First let me state that without question, Cataclysm is the most polished, deep, and technologically advanced MMO on the market. It far surpass what Blizzard has put out in the past from our original battles in Azeroth, through the portal to the Outland in Burning Crusade, and finally our journey to Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King. The revisioning of the world is amazing and the writing is tighter than ever before. There are so many great things that I can't list them all but here are my favorites:
- The Zen'Kiki quests in Western Plaguelands
- The imagery of Thrall holding back the implosion of the world in the Maelstrom
- The Black Dragon Quests in the Badlands
- The Caravan Quests in Eastern Plaguelands
- The Dragonmaw questline for the Horde in Twilight Highlands
- The Wildhammer questline for the Alliance in Twilight Highlands
- Uldum
That's off the top of my head but notice that for me everything is quest related. That's because I haven't hit a single heroic. I just don't feel the need to face the frustration of heroics anymore and that's the problem Blizzard faces. They are facing a Cataclysm of a different sort whether they realize it or not.
The seeds of the current situation were sown in Vanilla WoW. 99% of the players then weren't in a raiding guild so very few ever saw Naxxramas or even Neferion/Ragnoros. I was lucky in that I got into my current guild about halfway through Burning Crusade so we were just entering Naxx when Burning Crusade hit. Burning Crusade crushed most 40 man raiding guilds. The reason was 40 man raiding went away and was replaced for most people by 10 man raiding in Karazhan. This killed just about every raiding guild on every server. My guild was hit hard and went from about 50 members to about 10 before we were able to right the ship and rebuild. One positive is the best players stayed and most were anxious to be an end game so we quickly found many other like minded players to fill our ranks. A few months later we were knocking out boss after boss and quicker than anyone imagined we were the best raiding guild on our server. One thing we didn't notice is that most other guilds on our server were still stuck in Karazhan. The reason for this is simple. Unlike me, most people didn't start playing this game until well into Vanilla or Burning Crusade and the World of Warcraft has a steep learning curve. I know I spent my first year just doing quests and travelling the world before I got the itch to raid. At that point I had exhausted all the existing content and decided it was time to try to get some of the leet purple gear I enviously inspected on other players. I'm sure my process was similar to most other players. WoW rose from 2-3 million players in its first year to about 10 million players in the beginning half of Burning Crusade. Considering that the game now has about 12 million subscribers today it is pretty safe to say that even with defections, a majority of players in the game are BC babies. By BC babies I mean that they went through their noob phase in Burning Crusade. These BC babies loved that expansion and especially Karazhan as it was tailor made for beginning raiders. At the end of Burning Crusade these BC babies were no longer noobs but veterans ready to tackle bigger challenges. Blizzard decided to meet this challenge by focusing on making raiding more accessible to the masses in Wrath of the Lich King.
When Wrath of the Lich king was released, my guild was hit hard by defections. Actually the defections begin a lot earlier than the release of WotLK they started partway through BC when we beat Illidan. All MMO's have a simple strategy that is similar to what you'd see at a dog track with its participants chasing a rabbit that is always just out of reach. Instead of a rabbit, MMO's use player itemization (gear, pets, mounts, titles) to entice its members to continue to play. Hardcore raiding is almost like a part time job in that you have to devote a consistent least 12-20 hours a week to be good at it. The time demands/schedule are more that most people can do and many just stay around so they don't let their teammates down. All this ends when a goal is reached and many ask themselves, "Do I want to continue playing at the same level?" This leads to many players demoting themselves to a more casual status but my observation is that most quit after a short while because it is hard to see others scaling the mountain while you sit in base camp watching them ascend. For most former raiders it is easier to just leave the game entirely and tackle a different game with (hopefully) less time demands. Some return but the fire is never the same as it was when you first tackled raid content.
In many ways, Wrath of the Lich King could be called the People's WoW. Gear was pretty easy to acquire as a result of Blizzard's new philosophy to make raiding more open to the masses. People that had never even come close to end game before were now in pick up groups and beating the 10 and 25 versions of bosses. Of course they weren't doing the heroic versions of the bosses but that fact didn't matter to most. The time demands weren't as drastic as needed in a heroic guild but it still required a consistent 10 hours every week if you wanted the best gear. By the end of the expansion the number of people in tier gear were many orders of magnitude greater than what had happened in Burning Crusade. It didn't matter that they didn't beat the heroic version of the boss. In their mind they were an end game raider.
Then Cataclysm hit and all that gear was suddenly worthless.
I remember when that happened to me back in Burning Crusade. At first I was angry that I was replacing gear I had spent months working to get replaced by the first quest I did in Outland. My general dissatisfaction continued for a long while until I accepted it and the hunger to be an end game raider returned. This dissatisfaction is occurring all over Azeroth right now. Despite general agreement that the content is better than ever many people aren't happy with the game. Most everyone playing has a level 80 character and has already leveled them or is working towards getting them to 85. The thing is that well over 50% of the new content is in the 1-60 zones. Starting a new character is easier than ever and the quest are fun but its a bit hollow. I think the reason is once you've done the level 80 quests it really doesn't have the same impact to be beating a level 25 gnoll with visions of world domination. We just beat the Lich King for pete's sake!
I remember back when the game first started a reporter asked one of the lead designers how long they thought the game would last and would they do a sequel at that point. The response was telling in that he said that they were a bit lucky in that they released their game at the same time that Everquest decided to abandon EQ1 and release EQ2. That enabled players to rethink their loyalties to Everquest and many of them ended up playing World of Warcraft instead. He said that Blizzard would never make the same mistake as they'd just let the world evolve.
That is exactly what Blizzard did with Cataclysm but there is a bit of a flaw in their thinking. People are tired of the game. People are tired of the world. People have been to the mountaintop and don't want to slog through the marshes anymore. They want a new challenge and I am beginning to wonder if that challenge can be found in Azeroth. Rift was recently released and has well over a million subscribers already making it the most successful game launch after WoW. Later this year The Old Republic is going to be launched and will easily match those numbers. As people only have so much money to spend on online entertainment does this mean it is the beginning of the end for WoW? No one can answer that with certainty. Blizzard has done better with WoW than anyone ever predicted so it is hard to bet against them. The thing is the World of Warcraft has always reminded me of an overdemanding girlfriend at times. You stay for the benefits but after a while you have to ask yourself if the benefits are greater than the cost. Now there's some new girls in town so WoW player base is asking themselves, "Do I want old and busted or the new hotness?"
My money is on the new hotness.
- The Zen'Kiki quests in Western Plaguelands
- The imagery of Thrall holding back the implosion of the world in the Maelstrom
- The Black Dragon Quests in the Badlands
- The Caravan Quests in Eastern Plaguelands
- The Dragonmaw questline for the Horde in Twilight Highlands
- The Wildhammer questline for the Alliance in Twilight Highlands
- Uldum
That's off the top of my head but notice that for me everything is quest related. That's because I haven't hit a single heroic. I just don't feel the need to face the frustration of heroics anymore and that's the problem Blizzard faces. They are facing a Cataclysm of a different sort whether they realize it or not.
The seeds of the current situation were sown in Vanilla WoW. 99% of the players then weren't in a raiding guild so very few ever saw Naxxramas or even Neferion/Ragnoros. I was lucky in that I got into my current guild about halfway through Burning Crusade so we were just entering Naxx when Burning Crusade hit. Burning Crusade crushed most 40 man raiding guilds. The reason was 40 man raiding went away and was replaced for most people by 10 man raiding in Karazhan. This killed just about every raiding guild on every server. My guild was hit hard and went from about 50 members to about 10 before we were able to right the ship and rebuild. One positive is the best players stayed and most were anxious to be an end game so we quickly found many other like minded players to fill our ranks. A few months later we were knocking out boss after boss and quicker than anyone imagined we were the best raiding guild on our server. One thing we didn't notice is that most other guilds on our server were still stuck in Karazhan. The reason for this is simple. Unlike me, most people didn't start playing this game until well into Vanilla or Burning Crusade and the World of Warcraft has a steep learning curve. I know I spent my first year just doing quests and travelling the world before I got the itch to raid. At that point I had exhausted all the existing content and decided it was time to try to get some of the leet purple gear I enviously inspected on other players. I'm sure my process was similar to most other players. WoW rose from 2-3 million players in its first year to about 10 million players in the beginning half of Burning Crusade. Considering that the game now has about 12 million subscribers today it is pretty safe to say that even with defections, a majority of players in the game are BC babies. By BC babies I mean that they went through their noob phase in Burning Crusade. These BC babies loved that expansion and especially Karazhan as it was tailor made for beginning raiders. At the end of Burning Crusade these BC babies were no longer noobs but veterans ready to tackle bigger challenges. Blizzard decided to meet this challenge by focusing on making raiding more accessible to the masses in Wrath of the Lich King.
When Wrath of the Lich king was released, my guild was hit hard by defections. Actually the defections begin a lot earlier than the release of WotLK they started partway through BC when we beat Illidan. All MMO's have a simple strategy that is similar to what you'd see at a dog track with its participants chasing a rabbit that is always just out of reach. Instead of a rabbit, MMO's use player itemization (gear, pets, mounts, titles) to entice its members to continue to play. Hardcore raiding is almost like a part time job in that you have to devote a consistent least 12-20 hours a week to be good at it. The time demands/schedule are more that most people can do and many just stay around so they don't let their teammates down. All this ends when a goal is reached and many ask themselves, "Do I want to continue playing at the same level?" This leads to many players demoting themselves to a more casual status but my observation is that most quit after a short while because it is hard to see others scaling the mountain while you sit in base camp watching them ascend. For most former raiders it is easier to just leave the game entirely and tackle a different game with (hopefully) less time demands. Some return but the fire is never the same as it was when you first tackled raid content.
In many ways, Wrath of the Lich King could be called the People's WoW. Gear was pretty easy to acquire as a result of Blizzard's new philosophy to make raiding more open to the masses. People that had never even come close to end game before were now in pick up groups and beating the 10 and 25 versions of bosses. Of course they weren't doing the heroic versions of the bosses but that fact didn't matter to most. The time demands weren't as drastic as needed in a heroic guild but it still required a consistent 10 hours every week if you wanted the best gear. By the end of the expansion the number of people in tier gear were many orders of magnitude greater than what had happened in Burning Crusade. It didn't matter that they didn't beat the heroic version of the boss. In their mind they were an end game raider.
Then Cataclysm hit and all that gear was suddenly worthless.
I remember when that happened to me back in Burning Crusade. At first I was angry that I was replacing gear I had spent months working to get replaced by the first quest I did in Outland. My general dissatisfaction continued for a long while until I accepted it and the hunger to be an end game raider returned. This dissatisfaction is occurring all over Azeroth right now. Despite general agreement that the content is better than ever many people aren't happy with the game. Most everyone playing has a level 80 character and has already leveled them or is working towards getting them to 85. The thing is that well over 50% of the new content is in the 1-60 zones. Starting a new character is easier than ever and the quest are fun but its a bit hollow. I think the reason is once you've done the level 80 quests it really doesn't have the same impact to be beating a level 25 gnoll with visions of world domination. We just beat the Lich King for pete's sake!
I remember back when the game first started a reporter asked one of the lead designers how long they thought the game would last and would they do a sequel at that point. The response was telling in that he said that they were a bit lucky in that they released their game at the same time that Everquest decided to abandon EQ1 and release EQ2. That enabled players to rethink their loyalties to Everquest and many of them ended up playing World of Warcraft instead. He said that Blizzard would never make the same mistake as they'd just let the world evolve.
That is exactly what Blizzard did with Cataclysm but there is a bit of a flaw in their thinking. People are tired of the game. People are tired of the world. People have been to the mountaintop and don't want to slog through the marshes anymore. They want a new challenge and I am beginning to wonder if that challenge can be found in Azeroth. Rift was recently released and has well over a million subscribers already making it the most successful game launch after WoW. Later this year The Old Republic is going to be launched and will easily match those numbers. As people only have so much money to spend on online entertainment does this mean it is the beginning of the end for WoW? No one can answer that with certainty. Blizzard has done better with WoW than anyone ever predicted so it is hard to bet against them. The thing is the World of Warcraft has always reminded me of an overdemanding girlfriend at times. You stay for the benefits but after a while you have to ask yourself if the benefits are greater than the cost. Now there's some new girls in town so WoW player base is asking themselves, "Do I want old and busted or the new hotness?"
My money is on the new hotness.
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