefire Chasm and Stockades), but Deadmines isn’t alone in that regard either (LBRS and UBRS for example are also amazing).

On a different note, Monday night was the first time our server, Benediction, had a short login queue. Something to keep in mind about the queues; Vanilla didn’t peak at release. It didn’t peak 6 months after release, or even after the first year. Now, I’m not saying Classic is going to continue growing in the same way Vanilla did, or even close. But I’m also not convinced opening week is the peak of activity either. What Classic has reminded many, and perhaps shown for the first time to some, is that Vanilla was a great game to play, especially as a member of a guild. As the current Classic players continue to enjoy it, they are going to pull others from their social circle into the experience. And as the base leveling game in Classic isn’t short, that time span of enjoyment and recruiting is going to continue for the next few months, at least.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, MMO design, World of Warcraft | 2 Comments