Thursday, March 13, 2008

WoW Perspectives: Volume #2 - Redundancy Breeds Contempt

The title of this weeks WoW perspectives is something that a college writing professor preached regarding the overuse of ancillary words in college level writing. This included prepositional phrases, persistent use of second person pronouns and so forth. His message was that this flaw in writing was repetitive and convoluted the message. He felt readers would grow tired of filtering through the unnecessary verbiage to discern the writer's message and become disinterested with end result being the reader would stop reading. After yesterday's run through Karazhan, it became readily apparent that this concept rings true in more aspects of life then just writing. WoW has hit a point where redundancy has begun to breed contempt in players caused by a noticeable lack of new game content.

This flaw first came to light during Tuesday's run through Karazhan but blossomed completely last night. I should preface this by stating that yesterday's run through Karazhan was perhaps the sloppiest and least organized run through Karazhan we have had in months. Mindlessly wiping to mobs we have had on "farm status" for months. Brain-numbing mistakes such as breaking Flame Wreaths on Shade of Aran and fumbling tank switches on Netherspite. Ironically, the roulette wheel known as Prince Malchezzar was one-shot, a boss that is as much luck as it is skill. Regardless, it was apparent that our guild members have become complacent and that complacency has settled into not taking the same redundant encounters seriously. It is the results stemming from repeating these same encounters for months on end.

With the promise of tier 6 quality gear for Badges of Justice, most casual players like myself find themselves in a position where the best way to better their toons is to farm as many badges as possible. For most players, this means grinding Karazhan or the same old heroic instances repeatedly. Perhaps I am in the minority but while easy to obtain badges may appeal to some, I would prefer some new content to experience in conjunction with obtaining badges as opposed to obliterating Heroic Slave Pens for the 100th time or clearing Karazhan repeatedly. It takes the dynamic element of a persistent world and relegates it to a static grind.

The PVP experience is much the same. Exactly how many times does one have to grind Battlegrounds for gear? Here is just a rough estimate:

  • Let's assume we receive 300 points of honor from each BG we complete. This could be a relatively high estimate but if one focuses on AV, this is not entirely out of the question.
  • If saving honor points for an item that costs 14,500 honor, it would roughly take 48 1/3 trips to Alterac Valley to accumulate this amount of honor.
  • If each match takes roughly 20 minutes then it would take 960 minutes to accrue this value of honor or roughly 16 hours of game time.

Sure, there is the daily quest for honor but 300 honor per match is a fairly high estimate if the player does Warsong Gulch persistently. This estimate is not unrealistic. This kind of repetitive game play will inevitably result in burnout sooner or later.

This concept rings true even more for the leveling experience from 1 to 60 as most players have done the newbie areas, westfall, barrens, or other instances countless times. The lack of new content in these areas is staggering, with only a revamped Duskwallow Marsh and the two newbie areas from Burning Crusade being implemented since release. One could argue that the Duskwallow Marsh changes were done sheerly to alleviate the massive population congregated in STV from levels 32 to 40 as the zone is one of the few options available for characters in this demographic. It would have been refreshing to see Blizzard add some more content to Northrend in an effort to revitalize the leveling experience.

Perhaps the greatest area that rings true for WoW in this area is the concept of daily quests. I personally find daily quests incredibly boring. While it does provide the casual player some easy to access gold, it rehashes the same ridiculous quests over and over and over again. At this point, I never want to see Skettis again for any reason. Sure, occasionally I still drag my toons there for gold but I do it not because I enjoy the content but it allows me to better my toon from the gold that results. It is no secret that daily quests were implemented with the notion of running gold farmers out of business more so then providing the player base with more content. It is just more evidence that lends itself to prove that WoW really is a product of marketing versus a truly innovative MMO experience.

Is there a nostalgic feel to WoW? Sure. I still enjoy Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, Scarlet Monastary, Scholo and many of the original dungeons. Nevertheless, I would still like to see new and exciting places to explore not only with my level 70 toons but my lower level toons as well. And the bottom line is, at this time, one can make the statement that WoW's biggest flaw is its redundancy. After all these years, I'm sure that college English professor would agree.

3 comments:

Jef said...

I totally agree with you. My biggest problem with most MMOs is the stagnation of the persistent world. Every time I go to Westfall I wonder when those workers will finish the roof on the inn. When will the workers in Redridge finish the bridge? Come on, it's been three and a half years! Lord knows how many Iron Rivets I've brought to those guys for that bridge too.

One of the coolest things that I've ever experienced in all my time playing this game was the Scourge Invasion. A world altering event. Not some silly holiday where I can get another pet to put in my bank, but an invasion! Hostile high level enemies wandering capitol cities, new enemies in old dungeons, it was epic! It was... once, for about a week, never to be seen again.

I'm not saying these things should be happen on all the time, but something different needs to happen. Things need to change or, like you said, redundancy breeds contempt and it is only a matter of time before people start leaving just to see something different.

The Squirrel said...

I totally agree. I would even go a step further and have events where certain areas that were once Alliance controlled are over run and either sieged by NPCs or have become horde territory. This was once done in Everquest when Frogloks were introduced. The story line was that the frogloks of Guk had overwhelmed the troll city of Grobb, forcing the trolls to flee to Neriak, the dark elf city. It was a brilliant move in that it showed that the persistant world wasn't static.

Jef said...

Hopefully with Wrath of the Lich King some of the things we are discussing will be implemented. Lake Wintergrasp sounds interesting with its destructible environments and capturable cities. I actually see Halaa becoming much more popular with 2.4 and the destruction of diminishing returns on honor kills. The bottom line is, there are only so many boars we can kill before we just start expecting more.