My Life As A Gamer: The Failure of Island Expeditions

Battle For Azeroth added a few new instanced content options. One of these is "Island Expeditions", where the premise is that your man forms a team with two others to scout out small islands to explore and exploit for the new resource: Azerite. You do this in competition with an enemy team from the opposing faction, and the first team to collect "X" amount of Azerite wins.

Sounds like a fun competitive scenario, right? Searching out nodes, holding them long enough to exhaust them, occasional combat with the enemy team, and so on, right?

Nope.

What we have here is an adaptation of the Rift system from Diablo 3: enter into an instance comprised of a pile of recycled art assets, fill up a progress bar as fast as you can, and maybe get something extra as a bonus when it's over. Do enough of them in a week and you get a bonus reward that powers up the expansion MacGuffin all men have ("The Heart of Azeroth", the Artifact Weapons of this expansion).

What this becomes in actual play is "GOGOGOGO!" style of play where the team rounds up as many hostile mobs as they can in a single pull, burns them down with Area Of Effect attacks at best speed, and any other objective is ignored because it's slower than just doing that. Since filling the progress bar determines who wins, and doing that fills it fastest, there is no exploration. You just attack the nearest mobs, and murderhobo your way across the map until you're done.

The sole exception is when this is done on PVP Mode; by default this is a PVE mode, where the enemy team are bots (and you can see your sides bots over by the NPC where you queue up to do this bitchwork), but on PVP Mode you actually have enemy players against you and that sufficiently changes the dynamic to restore (partially) the intended mode of play for Expeditions- for now. (Once they figure out that it's better to just race and ignore the other team, this will resume.)

The devs have had to adjust Expeditions several times already, first to fix bugs and other errors reported during the Beta and then to fix rare item drop rates to bribe players to keep queuing up for this snorefest. They are not fun, they don't do what they claim, and there is nothing to explore; if you get bored with the thought of farming randomly-generated dungeons for a slim shot at better loot (D3 Rifts) and the useless prestige of a high score or best time, then this is a flop for you- as is the case with most World of Warcraft players.

The point?

Either the devs are incompetent, despite access to all the data showing them the revealed preferences of the players over years of play, or they're cynically exploitative of the players in service to stakeholders who hold them in contempt (as most casinos do, since we're talking about the same slot machine psychology being used in MMOs). The former would believe that players would actually explore a map before racing to complete the game, while the latter expect that despite it being unsatisfying the Skinner Box systems in place would keep players playing indefinitely.

Nope.

The users define the tools. Tools that have no purpose will be abandoned. Games and game systems are no different, something game designers routinely fail to comprehend; Island Expeditions are superfluous adjuncts to core gameplay modes that actually matter to World of Warcraft, which is why they failed- that they were designed in such an incompetent (and cynically exploitative) manner only makes their abandonment easier. No amount of additional maps, or mobs, etc. will change that until fundamental reformation of the underlying systems actually make players change how they approach playing this mode of gameplay- and the devs are too full of themselves to ever do that.