Thursday, May 18, 2006

World of Warcraft Q&A... disapointed

Gamespot has an interview up with Blizzard lead designer; Jeff Kaplan. It covers the upcoming Burning Crusades expansion, jewel crafting, Naxxramas (new uber dungeon), 1.11 patch tidbits, and even flying mounts!

But again this is where MMORPG developers disappoint me. They just don't focus their "showing off" on the right audience. Perfect example is this question and answer.
GS: The warrior you're showing here has the full tier 3 armor set. Can you tell us when those items will be in the game?

JK: The exact same team building the expansion is also building the live content updates. The big feature of 1.11 is the Scourge invasion, with Scourge unleashed all over Azeroth and Kalimdor. We're going to have a necropolis floating over the invading Scourge. For the raid players, we'll have Naxxramas, where the tier 3 gear drops.

Basically it tells me that there will be another huge world event that everyone will go crazy over, but Blizzard really doesn't care enough to tell us about how it will reward the average player. That's probably because it won't... just like the war effort for the opening of the AQ gates. It really only rewards the raiders in the end. So no fear... as you can tell they were more than eager to hip-check the tidbit about Tier 3 armor in there.

It's bad enough they were showing off a Tier 3 uberfied warrior in the first place. Because we all know that 3.6% of us are hardcore raiders and it's nice that they are paying attention to informing the vast majority of us about content we will be consuming.

Don't get me wrong... WoW is a great game. Blizzard just has a bad habbit of distancing the hardcore raiders from the casual majority. In the end it really just creates two communities and eventually that leads to the complaint that WoW's overall community blows goat nuts. Blizzard could do a lot to satisfy the casual gamer's attitude towards raiders if the world events were better presented and executed.

World events should be about the majority, rewarding the majority, and most of all pleasing the majority. The hardcore raiders are going to be there either way with their nice little raid schedules and farm status instances. Face it... Blizzard sucks at making casual gamers excited to log in. How about a little focus on the casual content that is coming out... enough with showing off the Tier 3 bullshit that only 0.1% of the players will ever actually achieve!

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:16 PM

    Yeah, and don't forget about the guild who is going to brag his balls off about how they mastered the event first with no credit at all to the little guy who made it all possible.

    I'm not going to bother with helping them this time around. I'm not going to encourage anyone else to either.

    Events of this type in game should not be encouraged. Let the braggart work for what they boast about (ie, 10,000 freaking purple lotuses - good luck with that!). Do the whole damn event yourself, imo.

    I'd get some fun out of sitting back watching them burn out on it, though. heh

    -- Vertigo

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  2. It's simple... like I said. The reward should be for everyone. Whether thats a new city to visit, a new zone, etc. To make a huge event that only opens up content for the MINORITY is a plain dumb move.

    At least this event will tell us whether Blizzard cares about casual gamers. Seems the only thing for the casual side is a long off expansion pack with 10 new levels -_- Even then look at the raid cotent... they are still struggling to provide step up content that casual gamers can at least start looking at.

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  3. Anonymous10:40 PM

    Hey Matt,
    Guess what? Im coming early on the 18th i think but you will have to talk to dad first. I fornd a sheet with the dates and flights on it so it must mean dad ordered the tickets. YAY!!! well talk to you later!

    TJ

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  4. Damn TJ you have my email -_-

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  5. Anonymous4:45 PM

    Never a truer word has been said.

    It simply boggles the mind why Blizz spend so much creative and marketing time and effort on these uber-upon-uber instances that so few of us get to play.

    And this is the opinion of someone who regularly raided and farmed Molten Core. After a while raiding and farming more more and more uber-epics just becomes boring.

    How about some nice new solo and group content for the vast majority of WoW players, for a nice change.

    -- Wyanne (retired 60 Hunter of Dragonblight)

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