World of Warcraft Addiction

I was reading the World of Warcraft Addict’s blog and he was commenting, perhaps ironically, on World of Warcraft Addiction. It is a good read, and has added some good points to the on-going global discussion about WoW addiction. There is certainly a lot of commentary on the web at the moment about game addiction, in particular World of Warcraft addiction, and much of it seems to be pointing the finger at Blizzard and Gamers. I’ve been thinking of writing something on the topic for a little while, now seems like a good time.

First I have to say that it is parents who are responsible for raising their children. If a child becomes addicted to a game to the extent that it is messing with their school or family life, then you have to ask why the parents haven’t intervened. It is a parents responsibility to ensure that their kids lead a balanced life, and that they are teaching them the skills to lead that sort of life when they become adults. Unfortunately, these days parents don’t seem to be doing that. They leave their kids in front of the TV, or unsupervised on the Net, and expect these devices to nanny their kids for them. Then when things go wrong, they blame whatever is closest, or most visible, when they should be taking responsibility for the problems.

Who is at fault though if an adult becomes addicted to a game? Is Blizzard responsible there too?

A lot of people have been comparing MMORPGs to drugs, and game companies to drug dealers. For years Everquest has had the nickname of Evercrack, and even WoW has been refered to as World of Warcrack. Cute ways to refer to the addictiveness of these sorts of games. Lately though, it seems that there is a lot more serious comparison to addictive and dangerous drugs. I really don’t believe that this is a valid comparison.

For one thing, drugs are pretty universally addictive. Give heroin to a hundred people and you’re pretty sure to have a hundred heroin addicts, regardless of their personalities.

Set up a hundred people with WoW accounts, and you might be lucky to get one full blown addict who screws his life up over the game. And I wouldn’t mind betting that this person has a personality that is prone to addiction anyway. If it wasn’t for WoW, something else would take that place. Maybe real drugs, or alcohol? There are 7,000,000 World of Warcraft players in the world today. How many of these people are literally addicted to the game?

The reason we hear so much about the ones who are is because there are people out their with agendas. Some are probably looking to make a name for themselves, some are probably trying to sell a book or theory. Like a lot of things, the biggest noises tend to be made by the smallest groups that generally have an axe of some sort to grind.

I’ve spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft. I still go out with friends to the movies, I catch up regularly with my family. I read books and watch a little TV, though I don’t watch as much as I used too. I have time to do this blog, and I work a solid working week.

What would I be doing if I didn’t play WoW?

I guess I’d be watching a lot more TV, I think a lot of other WoWers would be doing this if they quit.

I’d probably go out and buy a couple of other games that I’ve had my eye on. I might read a little more.

I doubt if I’d go out socialising much more than I already do. I’m a bit of a home-body anyway, playing a game or not playing it wouldn’t change that.

So, what’s better. An addictive person who plays WoW, or an addictive person who gets drunk everynight and becomes an alcoholic? Or uses drugs? What about the person who gets addicted to TV, that’s better than a WoW addiction how?

Okay, so any addiction is bad. I’m not suggesting that it is okay for someone to throw their life away over a computer game, just as it’s not okay to throw your life away for drugs, alcohol, or TV. But let’s get some perspective. Do we blame the company that makes the beer, or the company that makes the soap opera? (Yes we do blame the drug dealers.) US society doesn’t even blame the companies that make the guns when a shooting occurs.

So why do we blame the game companies?

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More Queue Madness

It seems the Queue of Doom that I wrote about the other day was due to a mistake on Blizzards part.

They had been providing paid character transfers to Khaz’Goroth and accidently left the transfers going for longer than they should have. I’ll say they left the character transfers on too long. They should never have been on at all.

Khaz has been experiencing queues for months. There’s always a two to four hundred queue on Sunday afternoons, and often at least a queue of a hundred and fifty on a week night. Then for some insane reason, Blizzard allows players to transfer their characters in from other servers. Forgot the accidental extension of the transfer, I’d like to know what they were thinking, especially when they have recently added new Oceanic realms and provided free transfers from Khaz to them.

So, now we are in a worse position than before the new Oceanic servers were added. Sundays 1100 queue prompted at least one valued guild member to consider cancelling his account. I’m not sure if he did end up cancelling, but I hope he didn’t.

And what about all the suckers, err players, who paid twenty five US quid (around 35 Aussie dollars I think) to transfer to a realm with 2 hour weekend queues? I’m sure they’ll be pleased. I know I’m not.

What we’ll see now is players who want to play on a Sunday arvo, log in during the morning and stay connected even when they’re not playing. That will be the only way to avoid the monster queues, as well as create bigger ones.

Way to go Blizzard.

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The Queue of Doom

From the department of things that make you go hmmm.

Today Khaz experienced queues of 1100 with players waiting 2 hours to get into the game. That’s the highest I’ve seen it, my previous “best” was a queue of 850ish. I was lucky, I logged in around 10am and didn’t have a queue at all. But my guildmates logging in at 3pm were waiting 2 hours. That’s just not cool.

I’m just wondering what’s going to happen when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out. There’s a lot of talk about ex-players re-subscribing when it’s released. What will this do to queues if they are already so big? It’s a bit of a worry.

In some ways I think this has the potential to seriously damage World of Warcraft. If people get sick enough of waiting for long periods to get into the game, and really why wouldn’t they? Then they may get sick enough of the queues to depart the game en-masse, especially when the next big thing comes out. Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan anyone?

How many game worlds became graveyards when WoW came out? It’s not outside the realms of possibility that it could happen again.

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Back in the Game

Just before I got to 60, I went into Molten Core with my guild. That night we knocked down Lucifron, and gave Magamdar a bit of a hammering before we got taken out. Since then, our success in Molten Core has been fairly sketchy. Unfortunately, the atmosphere on some of these runs got a bit negative too, which made the raid not all that enjoyable.

I think the reason was that we lost a few experienced guild members to other guilds, and didn’t really get enough of the right numbers and classes. Frankly we did pretty badly.

That is changing. This Friday we went into MC again. We formed a bit of an alliance with a guild called Ravage to run MC together. Individually we had trouble filling 40 mans, but together we got a pretty full raid with the right class balance. Even so I must admit I was a bit nervous.

However, this time the run went very well. We made it all the way to Lucifron without wiping, and we did it very quickly. Then we took Luci out, first time, with what seemed to be a minimum of casualties. We didn’t manage to get Magmadar down though. We had two shots before the core hound packs respawned on top of us, and we got him down to 50% each time. We used a couple of different strategies, with variations on the positioning of the raid. They both seemed viable, but I think we have to work on it.

In anycase, I reckon the drought is over. The Ministry is back in the game for MC with the help of our friends in Ravage. Woo Hoo!

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Burning Crusade Beta Invites

I’ve been digging around on the Net trying to find out how I can get an invite to the Burning Crusade beta. I wasn’t so worried a week ago, but since the expansion has been pushed back to the end of January, I’ve been thinking it might be good to get into the beta, have a look round, report some bugs, and post some of my findings on the blog. I’d love to find out firsthand how the new Hunter talents and changes will change things.

So far though, I haven’t really found anything concrete. It looks like beta invites go out somewhat randomly, though I’m sure there is some method to the madness, as well as to established WoW website owners.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

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The High Cost of Respeccing, The Low Cost of Meaning

On my look through the forums today I came across a post from a player complaining about the high cost of respeccing talents. This player felt that players were being punished for wanting to try out different specs. Tseric responded with:

The basic idea is about consequence through cost. Decisions carry weight because of costs or consequence behind them. In trying to estimate these costs beforehand and make a decision, this idea makes something carry more weight and be more meaningful for players.It’s sort of like why the only real way to play poker is with real money. Sure, you could use chips with no value attached, but the betting is less meaningful. People will bet differently with real money because there is more consequence to it and more repercussions from the action. This is what gives the game of poker its real value. The exchange between players and the betting becomes the real game, rather than simply having three-of-a-kind or fulfilling some basic game requirement.

When there are too many reset buttons and decisions can be easily overturned, boredom shortly follows because things then have no meaning.

Having players get upset or emotional about respec’cing costs only speaks to its function and the fact that it does what it does well. If nobody cared, it wouldn’t be a big deal and we might even change it. However, it was designed to make choices significant and that is demonstrated by how players react and behave in relation to it.

Simply put, Tseric is saying that actions that cost a lot are more meaningful, and that if those actions were cheap, they would quickly become boring. Hmmmm. I don’t really agree with that. After all, aren’t some of the most meaningful moments in life free? Moments with family, friends, walking along a beach with a loved one? Playing with your children?

Even in the game, the meaning comes not from how I change my talents to make my character more uber for a particular situation. It comes from the moments I share with friends. From watching an AFK player break formation and run towards a pack of Core Hounds. From being silly with fellow guildies. From just helping someone complete a quest.

I can see where Blizz are coming from, but frankly, if you are relying on making the cost of change prohibitive to players to make your gameplay interesting, you are doing something wrong. It’s certainly not what’s keeping me in the game.

I believe the primary reason for these sort of costs is to provide a money sink in the game. In a later post in the thread Tseric makes a statement that if it were a money sink, that would be Blizzard being malicious, perhaps to keep players grinding gold. Well no, a money sink in a game like World of Warcraft is a necessary thing. In fact WoW needs a lot of money sinks.

The reason is inflation. As with any real world economy, the government can’t print more money whenever it needs it. Cash is just a symbol, a representation of how wealthy a nation is. If you print more, the less it is worth. However, this is exactly what WoW does. It prints gold every time a quest reward is given out, every time a character sells a gray item to a vendor.

If there was no outlet for that constant inflow of gold, the world economies would inflate, gold would be worth less and less. A single stack of medium leather would sell for 2000 gold. Eventually a single piece of medium leather would sell for 2000 gold.

This is why talents cost so much to respec. It’s why an epic mount costs a small fortune, and a bag slot in the bank costs 100 gold. It’s why every MMORPG made so far has a money sink**.

So Blizzard aren’t being malicious for making the cost of talent respeccing high. If anything they should add more money sinks and reduce the costs of existing ones.

However Tserics last statement is what I find a bit odd. If players are upset about something, it’s working as intended. If players aren’t reacting about something, then they might consider changing it. Does this mean that if the majority of the playerbase enjoys a particular feature, Blizzard would change it so more players would not like it?

That seems counter-productive to me.

I would think that if players hate something about a game, perhaps the incessant grinding for rep, I hate Furbolgs and never want to see another one and I’m only at friendly, then that’s okay. Leave it as it is, don’t fix it because it is broken. Is this the correct attitude for a game developer? Should’t the primary motivation for a game developer be that his game is fun to play?

If something is not enjoyable, the players will find a way around it. Grinding for cash is not enjoyable to a lot of players, so they buy gold. By making talent changes expensive, the majority of players don’t bother respeccing, but some will spend dollars for gold and respec anyway. In a lot of ways this makes talent respeccing even more meaningless than if it were cheap.

Okay, so not every player is going to like everything about the game. I’m not suggesting for a minute that Blizzard should cater to the whims of every discontented player. What I am suggesting is that they take a good hard look at the features that the majority of players don’t enjoy, and make them enjoyable. If players feel the need to buy gold to do something in the game, then something is wrong with the game, not the players.

**Except, as far as I know, A Tale in the Desert. In that game there is no money, only resources. Players however are able to create their own banknotes based on the ingame barter economy.

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