Challenge Modes and Pet Battles

I can understand that Blizzard wants to add other ways of progression to WoW instead of power creep. I support that. But they do it the wrong way. Good ways are activities that use my unaltered character and his abilities. Didn't Blizzard learn from other occasions where they offered their players minigames? Oculus, anybody?

(1)
I am coming to the end of the BlizzCon commentary. This post concludes my opinion on the rest of the WoW-related announcements Blizzard made. Tomorrow and the days thereafter I hope to blog more generally about MMOs and computer games again. I might also have a short break; this will be decided short-term. What is certain is that I will pick up Skyrim in two weeks and almost certainly tell you why I hated it, although I loved it. SW:TOR will dominate the beginning of next year.
Will I ever blog about WoW again? You can bet! Will I ever pay for it again? No, they have Pandas.

(2)
That having said, it has been hard for me to make my mind up over Challenge Modes and Pet Battles. My gut reaction towards both features is 'meh'. I mean, pet battles don't really annoy me. I can see where the fascination is coming from. But while I considered pets a really cool idea in Classic, they where soon used to such an immersion-breaking extend that I learned to avoid them. Add greed on the business side and you can say that I 'hate' pets. That's simply my honest gut reaction towards pets (and mounts) nowadays. Once in a time pets added to the world in a fitting, cute, often even immersive way. I can have a dog in the game? Yes, man! I can own a space marine in the game? /fail.

This reaction towards pets obviously influences my reaction towards the pet battle system. But I do understand why people like Pokémon! I even enjoyed some Pokémon-inspired television series while I learned for my final physics exams. I didn't consider it the greatest series ever, but, well, it was fun. But does it fit into WoW? Not really. In contrast to Pandas, however, pet battles wouldn't really affect me as a player - I would hope. On the other hand, if Blizzard's masterplan is to get players out of the capitals and back into the world solely by having them search for new pets, this obviously wouldn't work for me.

Even considering the possibility that their minigame is not going to be scrapped, like the superfluous dance studio was, and even imagining that the minigame is going to be lots of fun in itself, I don't welcome the addition of such minigames to a MMO. That having said, done well, I'm pretty sure that this can turn out a to be a very important feature for WoW. It is almost certainly going to be copied.

(3)
I don't really like Challenge Modes, either. First there is the obvious immersion problem of having all my gear changing its properties suddenly. On the other hand, next year gear will already have lost any immersive value by having introduced transmogrification.

Then, it seems ridiculous to me to that a game that ended up relying completely on hunting for character power now offers a minigame that normalizes everybody. On the bright side, Blizzard finally intends to scale the power creep between expansion levels down. That's good and should obviously have happened with Cataclysm (or any prior expansion!) already.

The problem is that if I am honest I could see myself doing challenge modes and enjoying them. But I also know that they reduced WoW's overall quality and the overall enjoyment I could get out of it. Instead of adding the adventure back into WoW, Blizzard just seems to scrap it completely and declare the bug to be a feature. ”Players do daily dungeons ridiculously fast? Obviously they like doing that! Let's add a metagame mode that is all about speed runs!!”.
Typical for Blizzard. Instead of fixing what is broken they try to be extra smart and use it to their advantage. Unfortunately this doesn't always work.

(4)
I can understand that Blizzard wants to add other ways of progression to WoW instead of power creep. I support that. But they do it the wrong way. Good ways are activities that use my unaltered character and his abilities. Didn't Blizzard learn from other occasions where they offered their players minigames? Oculus, anybody?

All kinds of open world / guild / faction PvP would work even without any incentive at all, except for fame. So would adding an underground network of procedurally generated static tunnels full of wandering monsters that can be explored for some kind for fame or simply for exploration. Other ideas center around PvE sandboxes that allow communities of players to cultivate land outside of the cities and together fight off NPC monster attacks. The easiest way to add an alternative progression path would still be houses that players could decorate. I'm not an outspoken fan of player housing, but it would certainly fit better to World of Warcraft than challenge modes or pet battles.

There is no shortage of ideas really if Blizzard wants to add more activities to the endgame. Raising costs shouldn't be an issue for a game that generates one billion dollars profit a year and so far sees less than 20% of its revenue being reinvested company-wide. Wake up Blizzard! The competition is slowly becoming dangerous.