My Life As A Gamer: Turning MMORPGs Into Mad Lib Laziness

Blizzard Entertainment has two teams for World of Warcraft. One of them covers Classic. We aren't talking about that team in this post. The other team covers the Retail game, and that's the team I'm focusing on here.

Since World of Warcraft: Legion, the dev team has turned dev time into nothing more than filling out a Mad Lib. Not just any Mad Lib, but the same one over and over.

(Existential Threat) appears, forcing a crisis that only you and your fellow Heroes of the (Faction) can face. You must go to (New Content Zone), acquire the (New Borrowed Power MacGuffin), and power it up doing (All The Things) before you can face (Existential Threat) head on and beat him. Along the way, you meet (Allies) and face (Henchmen) as well as (Parallel Minor Threats) to clear the way to (Existential Threat).

This template has been what they've used to streamline the development process since the disaster that was Warlords of Draenor, when half of the planned content had to get cut while streching what remained out to fill the expected two-year lifespan that every expansion is meant to meet.

It is also the means for which they installed all sorts of time-wasting schemes and slot-machine sorcery meant to slow down your consumption of the content and keep you subscribed and your activity optimized accordingly to Pareto principles. (Nash need not apply.)

The key to this is "Borrowed Power", which is whatever MacGuffin that you as a player are expected to pick up and power up to get anything worth doing done. In Legion, this was Artifact Power to level up the mandatory Artifact Weapons you had to have to kill bosses in dungeons and raids- which then let you be viable in PVP. It also locked you into a very specific playstale, making you play not just a Fishmerman, but a Fly Fisherman and not even touching other specializations of Fisherman because those took other Artifacts that had to be powered up--levelled up--separately. In Battle For Azeroth, this was Azerite Power to power up your Heart of Azeroth and unlock the powers of your Azerite Armors. In Shadowlands, this is Anima and you need it to unlock the full power of your Convenant's Sanctum as well as purchase or upgrade some gear you can acquire.

Until recently, the secondary means was Item Forging, which was additional slot machine RNG for loot drops. Not only did you need to win a RNG roll for a widget to drop, you also had to win RNG rolls to get it at the maximum possible Item Level AND to get all the best Tertiary traits on it. For most players, not a problem; for the top 20% that drive 80% of the game, this was a huge issue that caused serious personal and group damage for years. This is now out of the game as of Shadowlands, and the net effect was to further slow down content consumption; as that consequence was forseeable, this is why the devs went along with the demand.

The devs' objective is to make content development as lazy as possible, maximizing return on investment on multiple levels.

Being lazy amounts to maximizing the time-wasting, slowing down content consumption as much as they can get away with until the expected time for a given phase has elapsed. Gear drops slowed significantly from Legion to Shadowlands, friendliness to playing characters other than one's main--as well as playing specializations other than the main one--has also dropped away over this time. All of this is meant to keep you active every day for small amounts of time, rather than just logging in to do your raid and not showing up at all the rest of the week; this user metric alone drives all of development now, and this is made clear during the quarterly earnings calls.

Other things touted as features--such as the Mythic Plus system--as well as the shift towards making the game into a seasonal game akin to Diablo 3 also play into this scheme; by fixing the core of the game--raiding--such that you cannot just raid to succeed, you force participating in PVP and dungeons to compensate. PVP organically scales players to rewards, but PVE does not; this is where the Plus scheme kicks in, allowing players to get better gear for doing dungeons by adding optional difficulty increases to them and forcing it to be done on a timer.

All this is meant to reduce workloads while increasing user activity. You use these schemes to justify reduced or eliminated content expansions; what formerly would be handled by releasing new raids and dungeons can be done now by doing the existing ones on a higher difficulty, so all you need to do is make the NPCs numbers bigger and add a few new mechanics to handle. Lazy, but it works.

The overall trend is to keep players down to just one character that they play seriously, and keep that player doing just one or two hours at a time, but doing it every single day. They want chores and grind, not any semblance of accomplishment and therefore no point where a player says "I'm done" and stops logging into the game at all.

It's the logical endpoint of "Game As Service", and it has to stop.