My Life As A Gamer: Stop Ignoring The Revealed Preference of Your Leading Players

Two days ago, Classic World of Warcraft launched The Burning Crusade. In that time, one European guild has already speed-levelled to Level 70, speed-run all of the necessary attunements, and cleared all three of the raids that comprise the first raid tier of TBC.

I never again want to hear how difficult the old days were. They weren't hard. They were tedious. The appearance of difficulty stemmed from three things: much poorer computers, much poorer Internet access, and a dearth of knowledge about the game. Today broadband is commonplace, most PCs blow away the top-end towers of yesteryear, and the very site I linked to above has extensive documentation of every last detail of both Retail and Classic versions of the game. Add YouTube into the mix--video guides--and you can see exactly why this is a joke.

To call this anything but making a mockery of WOW's obsession with the endgame is to miss the point entirely. This is a guild that took the time to blast through most of the expansion's available content--the stuff you do from 60 to 70--just so they could say they killed the entire raid tier of a relaunched expansion from 15 years ago two days in.

Congratulations, you played yourselves.

You'll not that I'm refusing to name the guild or the server. Yes, I'm deliberately omitting those details. This is not something to commend. It's pathetic. It's like coming back to a Pee Wee league game after a career in Major League Baseball just to clown on the kids. There is no prestige to be gained from this, and I refuse to hand out the consolation prize of ignobility.

Instead, I'm using this to again point out the massive disconnect that exists in WOW particularly and generally in MMOs as well as RPGs; when the most significant cohort of players--the 20% that drives 80% of the game--routinely, consistently, and repeatedly--for over 20 years--tell you that all that matters is endgame and everything else is a waste of time and they back that up with equally consistent behavior then you need to stop ignoring that and start figuring out why.

You can work around that problem. Final Fantasy XIV's solution is effective and proven to work: lock important stuff behind a Main Narrative, spin off the rest as sidequests, and that stuff you can safely skip initially becomes stuff to do when you're done with the main stuff.

There are other solutions that work. Traveller is famous for being, in videogame terms, direct-to-endgame in its approach. You go directly to the merchant-or-mercenary endgame after character creation, and your man is almost entirely static so the only "progression" to make is social and material wealth cultivation. The same is true for the various TRPG rulesets for BattleTech (alternatively MechWarrior and A Time of War), focused on the mercenary end of things. You don't have to--and you shouldn't--blindly copy Dungeons & Dragons.

What you can't do forever is ignore it.

The reason that Muh Endgame is so focused upon is because Endgame is a level playing field. All that matters is you, your skill in operating the controls, your acumen with the mechanics of the game, and the gear your man has. Competent game designers would have noticed this by now, and started making changes to eliminate everything that runs contrary to this revealed preference by the leadership cohort, the one that matters.

This has not happened in most games. Therefore most games--including WOW--are run by incompetent fuckwits and protected by greedy publishers. Most TRPGs are likewise designed by and administered by Cargo Cultist incompetent fuckwits. Until either this competence issue is rectified, or the leadership changes its comprehension of the game, the long-standing problem noted above will persist.

The problem is this: most players give no fucks about the journey. They only care about the destination because the destination is the Arena and they want to be gladiators.

Shut up and give it to them.