The Business: They Aren't Making It To Be Fun

The other day, one of the premiere raiders in World of Warcraft--Preach, out of the United Kingdom--did an interview with the leader of the WOW design team, Ion Haszzikostas.

I'm again using WOW to point out a larger practice in commercial game design, especially in commercial games in the online space such as MMOs, but this will apply to other genres so long as they have any online element to their business model.

That practice is the deliberate design of elements for their game product that have nothing to do with entertaining their audience, but instead maximizing the extraction from the audience of their money via compelling the audience to do bothersome chores before being able to be effective at whatever they really play the game for. In the case of WOW, that means to be effective in the three endgame activities that matter: small and large group dungeon challenges (Mythic Plus and Raiding), and their Player-vs-Player counterparts (Arena and Battlegrounds).

The entire game is designed to (a) rush you to the endgame where (b) you are told to plow through tedious chores before you can actually do anything fun. Tutorials are badly done if they exist at all, as the regular testimonies of players in community forums reveal, so not only are you rushed to the chores you don't get any information on how to not suck at doing it. (No, it turns out that the new starting zone isn't as effective as hoped.)

This makes no sense unless you account for the possibility that maximizing user engagement metrics--measured in how many users log in daily and do something, even if it's for an hour--is the driving forces for game design, and not entertainment of the audience in any reasonable form that audience would recognize. This realization is slowing dawning on the WOW audience, as not a day after that interview Preach cut this video.

TLDR: They're making Torghast more annoying to stretch out user engagement across usual subscription periods--monthly--to pump up metrics and make quarterly earnings reports look better than they are.

Today, he cut this one.

Preach's perspective is not that of a common player, let alone a new one; he is a hardcore raider, has been for years, and has no problems no-lifing things to be at that level. He literally plays WOW for a job and gets paid well enough for it so he--like others such as Asmongold--have outsized influence on both the developers and the audience of users.

His post-mortem on the interview takes its time to make its points, so I'll summarize the conclusions you can draw:

• A lot of the problems stem from tying Things That Matter to things that should not.
• Covenant choice should not matter, but because they grant gameplay performance boosts they can be--and are--minmaxed making the choice a non-choice for actual gameplay. Players, as a group, do not like this. Other complaints are variation on this theme.
• The WOW team is loathe to stop doing this because most players--revealed by behavior--will not engage in content that offers no performance boost.
• The rise of throttling players' gameplay via time-gating, forcing them to log in frequently to do things in small chunks over time, for every significant performance boost is there to satisfy investors because it raises user engagement metrics. Fun and satisfaction are not considerations at all.
• The PR front that devs give in interviews is just that. They have a well-established business model now, and having happy players isn't part of it; they just need to be kept on the treadmill so they can keep the dopamine hits flowing, which they are increasingly close to perfecting, and not leaving the reservation for competing offerings. To this end, they will flat-out lie to your face and rely on dopamine addiction to chain you into place.
• If you are not playing now, the next patch will not make it worth your while to start; stay away and unsubscribed. If you are playing, and you're not already invested in playing high-end content, you should be planning your exit. The devs presume compliance, and only massive subscriber loss gets any real improvements.

WOW is not a game made to be entertaining. It is made to maximize revenue, no different to how casinos are engineered from the doorway into the building to the slot machines and table games to suck your wallet dry, and your satisfaction is not their concern in the least. They rely on dopamine addiction to sucker players into thinking it's better than it is, even in the face of superior alternatives (including the Classic version of their own game).

This is becoming standard practice now, normalizing via mobile trash that does Gatcha-style gambling, and it's going to afflict every online-enabled game if it is not resisted both by users and by developers.

Remember that Mammon hates you as surely as Molech does. Be prepared to walk away.