I need a better reason to kill umpteen of these things.
Part 5 of the Summer of Warcraft series.
If Warcraft Realms is to be believed, the current population of Azeroth is less than 6.2 million, about the size of Tennessee or Rio de Janeiro. Detractors will whine that the game is actually 11.5 million strong (Ohio or Istanbul) as of autumn of last year, but I prefer the Realms method of eliminating characters that are under level 10 or haven’t logged in for the last 30 days. After all, we should avoid Second Life-style stat pumping.
That’s a stark contrast, isn’t it? Only 6.2 million of 11.5 million characters are active? That’s some serious churn. Still, Blizzard is operating from a position of strength, holding about 60 percent of the national MMO market. But stock prices don’t reward current standing, just potential growth. Warcraft’s growth is slowing and its cultural high water mark (Leeroy Jenkins, the Southpark episode, the artless term “pwnage” and alarmist news stories about its affect on marriages) has passed. It needs a kick in the pants if it wants to continue to add new subscribers in droves.
As a newbie, I have a few suggestions:
- Update the old areas – The beginner areas of Warcraft look every bit their four years of age, even older. The simple polygonal graphics allow for it to run on less powerful machines (like my Intel graphics laptop) and wide open vistas, but the textures could use some updating and refinement. Seasonal changes would be nice, as would a few new enemies. I haven’t seen this much palette swapping since Super Mario Bros. There is a sense when you log in as a newbie now that all the action is elsewhere. Nothing new is happening on the original landmass. It is just a grind tank. The quests haven’t changed at all, so their is little motivation for older, leveled characters to assist younger characters through the grind to more advanced, action-packed areas.
- Go beyond grind – Warcraft, in essence, is boring as hell. At the noob level, fights are an autoplay chore. I’ve parked my character next to an enemy to start slashing and walked away to get a drink. This is unacceptable. I’m sure that speeding up the fighting process would destroy Blizzards carefully balanced plot to make me take a certain amount of time to level up. Tough shit. It shouldn’t take 10 gunshots to kill something. If this game truly does not get fun until level 40, as one of my commenters alleged, then we have a problem. Because it is totally rigged for repetitive killing and little else. Where are the merchants and artistic classes? I realize it’s called Warcraft, but wars are won by logistics, not just warriors. Supporting classes, such as priests, have nothing to do if someone is not doing the killing for them. Here’s an idea – put the religious factions in charge of controlling guilds. You want some politics? You want player-created crusader drama? Put the priests in charge. No legal guilds without priest leaders. Oh, fighters and mages could make outlaw guilds, but then they would carry bounties on their heads, subject to PVP challenges without consent. Now that would stir shit up around the old stomping grounds, and it would make priests more influential and desirable. Of course, it would also make the game more like work than it already is.
- Add some story – I’ve already bitched about the fact that a WoW player never sees progress in his world. Quests aren’t cycled out and replaced after a certain number of players complete them. Azeroth has a long and fabled history that looks like a poor man’s Middle Earth creation myth, complete with unpronounceable names and OCD detail, but there doesn’t feel like anything is going on today. A noob’s first missions are always fetch quests and creature cullings, but there is no sense of why we’re doing this, except for vague excuses about not liking said creature/enemy. I don’t want to kill Kobolds because they are annoying. I want to kill them because they kidnapped, raped and consumed the flesh a young virgin of the village and then danced in her entrails until dawn. I need a reason to hate. Some players don’t need this. I do, and so do a lot of other potential customers.
