My Life As A Gamer: Blunder For Azeroth

Settle in, folks. This is going to be a long post.

Last week, Blizzard Entertainment launched the final content patch of World of Warcraft: Battle For Azeroth. This is the end of the gameplay and narrative arc for this expansion, meaning that we're soon to come into the downtime between the conclusion of one two-year content release cycle and the start of the next. In short, it's over and now we can sit back and take stock of just what the hell went wrong.

Background

Battle For Azeroth was one of those expansions that no one asked for. The reason was simple: it's been long overdue to just shut the damn game down, and the end of the previous expansion--Legion, which saw us punk Space Satan and take his stuff--would have been the right time to do so. (They should have done it in 2010, at the conclusion of Wrath of the Lich King, but that's for another post.) Corporate wouldn't allow that and so here we are going from the leaders of organizations that transcended all other concerns (the various Orders) back to being basic-bitch ball-busters for the Warchief/High King.

The idea is that the literal life-blood of the planet's been spilling out since Space Satan stabbed the planet with his magic sword, and this magic blood is stupid-powerful so Welcome To the Arms Race. In pursuit of this world-changing development-cum-strategic resource, Yet Another Alliance-Horde War breaks out. (This is even called "The Fourth War".) Both sides, already depleted after fighting Space Satan and his (Not-So-)Endless Demon Hordes, go hunting for allies across the world. Since the existing landmass had already been tapped out, we had to go to places heretofore not seen (and yet didn't so much as merit a mention during the Space Satan War): Zandalar and Kul Tiras, both major maritime powers.

The gameplay and narrative of the expansion follows a simple pattern: go to New Continent, find out things are going bad, fix things by ganking everything hostile to you or your new buddies, and then go to the other New Continent with your new buddies to gank everything hostile to you or them. How do you mess this up? Be a bean-counter at Corporate HQ with shot-calling power, that's how. Years ago now, the folks who call the shots ceased to be the actual makers of the game--the ones with skin in the game--and the purse-holders took over. This has predictable consequences.

From Innocent Incompetence To Malevolent Sandbagging

The rules governing gameplay--the mechanics--have become needlessly complicated over time. Instead of the well-meaning, but misguided, cockups of the early years (Vanilla->Lich King) which had been slowly been hammered out and removed over time the regime began including deliberately-complicated mechanical systems that have the effect of inflating player time spent through obfuscation.

The first iteration of this, going from Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria, was the deliberate retention of unwanted attributes that a player had to have to be effective such as Hit and Expertise. You had to hit targets on these attributes to guarantee that your man's attacks hit, and when you got new gear you had to juggle all of your man's gear around to keep hitting those targets, meaning that sometimes you couldn't actually use what you got until you did. Failure to comply meant you risked your team's effectiveness in combat- and that meant risking your ability to be included in doing it. That meant artificially extending the time you spent playing the game to ensure that your man was viable--not optimal, viable--while maintaining power progression.

This was also the time when the development process started leaning into the metagame that surrounded the game, especially as online video and later livestreaming emerged as exerted influence over the playing population. The World-First guilds started getting noticed, and those guilds started getting attention. First those guilds exerted influence by the content being tuned for them--another example of deliberately retaining past mistakes--in order to artificially extend the lifespan of content releases; new raids in particular were harder than Nintendo Hard just to stymie those guilds, and would later be nerfed down in stages to something completable by the mere mortals comprising the majority.

The change to the second iteration came with the aforementioned MOP expansion, with the introduction of a slot-machine subsystem on loot drops called "(X)Forging". Originally introduced with the Throne of Thunder raiding ("Thunderforging"), this was the new way to both artificially extend content lifespans while having a policy of planned--yet concealed--nerfing over time. How? When an item dropped, a random number generator rolled. If the RNG hit a target, then the item's stats got buffed via increasing its Item Level (which controls the stats alloted on it). At first this was a one-step bonus, but with the final MOP raid--Siege of Orgrimmar--the RNG could proc itself ("Warforging") leading to those same guilds and the wanna-bees that follow them deliberately farming every iteration of available content hoping for slot-machine hits.

The effect was as intended; it kept players playing longer, hoping for a top-end X-Forged widget, and allowed the top-end players to carry the mass of suck players so they too kept playing. More time played meant more subscription money.

If you're noticing what the cancer is by now, good. Because it got worse with Warlords of Draenor and continued through to the present, when it changed with this new patch. No, not just the spreading of RNG for item drops, but the increasing number of microtransactions in the game (so far still refraining from anything that makes you more powerful in gameplay, but does include some that circumvent playing at all) as well as allowable character options aimed at maximizing player retention than proper IP stewardship. The decisions regarding what goes on with the game is now dominated by making the quarterly reports in the earnings call sounds good, not what is actually good for the game.

The bean-counters are the shot-callers.

Gallywix Doesn't Care

The leader of the playable Goblin faction is Trade-Prince Gallywix, a fat sack of crap whose every stereotype of a Gilded Age god-tier grifting gangster put into one along with a terrible mockery of Mafia bosses as his voice. This might as well be the man running the show because the predictable effects of such a man running the business are now too obvious to miss: corners are cut, suckups and fuckups are promoted, while competent talent gets out of Dodge (if not terminated) and the quality of the business's operations degrade steadily over time until the neglect makes collapse a topic of concerned customers.

We're there now with World of Warcraft.

The reason WOW has gotten away with it for so long, despite suffering such a collapse in paying customers since 2010--from 12 million unique paying accounts then to maybe a quarter of that now--is the lack of viable competition. Not until the re-launch of Final Fantasy 14 has a real competitor emerged, and having done so it is clear that Blizzard has taken notice; they do counter-program around 14's major releases and events.

The bean-counters don't care. They want maximum quarter-on-quarter returns. They aren't willing to do the long-term investment required for a healthy MMORPG business, hence the increasing reliance on microtransactions, slot-machine mechanics, and player-retention salesmanship schemes ("Get this unique Store Only mount w/ a six-month sub!") The result is that more and more changes to the game are made with this short-sighted mindset, and the consequence is increased player churn as there is no reason for most to stick around for more than a month or so at a time.

But so long as the month-to-month numbers please the bean-counters, they don't care, and since they control what's done via the purse they have control and not the folks who actually make the damn thing that justifies the entire business operation to begin with.

How It Turned Out

One very cynical scheme that's been used is a concept known as "Borrowed Power". This means that the content requires that a player acquire a widget with a capability necessary for him to participate in the content somehow: MOP's Legendary Cloak, WOD's Legendary Ring, the Artifact Weapons for Legion, the Heart of Azeroth and yet another Legendary Cloak for this expansion (and there is more coming in the next one). Then he has to feed that widget via doing content in that expansion somehow, and he gets to enjoy its increasing power over the expansion's lifespan, but that power is not his and when the time is up he loses that power. Either it's straight-up stripped away or it's rendered useless going forward, and the player has to start over again.

This is in contrast to the player's character actually acquiring new abilities, or improving existing ones, as he plays. They stay with him, remaining forever available to use.

It's Planned Obsolesce in a very cynical form coupled with a form of gatekeeping; you have to have it, you have to feed it, because if you don't you can't play with your friends doing what's currently relevant to do- and most players aren't keen on helping laggards catch up if left behind. The bean-counters figured out (a) this works for the short-term intervals they care about and (b) how to sell it to the players as a good thing by (c) turning a persistent adventuring world into a seasonal psuedo-sport with a scuffed themepark attached to it.

This is the origin of "You play the patch, not the game."

It's why there are "seasons" at all in this game now, very explicitly so. And it does one other thing: grant cover to the dev team when they inevitably cock things up and have to fix them or suffer losses to those all-important quarterly numbers. Which they do, and did with this expansion.

The Borrowed Power scheme this time around is a two-part affair, initially. The Heart of Azeroth was a new Artifact issued to you when you entered the new content and began leveling up. It took your man's Necklace slot, and it increased with power as you feed it magic planet blood. The other part is the Azerite Armor system, which replaced the Artifact Weapons of the previous expansion. The catch? To access the magic powers of the armors, your neck had to hit specific power levels, and as you got better versions of those armors your neck had to be higher-level to unlock those powers- including more powerful versions of the exact same armors.

This was, at launch, a massive cock-up. However, due to the "seasonal" mindset, all the devs had to say (and do) was "We'll fix it by next season" and follow-through. They did, and until this latest patch things were acceptable. (See below)

The problem was--as with the Artifact Weapons--those armor powers were specific to given class and specialization. You had to farm up multiple sets, or pay increasing gold costs to respec, to actually play your man's whole class and not just one portion of it. The result is that your man was your specialization, not your class, unless you were a No Life NEET or you got stupid-lucky with loot drops.

And then they made it worse.

Layering Bad

The dev team has a habit of layering systems over the course of expansions, especially if they intend to use something like it in a future one. This expansion was terrible about it. With Patch 8.2, you had the addition of Essences, also tied to Magic Planet Blood Vampire Widget. First you had to have a minimum level to get them at all, and then you had to keep leveling it to unlock all of the Essence slots; you also got significant HP buffs for doing so, making the pull that much stronger (and all content was balanced around this). Next, some of your best Essences were only available in content you generally wouldn't be doing; raiders in particular despised having to do PVP to get their best options unlocked. Finally, you had to grind away at overworld bitchwork to level up those Essences (or farm the fuck out of one raid, or several dungeons, etc.) to their top tier. Everything about this new system had "Artificially timegated bullshit to pad out sub fees" scrawled all over it.

Oh, and they had a new "catchup" system that had a cockup of its own--the Benthic gear tokens--which could also be leveled-up via grinding for a patch-specific currency. Each of these could also be subjected to that aforementioned RNG slot-machine effect, in this case to provide a socket for slotting in a gem that could boost one stat on it, and each item had an effect specific to that patch's major raid and associated content zone and some of those procs were better than the gear out of the raid at its top tier of difficulty.

Brilliant job there.

And you had to keep all those plates spinning to get into groups to do anything worth doing. No one likes shit sandwiches, no matter how many layers you put on it.

It's no surprise that the raiding scene, already declining, cratered here despite a very public marketing campaign for World First Mythic Raid clear (that Method, the top guild, won anyway because they always do and they always win all the WOW crap). A lot of people who play to raid either quit after clearing the raid or swapped to Classic for the duration of the patch; PVP participation wasn't much better.

Noticing Also Bad

All of the above complaints have been said loud and clear for years on the official forums as well as Reddit and various streams and video channels; you won't have problems finding them if you care to go down that (massive, Borg-cube-sized) rabbit hole. The Forging complaints have been most persistent, and at BlizzCon this past November we finally got word that they're killing it with Patch 8.3.

If you're thinking "What's the catch?", you're not wrong.

Because of the bean-counters, the devs don't have the time, resources, or talent available to actually fix the deep structural flaws that Forging fails to fix. (Yes, there is a solution, for another post.) They do not now, nor have for years, been "It's done when it's done" but rather "It's due on this quarter, so it goes live ready or not". There was no way any such solution was going to be better than what it replaced. It was likely to be even worse.

Let The Old God Win Already

The narrative of this expansion was barely-sensible from the start. Why would we, the leaders of the various Orders that ganked Space Satan and ended the existential threat of his Endless Demon Hordes, ever give a shit about fighting a world war over Magic Planet Blood? Especially when King Diamond Dwarf, now literally Planetary Spokesman, tells us we need to clean it all up before she bleeds out and dies and gives us a wearable vacuum/sponge to do it? In typical Blizzard writing style, this was really a time-stall for Yet Another Existential Threat to step out and say "HAH! You're all fucked now!" before we gank him like the loot pinata he is and take his stuff.

Picking up from "We get allies from places that should have been involved with fighting Space Satan, but somehow didn't do jack shit and no one knows it even happened", we first solve all their internal problems--which include taking away all of the Magic Planet Blood they somehow got their hands upon--while variously stopping the release of Not-Nurgle from SCP Facility 1138, ganking a wannabee Chaos God leading a witch cult, ganking another wannabee Chaos God leading a heretical faction of a not-Church of England, a Karen running an arms company trying to take Becky's throne, atheists trying to release ANOTHER Chaos God, and crazy feminist trolls trying to destroy a troll empire with Not-Nurgle's help.

With all that sorted, we then have Not-England attack Troll Empire HQ with a scheme that looks like something I came up with 30 years ago after hearing about Sun Tzu for the first time, while Cthulhu Knife from the last expansion comes back to talk us into some stupid Giger thing that's going to lead up to the current patch. Then we go to Not-Atlantis, where Ancient Knife-Ears Karen-turned-Snek BitchQueen of the Seas decides to let us gank all her snek subjects for shits and giggles before using us to release Not-Cthulhu from SCP Facility 3421. Meanwhile, there's a sidestory involving clockwork cyborg midgets with delusions of adequacy pretending to be Cybermen out to Upgrade The Universe; they suck, and are now a playable Alliance race.

Not-Cthulhu's release sets up this final patch. His invisible alt-dimension empire pops up out of nowhere in places we haven't been in years, and Edgelord Dragon Punk comes back from wherever they forgot him in the narrative to conveniently offer to help and dispense a new line of anti-batshit accessories. We get the cloaks, we power them up, we go to Dread Not-R'yehl (whatever it is), wreck that shit like it's DOOM Eternal and then this happens.

Oh fuck this.

And if you are playing this, then that lazy work you see reflected in that cinematic is present in actual play. Instead of Forging, you have Corruption; it does the exact same thing. You need the new cloak to use this stuff, because the penalties you accrue for using this stuff will get your man crippled and soon thereafter eating floor; the cloak (and a new set of Essences) grant Resistance that lets you soak up some Corruption, allowing you to use this stuff- and because three of the possible effects are stupidly powerful--even after the nerfs--to make them mandatory for cutting-edge groups (and therefore required for pick-up play due to how the metagame psychology works).

Rush upon rush, layer upon layer, all of it Borrowed Power mechanics, with a nonsensical narrative to fail to justify any of it.

Blizzard is truly an epic company, because you need to be one to create such an epic failure.

Conclusion

If you are not playing the game right now, DON'T START!. Don't resub. Don't buy this. Don't pre-order the next one.

Public testing for the next expansion has not started yet. For an expansion due out by BlizzCon this year--and there will be one--to not have any public testing going by this time is a bad sign. If there is none before Spring, that's a red flag event. If they push to have the next expansion out by BlizzCon or earlier, that's also a bad sign. The game is damaged, and that damage needs to be addressed; there is only one way to do that, and that's to ensure that--as with Legion--you put out a good expansion. However, by now that's merely necessary- not sufficient. You need to do far more than what the bean-counters allow, more than the announced major content and system overhaul will allow.

You need to shut the game down entirely. You need to take three years while offline rebuilding the entire game using a brand new engine; there are videos showing what, e.g., Elwynn Forest looks like in Unreal 4 and it is ridiculous how good the game could be if they did so. Why do that? Because you could do something so long overdue that many folks don't even realize it's a relic of the Everquest days: Proper fucking collision detection.

(That means the end of the Tank-Heal-DPS Paradigm, by the way.)

If I do not see solid signs that what's coming next addresses these structural issues, then when my paid time runs out in July I will not renew; I will, after over 15 years, walk away from this game- I am done.

"You would leave the game you've played since Vanilla? For good? Over this?"