Early this year Blizzard explained the declining player numbers with players consuming content faster these days. And I agreed. But I think they didn't understand why players are consuming content faster these days.
(1)
When Blizzard talks about content they mean dailies and raids, in short: narratives. And if narratives are your content, then more content won't help all that much, Blizzard. Of course, more narratives will help short-term. And should you manage to create like ten times the content per year, which is easily possible considering your profit from WoW, content would solve many of your problems.
However, increasing your content production speed by like 50% or so, won't help much, if at all. It's not like players magically started to consume content faster since mid-WotLK. There were reasons, and players being more experienced is only one of these reasons; and a minor one. Many of us have been 'experienced' for years now.
(2)
The reason content doesn't last long these days is the missing community. In a guild with friends I don't care all that much if I wipe many times in front of a raid boss or a dungeon boss. I am busy explaining things to people and as long as they appear to be listening and trying to succeed, I am absolutely willing to wipe many times. Even if I am not leading the raid and just eating my meal in front of the screen while the raid leader explains the encounter for the 10th time, I don't have much of a problem with it; at least not the kind of problem that would make me get bored with WoW per se.
This is different with random groups. My tolerance for failure with random groups is very low. Actually, it's zero. While I am a very nice player in a community, I turn into a sarcastic, elitist player in a random group. And I am not even ashamed for it. I behave according to the social environment which, in this case, I despise. Is my behavior really that hard to predict?
(3)
You will find out, Blizzard, that the LFR's biggest problem will be that people have no tolerance for wipes. And that turns raiding upside down! Raiding, when you look at what players actually did most of their time, was all about wiping!
But in a random group, you need to make the encounters really easy. And then, obviously, players consume the 'content' faster and get bored. You could also say: being socially invested in a community makes players have fun while engaging in time sinks. This doesn't work outside of a community.
Now, the obvious solution would be the same you used before: Turn bosses into dailies. Only one boss kill (boss loot) per day. And that, once again, would solve the content consumption problem by making the game worse.
(4)
You could also word it this way: When in older MMOs developers found out, to their surprise, that players would stay subscribed although they spent 90% of their time wiping on absurdly overpowered bosses, they started printing money. Producing this kind of content was very cheap and kept players subscribed for months, sometimes years.
By replacing communities with random groups, you are destroying a critical element that made this work. And you will find out that you need to produce content (narratives) at the rate at which a television series produces narratives, if you want to keep players subscribed. Probably, even faster if you don't want players to unsubscribe during cliffhangers.
Your hope that players who do LFR raids become 'normal mode' raiders later on, is going to be dashed. The kind of player who is going to use the LFR is not the kind of player who would do the same content at a harder mode for a slightly higher itemlevel and at the 'cost' of considerable socializing. Only very few players actually move to a harder mode of the same raid to get slightly higher item levels until the next patch. Haven't you learned that from the experience with 'heroic mode' raids?
They need to recreate UBRS with LFR. Spirit and mechanic wise. Maybe without the key (although I liked the key).
ReplyDeleteUBRS was:
- You wait 15-30 minutes for a group of 15 people.
- You pull the trash with a little bit of care but without minutes of marking targets and planning.
- You gather in front of the boss and kill it just by playing your character and focusing on the encounter for 5 minutes. No dance. No twitch. No QTE.
- 95% success rate to kill the end boss with randoms.
- No more then 2 hours for a full clear with randoms.
I agree Kring, but would add: They must not make the next raid be identical content-wise. If the UBRS PUGs (who were all on the same server and often knew each other), had had to move on to UBRS, just higher difficulty instead of MC, ...
ReplyDeleteOnce they have done this, however, we will have come full circle and suddenly not every player sees all the content anymore. What Blizzard does looks like a crazy and futile dance, I think.
Since WotLK they announce every patch with the "piece of lore of the month". If the LFR raid would not be available for deathwing, it might be a bad idea to announce a "deathwing patch" if you, again, intend 95+% of the community to never meet deathwing.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe I didn't understand you correctly?
You did understand me correctly, but of course you are right, Kring. Blizzard can't just get back to the 'not every player sees all the content' now.
ReplyDeleteI think they positioned themselves between a rock and a hard place, really, because I sure as hell won't move to normal raids after I did the same raid before on LFR. And the amount of LFR raids I can consume is extremely high, because they are (have to be) so easy. So I will get bored really fast.
Which means that I will probably unsubscribe really fast after I did some LFR raids and have seen the narrative. And I think most players are like me in this respect. The best case scenario for Blizzard is that players resubscribe for every content patch they release, the worst case scenario is that they just lose interest, because itemlvl 9000 and the next scripted boss to be done with anonymous random pugs feels a bit pointless.
I guess they will end up gating not only your character progression, but also the narrative. *sigh*
I would assume that the target for the LFR are the player that don't raid at the moment: The majority of player. They probably try to keep those player subscribed by giving them more "transient content".
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure if they really care about the few normal mode raider who now switch to LFR and unsubscribe 2 month faster for every patch. I don't think it's a financial relevant group for Blizzard.
I have some doubt that adding more bosses later in the dungeon is going to work with the LFR target audience. I don't think the ICC gating would be a success for LFR. But maybe adding a new wing every other month which is it's own LFR "target"? Would that be so bad? I don't think so as long as they keep the ilvl the same and just increase gear diversity.
Instead of remove the LFG tool blizzard adds one for raids also...I think this is the end of wow, the last act of suicide..
ReplyDeletewhen I say the end of wow, I don't mean significant loss of subscription, I mean it will become a game where no serious people will bother to play at..the only reason I am still playing wow is that I am in a guild with real life friends and we are heaving fun. We are good players but not hardcore..we did firelands and only Shanox heroic and now we try Ryolith heroic.
We wipe for 2-3 hours in every heroic mode fight but we laugh at teamspeak, tease each other and generally having lot of fun. I have to use the LFG tool months now and I am not gonna use it ever..If I find myself in a position where my friends have stopped playing and I have to use LFG or LFR then this will be the end for me
If I find myself in a position where my friends have stopped playing and I have to use LFG or LFR then this will be the end for me.
ReplyDeleteIn a WoW without LFR/LFG what would you have done if your friends had stopped playing? Because if the answer is "quit", then you cannot really blame LFR/LFG for anything. And if the answer is "look for another guild", then LFR/LFG are not stopping you.
@Nils and many others: honestly when I read the current wave of blog postings on how "bad" WoW is, and what Blizzard should do to "improve it", I'm happy that you don't work as developers at Blizzard, because you would insta-kill the game with your changes....
Helistar, contrary to what Blizzards devs do, I actually wouldn't dramatically alter a successful game over night. I would, for example, not suddenly remove the LFD from WoW.
ReplyDeleteI would instead develop a plan about how to draw people back into communities instead of having them join guilds they don't know anything about, except for when they raid or whether they pvp.
Just because something is bad about a game doesn't mean that you can just remove it. Or, one of my favourite quotes: "The past isn't dead and buried, in fact, it isn't even past."
Helistar: "In a WoW without LFR/LFG what would you have done if your friends had stopped playing?"
ReplyDeleteI'd find more friends by meeting people from my server who are interested in the same level of content as me. I never had to use a guild recruiting or finder tool because I met people just by playing the game.
By replacing communities with random groups, you are destroying a critical element that made this work.
ReplyDeleteWe can disagree on this point, but again, do we really know whether they were replacing communities with random groups... or were they replacing the holes where communities used to be? The leveling/10m raiding community I was a part of would not have survived into Wrath if that expansion was TBC 2.0 - we were already bored out of our minds and drifting apart until Wrath came along.
Honestly, you say that you are disconnected from the community and are otherwise unwilling to shop around for another guild. Would being required to have a full Friends List and/or be in a guild to even have the notion of running a heroic kept you occupied all this time? Hell, one could rightly say that this "replacement" was the only reason Blizzard has another month's worth of subscription from you, right? If there was no "LFD experiment" to try out, is there another reason you would have stayed aboard this long?
I'm with Helistar on this point. LFD destroyed nothing; it created activity out of thin air. The people who don't bother talking or saying hello in LFD? They would not be looking for groups or joining pugs in Trade chat. If social "Friends List" people use LFD instead of using their Friends List, that indicates they (or the people on the Friends List) don't actually enjoy being social, but did so out of necessity. Sort of like, hey, Facebook games.
Haven't you learned that from the experience with 'heroic mode' raids?
Blizzard learned that heroic raiding isn't necessarily doubling the content perhaps, but as a method to avoid having a single difficulty level (and shoehorning 25m as the de facto "hardmode") the heroic raid model was a pretty solid success.
@Nils: I would instead develop a plan about how to draw people back into communities instead of having them join guilds they don't know anything about, except for when they raid or whether they pvp.
ReplyDeleteSuch as? Can you provide an example of a change which would work?
Please don't take this badly, I already had the experience on Tobold's blog, where after endless posts on how bad the current raiding is because of "the dance", I asked to describe how a combat SHOULD BE. I wanted a detailed description. Instead, I got the usual generic answer about "making things fun". Yeah, sure, HOW?
It's very easy to criticize Blizzard, but at least you have to admit they are trying to change things (even if slowly and with mistakes), which is still more than what the competitors are doing....
I think the current state of WoW is very much an example of unintended consequences. Everything that Blizzard has done with WoW has done exactly what it intended.. and more.
ReplyDeleteArena and LFD are the two things that have come back to bite Blizzard in the ass more than anything else.
Arena is the reason the game went to seasonal raiding (because if it didn't everyone would just pvp to skip the early parts of the raid game like they did in BC), and the reason for the unending rollercoaster of nerfs and buffs (and lately having to relearn one's class on a monthly basis). Everyone knows what wonders LFD did for the community and the world.
At this point I don't think Blizzard is interested in fixing what ails WoW. They're not trying to expand in their core US/EU markets anymore, rather they're focusing on getting their existing subscribers to pay more. They recycle content constantly instead of making new stuff. And a lot of the tweaks they've been making lately strike me as being more as a test to see how well whatever they're doing will work out elsewhere. Like Titan, perhaps.
@Azuriel If social "Friends List" people use LFD instead of using their Friends List, that indicates they (or the people on the Friends List) don't actually enjoy being social, but did so out of necessity. Sort of like, hey, Facebook games.
ReplyDeleteThis is actually a very silly statement. While I do prefer to play with my friends, I still enjoy getting to know new people very much. One of the main areas where I used to find new friends was through dungeon groups. I can still join a random dungeon even when I have friends online in the hope I will meet new people I enjoy playing with - even if just for the day (they being from another server).