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The Destructive Legacy of WoW
Dullahan
Member EpicPosts: 4,536
At the end of 2014, Blizzard Entertainment celebrated the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft. There can be no doubt that WoW is a juggernaut that changed how we play and how we think about virtual worlds and MMORPGs.
But not all change is beneficial and not all success is healthy.
Amid the accolades and self-congratulatory celebrations going on there is unreported dark side to the triumph of WoW and it has come at a high price. It is this: the fantasy MMORPG that some of us used to know and love has all but evaporated and turned from an experience rich with social interaction into one devoid of it.
As WoW has systematically obliterated every MMORPG that came before it, the fate of the entire genre is now symbiotically linked to WoW. Look at your average MMO today and chances are it’s just another WoW clone with a different skin, story and setting.
Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, the reverse is also true. This essay will attempt to explain the destructive legacy of WoW and in particular how Blizzard caused the widespread decline of social interaction in MMORPGs.
More at http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-destructive-legacy-of-blizzards-world-of-warcraft/
Article by Wolfshead
Has the success of WoW destroyed the genre you loved, or improved it?
Comments
While I applaud the effort, the fundamental basis for the argument is wrong.
WoW didn't do anything to kill the MMORPG genre. Quite the opposite really.
The real damage came from the shills trying to chase Blizzard's success by releasing unfinished, fundamentally flawed WoW clone + twist games.
Let WoW be WoW, to the gamers that want that kind of game and enjoy it - great! Have it it.
You want to compete with WoW?
Offer me something different.
Something I can't get in WoW.
Not something that just simply isn't as good as WoW.
Sorry to beat up your entire well thought out and written paper in about 100 words.
WoW doesn't have the worst community. It does have one of the largest and most diverse, and in that diversity there will be the good and the bad. The actual game design itself promotes both the positive and the negative, but that is more on the individual than anything else.
You can't blame WoW for society, and for gamers as a whole.
What a waste of time reading that. The author clearly has no ability to think critically and basically states some of the most thoughtless rhetoric we see all day long on these forums.
Willfully neglecting reality and shifts in player behavior and desires. Perhaps the reason the hate is directed towards WoW is because WoW represents and gleefully showcases our very worst decisions in MMO form. WoW did not create the path, nor did it funnel people into it - WoW is the result of us. Blizzard is only an accomplice, guilty of enabling.
If anything it's those who attempted imitations that resulted in poorly developed and tested products that can be blamed; if indeed there is anything for which to lay blame.
Threads like these are kind of ridiculous in how melodramatic they are if you ask me.
8 years and counting addicted to
Avalon: The Legend Lives - the longest running online RPG in history
To sum up -
SWG would have survived well if they fixed their game and kept to the vision - a sandbox Star Wars world.
EQ2 would have done better if it stuck to it's Everquest roots (more hardcore party based PvE).
WAR would have been good if they focused on the RvR and left the quests/dungeons/raids to WoW.
AoC would have been good if they embraced the brutality of the IP with open world FFA PvP (with consequence) instead of trying to appease the masses with generic quest driven PvE.
SWTOR would have been good if they embraced the story and character building in true Bioware fashion rather than watering everything down to include WoW-like elements.
Rift could have risen further if they had focused on the public event/rift/invasions and more unique class building system then trying to chase the WoW-model of dungeons/raids and instanced PvP.
etc. etc. etc.
None of these games "failed" or under-performed directly because of WoW - they did the damage to themselves by trying to be like "that other guy" and simply not doing a very good job at it.
You can't blame WoW for its success, you can definitely blame the fools trying to break off their piece of it and failing.
This! It's getting old hearing people blame Blizzard "ruining " the genre, when the real problem lies elsewhere. The other companies trying to recreate success aren't doing a very good job at making me feel like I can't get this in any other game and it's really fun. I have to say that FFXIV has done a good job at keeping my interest cause it adds story content in each patch, as WoW just basically introduces all the threats in an x-pac but they're not ready for you yet.
Thats one helluva amusing rant.
Too bad that its completely delusional, i feel sorry for the author that lost time to write it. he will never get it back.
I agree. I hope that hindsight is 20/20 on this and it leads to bigger and better things.
The original question though, is not whether you blame WoW, but WoW's success which is actually doing just that, pointing a finger at those who've tried to emulate it to get in on that success.
I particularly liked the part of the article about how players attempt to validate the changes, justify their commitment to them.
As we continue to play a MMO, we come to accept and validate the mechanics and features it provides for us, so we expect them in our current MMO and in all other MMOs we play.
We as humans tend to reinforce decisions we have made in the past. The same is true of MMOs. Once players become wedded to MMO conventions they have a tendency to validate those conventions by continuing to participate in them. This demonstrates what is termed consistency and commitment. Dr. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
When we continue to play and support MMOs that are designed with certain values, we tend to justify our decisions and internalize the values that that particular MMO has imported to us. So if a MMO is designed with little to no reason for social interaction and we continue to play that MMO, we start to believe that social interaction is a needless distraction and an unwanted impediment on our quest for advancement.
^See of a lot of that going on around here on a daily basis.
Frankly is the problem greedy publishers and investors, not Wow.
Just because Wow made zillions of cash doesn't mean copy and paste from it is a good idea. In fact have plenty of games very similar underperformed while the Wow fans still continue to play.
The thing Wow did change was that it was hard to get much attention to low budget games after it released, with a whooping $60M budget games like EQ2s $12M and similar just couldn't compete.
The problem is that the things the publisher should copy is Wows work on details and polish, not the gameplay in itself since there really is little use of loads of very similar games, almost all players will stay at their current one unless something considerably better or rather different comes out.
But that still ain't Wows fault.
Improved it of course.
Left the link to that ...not an article , not sure what it was supposed to be, a hit piece i guess. Filled with such opinionated non facts, it was hard to get through it all.
Hating on, and blaming one game, no matter the size of the game, for all the ill's you imagine in the industry, just seems so foolish.
All WOW did was make the game millions of people want to play it seems. Who knew that was a bad thing? Well, besides you i guess?
WOW is, and always has been, a compilation of parts of all games that people like and enjoy in their MMO's. If that happened to be a group heavy rpg, then trust me that would be what it was as well.
But that was ruled out by, yes guess who...the CUSTOMERS...that that was not important to them. So for years WOW moved farther and farther away from that type of game to what we have today. And from the subs and cash they get every year, i guess they must of known their audience much better than people like OP will ever understand.
Why people spend their time trying to make a huge success into such doom and gloom.....
The author of that blog has been stating that "rhetoric" since WoW's inception. Yes its not a new thing, but its far from thoughtless and he isn't just regurgitating crap from these forums.
OP, Your whole argument is based on the idea that the MMO industry was healthy before WoW came along which I am not sure is true. It was a small niche market with games feeding on each others own small base of players over and over again to survive. WoW opened the appeal of MMO's up to a much wider audience and both brought countless new players in to the market but probably more important removed the stigma that was attached to MMO's and their players prior to it. There are things about WoW and the effect it has had on this market I don't like just like there are numerous things about what the rise of F2P has done to how games are created and played I don't like but it's hard to discount the affect both of those things have had on the number of people playing these games.
I think eventually even without WoW MMO's would have become more accessible to the mass gamer market but it would have taken a lot longer.
Nope, WoW didn't DO anything. Publishers trying to cash in on WoW's success have. If we follow the logic, no game should be great or genre defining or else it will be responsible for the bad things that come after it.
Ridiculous.
I have to reiterate everything said here. I don't always read/agree with everything you post BadSpock but you hit it "spock on" here.
I really wish this forum had a thumbs up or something such.
Great, he's been thoughtless for a long time, good for him.
I haven't read everything, but I tend to agree with most points.
"The problem is they have no idea of what went before them and what we experienced. They will never know the thrill of earning the right to exploring new worlds and the pulse pounding feeling of risking everything by dying and possibly losing years of your characters life."
I agree with this because I don't think people who haven't played MMO pre-WOW understand this point.
When you ran through kithicor forest in Everquest, you felt fear, when you did some of the later raids in Gates, you could feel your heart bounce in your chest, there was a lot at stake, the game was more brutal and harder. The game made you care about your character and friends mattered.
The lack of roleplaying is striking too, I don't think most games on this site are actually MMORPG, certainly no roleplaying in today's twitch games.
Flat out lies. You ran the border lines and if you pulled aggro you went to the next border, no fuss no muss.
Raids were nothing but zergs with 0 challenge. You just kept throwing bodies at it till they died, yay loots.
The game didn't make you care about your character anymore than most games did, the game just made you take less risks solely because of the exp penalty and the possible loss of your loot if you didn't /loc where you died and lost your body.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
I completely disagree. It is thoughtless. Just because you can write a 10 page article doesn't mean it's not full of crap. That's ok, though, it really isn't anything new, I see it in my own kids. The problem is a lack of accountability. You're blaming WoW for the state of the Internet, essentially (as is the article), which is absolutely silly. Yes, it doesn't even deserve a bad word, it's so bad. It's just silly.
You go to any forum on the Internet and you will find absolutely toxic and abusive communities. Some *looks at youtube* are so bad that they will actually result in someone killing themselves (and will have promoted it feverishly up until that point). Are you REALLY that surprised that nobody wants to talk to anyone? Anyone who has played more than, ummmm, just WoW should be able to tell how toxic communities are, in-game and outside the game.
It's actually a little sad that this person is at ALL involved in the games industry that he believes that a game, any game, could possibly have such a wide-spread impact on society as a whole. Him and Jack Thompson should hook up and share fantastically illogical diatribes.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Agreed. While EQ raids definitely weren't as complex as some of the newer games, they definitely weren't "zerg fests".
As far as fearing stuff in EQ, Kithicor wasn't that scary. Run from Highhold Pass to Rivervale, zone in. Zone out, run to Commons. Stay on wall.
For real fear:
Port a group of people up to Pre-Revamp Hate (anyone who played a Wizard knows what I mean!)
Zoning into Plane of Growth....Protectors of the Growth ftw!
Zoning into Plane of Fear. Random death touches and aggroing everything due to bad coding.
Recovering from a wipe in Train Castle...Err Karnor Train...err, yea, Karnor Castle
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
Btw everyone, just so we avoid further things like this from people who never raided Everquest.
Everyone who has an opinion on EQ raids, I want to see some post PoP gear so we know you're not lying or pretending.
Picture + name so people can take you serious.
Thanks everyone.
Here is mine:
Well WOW certainly destroyed the ability for people to produce timesink-heavy gameplay-lite MMORPGs.
None of the clones were as successful as WOW, of course, since they failed to copy the underlying design philosophies that made WOW what it was. But they typically did much better than the empty, grindy early MMORPGs where most of your time wasn't spent playing the game.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver