Two Biggest Lessons to Learn From World of Warcraft

I am a huge Ashes of Creation fan and an old World of Warcraft fan (that game lost its way many many years ago).

I believe that there are two big lessons that Ashes of Creation (and other MMORPGs) can learn from World of Warcraft.

1. In its early days World of Warcraft was a great MMORPG. It had some flaws such as horrible class balance, PvP progression, and more. However, one of its greatest successes was the fact that it was an adventure.
What I mean by this is that on any given day, you could log in and progress your character in a variety of ways and you did not feel restricted or required to progress in any specific way (aside from raid progression). You could farm mats for that piece you've been wanting to have crafted, you could farm dungeons, gold, etc. I am not a fan of early WoW's progression since its systems were rudimentary and too focused on PvE and instanced content, but it felt nice to log into the game and go on your adventure for the day.

In modern World of Warcraft there is a clear progression path defined by systems and daily/weekly activities that the players NEED to engage in so that they can effectively progress their character. This system is horrible and it's a big reason for me quitting WoW. Every day I would feel like I HAVE to log in and do things that I DO NOT want to do for the sake of my character's progression. It came to a point where I dreaded playing and then I just stopped playing because it felt like chores.

Please try to keep Ashes of Creation an adventure where players can log in and go about their day in whatever way they seem fit or fun. I can tell that this seems to already be your goal. However, I am bringing it up because I truly believe that the day to day gameplay will be so so much better if you get this right.

Key point: adventure vs. chore like game.

2. Expansions in World of Warcraft make all previous content obsolete. When you play WoW and you take a step back and sit there to think for a moment, you realize that all your progress will be reset with the next patch and then later become completely obsolete when the next expansion drops.

What's almost worse is that not only does the player progress become obsolete, but also the world around them. Expansions should not make the world smaller by implementing a single area of importance and thus making the rest of the world obsolete... that is the opposite of expanding the game... it's effectively removing content because everyone flocks to the newest thing and aside from transmog and achievement hunters the old world becomes forgotten.

Once again, I am happy that Ashes of Creation seems to already be aware of this issue through their zone design (many level ranges) and overall player progression as players of all levels and proficiencies can contribute to their node.

Key point: Expansions need to add content without making old content obsolete.

Like I said before, I am glad to see that Intrepid seems to be aware of these two aspects of game design, but I wanted to bring them up again as a reminder that they are incredibly important when it comes to building a MMORPG that desires to be more of a world to adventure in than a game to complete/beat.

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Bricktop

cleansingtotem wrote: »

Dont listen to fake hardcore player who think tedious, outdated game designed will make the game a success. It never works and this game will be Wildstar all over again. Sadly I see a lot of the same kind of post pn these forums as I did w*'s.

It's absolutely hilarious that you point to wildstar as an example. An absolute 100% direct WoW carbon copy. That's your beloved new age game design in action.

Wildstar tried to emulate WoW and advertised themselves as a hardcore raiding game.

If we listen to people like you, it absolutely WILL be wildstar all over again.

Wandering Mist

I agree with all the points made in the OP, although for me a big reason why games like WoW, ESO, FFXIV, etc lack the sense of adventure is because of the fast travel and convenience they offer. Here's the daily routine for most end-game players:

1. Log in to your character (usually in the main city where everyone stays most of the time)
2. Collect your daily quests
3. Fly out/teleport to your daily quest location (or queue up for a dungeon using the dungeon finder tool)
4. Complete daily quests as fast as possible
5. teleport back to the main city
6. log out until the next day

At no point in this process do you actually engage with the world or interact with other players in a meaningful way. Even doing group dungeons there's barely any interaction. You'll get the occasional "Hi" when you join the group, but that's it, because everyone knows what to do in the dungeon and you're all only doing it for the rewards. Get it done asap and get out.

Convenience is also a big thing here. When I was levelling up in ESO I chose not to pay the monthly subscription, meaning I didn't have the unlimited crafting storage and my inventory was extremely limited. This meant I had to keep careful track of what I was picking up and had to make sure I sorted my bags out regularly before I left town. It also meant that most of my gold went to purchasing storage upgrades, and this was the main form of progression for me during the levelling. It was a big deal for me to have saved up enough gold for the next upgrade and suddenly have 10 extra storage slots to use in either my inventory or my bank.

Once I hit max level, I decided to buy the subscription and from then on I haven't needed to care at all about bag space because they give you so much of it. I haven't come even close to filling up either my inventory or my bank storage since then. The result is that I've actually stopped searching through every crate and box in the world simply because I have so much of everything that I barely use it.

The same thing applies to GW2. So much storage space means I hardly needed to worry about my inventory at all. And even if I did somehow fill up my bags it didn't matter because I could teleport back to town instantly whenever I wanted.

This is the point where convenience actually detracts from the gameplay experience and ruins the sense of adventure.

Tragnar

Bricktop wrote: »

cleansingtotem wrote: »

Dont listen to fake hardcore player who think tedious, outdated game designed will make the game a success. It never works and this game will be Wildstar all over again. Sadly I see a lot of the same kind of post pn these forums as I did w*'s.

It's absolutely hilarious that you point to wildstar as an example. An absolute 100% direct WoW carbon copy. That's your beloved new age game design in action.

Wildstar tried to emulate WoW and advertised themselves as a hardcore raiding game.

If we listen to people like you, it absolutely WILL be wildstar all over again.

Wildstar wanted to serve only the head of the pyramid hierarchy - which is bad

However not giving anything to the head is equally as bad - just look at wow blizz have been adding and adding discomfort and gigantic grind systems to the top-end so the mythic scene is consistently dying out

Fortunately it does not seem (yet) that Ashes wants to follow suit, because you are able to use master looter and set your own rules on loot distribution in the guild and at the same time there will not be infinite progression systems as well.

Campfire_Goth

The greatest loss I feel that World of Warcraft endured was the loss of the "World" aspect as it evolved to include more and more features trying to adapt alongside modern titles while still trying to retain its foundation and identity. I think even today WoW suffers from an identity crisis. It wants to be a traditional fantasy adventure but with the progression model of a modern looter-shooter.

What I mean by that is that WoW started out as an immersive fantasy adventure but evolved into action oriented button masher over the course of the years. With every new update, older content irreversibly becomes irrelevant. The world becomes empty and lifeless as more and more people become concentrated into smaller area as the updates become more laser focused on power, progression and newer features.

If you weren't around during a content's respective era of relevancy then that magic is impossible to recapture for better or worse. And as older zones got left behind, the story became inconsistent as well with each new piece seemingly being referential to older story arcs and characters recycled again and again. Even whole plots have been recycled.

I think the game lost its sense of wonder and mystery when the content and updates became less about the world, story and exploration and more about player power: creating well defined and narrow paths of progression so no one got left behind while stopping to smell the roses.

I think the greatest lesson WoW can teach other MMORPGs entering the stage is that let the world be part of the adventure; don't let the world become an over glorified hub that serves just as a waiting room for other gameplay.

Medrash1

@vmangman

Absolutelly agree, you probably got the best aspect and the worst one of wow in general

.

I'm also warried about this, more for the daily and time limited quests...
Anyway i didn't understood too much how they will work in ashes. Every month there will be an assault to the node ... that's probably some time limited event that will force the player a bit.
The quest system isn't that bad, and they said the dailys are going to be a minor and not restrictive thing .. anyway you have good point sure.

fathergoose

I wasn't going to post, but so far it seems like everyone has agreed, and that doesn't make for a constructive or interesting discussion. Personally, I disagree strongly with the OP's two points. My short response:

1. The goal post always gets shifted when comparing old WoW to new. In the old days, there seems to be no expectation to do anything meaningful, and people praise the freedom. Sure, you can do anything, but that's only because there's nothing to do and no reason to do it. The bis gear was an insane pvp grind or raiding. Hard stop. You could farm to craft gear back then but it was pre-bis at best, you could farm gold, but you can do both of those in BfA. The only difference is BfA points an arrow at content. Why do you feel the urge to farm bis in BfA when you can go farm mog, or do casual BGs, or do pet battles, or do the large scale mysteries, or farm achievements, or farm mounts, etc. There's so much to do in retail that has nothing to do with gear progression, that involves the old world, and always gets conveniently ignored.

If you measure retail by caring about bis, evaluate classic the same. When you do, you'll have nothing good to say about classic either.

2. Expansions don't invalidate content, leveling does. How often do you visit Thousand Needles in Classic after you quest it out? Durotar beyond Org? Silverpine Forest? Unless you're there to speed run alts or friends through content, there's no reason to go most places because you already experienced them.

This is just a fact of mmos. Unless you scale characters to a zone like GW2 then either content is going to obliterate low levels or be trivial and probably useless for high levels. The only real way to get high level players back into low level areas is to give them high level reasons to be there, which AoC might accomplish fairly successfully.

The world of an MMO is always as small as what is relevant to the player. The rest of the world might as well not exist to the player, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant to OTHER players who are still leveling, or grinding horizontal progression.

Either way, the magic of an adventure is akin to falling in love. The dopamine from exploration and discovery can't last forever, and they shouldn't try. The key is to transition adventure into a longer lasting love of the game, but it's so much baked into our culture to hunt for the dopamine shot that developers start behind the 8 ball.

The magic of adventure WILL fade. The challenge isn't to keep trying to pump adventure in, but to get players to love the world they finished exploring.

Frammshamm

We've had 12+ years to learn the mistakes from World of Warcraft. I'd rather they focus on learning from the mistakes of shitty game releases since then. If we are benchmarking their ability to learn from 15+ yr old games, we are already doomed to fail.

This community needs to learn from the mistakes of other communities and stop using an obsolete cash-cow (now POS) game as a baseline for studio expectations.

Rhodree

primagoosa wrote: »

1. The goal post always gets shifted when comparing old WoW to new. In the old days, there seems to be no expectation to do anything meaningful, and people praise the freedom. Sure, you can do anything, but that's only because there's nothing to do and no reason to do it. The bis gear was an insane pvp grind or raiding...

Most of us spent over half our time in vanilla leveling. It was a more dynamic, open, and world spanning experience than the plug and chug, follow quest arrows for 10hours that expansions are now. Also, while I don't think grind will magically make a mmo better, I do think the social experience in early WoW's bg's and raids were replaced by "skillz". Whatever that was supposed to mean in a game serious competitive gamers never seemed interested in crossing over to.

3. Expansions don't invalidate content, leveling does. How often do you visit Thousand Needles in Classic after you quest it out? Durotar beyond Org? Silverpine Forest? Unless you're there to speed run alts or friends through content, there's no reason to go most places because you already experienced them.

This is just a fact of mmos. Unless you scale characters to a zone like GW2 then either content is going to obliterate low levels or be trivial and probably useless for high levels. The only real way to get high level players back into low level areas is to give them high level reasons to be there, which AoC might accomplish fairly successfully.

The world of an MMO is always as small as what is relevant to the player. The rest of the world might as well not exist to the player, but that doesn't mean it isn't relevant to OTHER players who are still leveling, or grinding horizontal progression.

Either way, the magic of an adventure is akin to falling in love. The dopamine from exploration and discovery can't last forever, and they shouldn't try. The key is to transition adventure into a longer lasting love of the game, but it's so much baked into our culture to hunt for the dopamine shot that developers start behind the 8 ball.

The magic of adventure WILL fade. The challenge isn't to keep trying to pump adventure in, but to get players to love the world they finished exploring.

You could go back to 1000 needles to farm stuff. Darkmoon feathers I think? Probably some elemental stuff as well. Anything level 30+ could still kill you with enough numbers until you got deeper into raiding. More importantly, on a pvp server other players could kill you, especially, if they want those resources.

On the other hand, expansions are near totally resets. Very rarely do items last beyond the first raid instance. I'm not sure what the answer is, maybe a more developed server will have cheaper crafted gear, making catch up for new players easier than going through the whole game? I don't believe the wash rinse repeat cycle of expansion driven mmo's is working though.

Another thing that would help with "the same old thing problem" is differences between servers geography, more dynamic events in the world, and .... the stuff a more sandbox game might have.

Hurf Derfman

Bricktop wrote: »

cleansingtotem wrote: »

Dont listen to fake hardcore player who think tedious, outdated game designed will make the game a success. It never works and this game will be Wildstar all over again. Sadly I see a lot of the same kind of post pn these forums as I did w*'s.

It's absolutely hilarious that you point to wildstar as an example. An absolute 100% direct WoW carbon copy. That's your beloved new age game design in action.

Wildstar tried to emulate WoW and advertised themselves as a hardcore raiding game.

If we listen to people like you, it absolutely WILL be wildstar all over again.

Relax dude. Cleaning totem is clearly a troll to save us all from toxic behavior.

They're going to literally drop their cleansing totem and Purge LOL.

Tragnar

When talking about WoW it is important to remember that "vanilla" was a honeymoon - everything was new and few people knew how to play the game.

Just look at the game now, people are going out of their way to gather world buffs so they can race how fast can they can clear the raids. I am currently rolling there a new toon on horde as a prep for tbc and I constantly watch world buffs going out just so I can grab them to steamroll through the world oneshoting mobs that I encounter.

Ashes should learn from WoW that once the honeymoon of novelty ends then the game will be judged on its actual longterm progression systems. Without those systems people will slowly leave, because they will have nothing to aspire to

majoroson

It's the best game I ever played. This might be a biased opinion because it's also the first game I ever played on my PC. It was more than ten years ago, and I have loved it since the start. I remember how much I struggled, but it was a part of the process, and it was fun.
Now it's much easier. Players boost their profiles on websites like https://wowcarry.com/wow, and they do it much faster. I have nothing against this, but new players shouldn't do it. They should learn how to play the game first and reach a certain level. I used that website to get some items I wanted, and it's cool that we can do that.

Tragnar

I guess you haven't played a lot of games then

Fairtale

The reason why wow exploration was fun, was because we were noobs. You have to remember that at the time of wow, youtube had just been launched, there were no "guides on how to get 100% results" and no streamers showing how to get optimal results. We just ran around the forest killing mobs and looking for chests.
We didn't know that dungeons gave better rewards
But once we learned that, we stopped playing outside and started focussing on dungeons.
And then on raids.

To get that feeling back, the outside world has to be as rewarding as dungeons, and the developers have to make an active effort for that.

So for example: players rush through the lvling, since they know that after they still have to go through the grindy process to get the pre-raid BiS items for raiding.

If AoC can reward players who adopt "the casual playstyle" with receiving the resources to build pre-raid BiS items BECAUSE of that exploration, then no guild leader will stay "get the fuck out of Stranglethorn Valley and come to the dungeon to lvl up, you fkn noob".

That is a very cheap example, and hasn't been thought through. The point is to show you how these things can be done differently if the desired gameplay is rewarded. If one player rushes through the lvling, and then has to go out and spend days grinding resources, while the other player tells him "oh I already have all that because I played the game the way it was meant to be played", that could go a long way in getting back that feeling of going on an adventure with friends with no clear goal in sight.

The problem with wow is that it rewards ignoring the outside world (of warcraft).

Does that make sense?

Ramirez

For me Themeparks always had one problem, while grinding raids and dungeons i asked my self why i want this gear? What utility will have? I will just sit waiting for next expansion to be irrelevant... Yes in classic wow made sense because you had more relevant open world content and was harder to survive, a lot of faction pvp and rivalry , but after lich king that goes downhill ...

Sandbox or PVX mmorpgs like for example archeage, lineage 2 , albion , eve , always make more sense for me, because we really are working in something that will be used, for example for conquest territory , guild wars, survive open world pk/gankers, gathering in dangerous zones , survive trade roads and many other objectives....

Aerlana

GW2 is themepark, and adopted the horizontal stuffing system and it works really fine on it.
so themepark are not forced to be on a basic cycle of life with patch/Xpac.

Enigmatic Sage

Considering most of your playtime will be associated with the community at your current node, vassels and politics with alliances via guilds and friends, there wont be a need to turn it into a theme park where you queue up for dungeons and raids while you do some pointless grind or meaningless stuff in town.

The game gives you options to partake in a plethora of things from different crafting roles, pve, pvp etc.

Now theme parks in relation to cash shop cosmetics, I hope they do not break immersion by putting in relatively dumb stuff like gingerbread house skins for your trebuchet.

and if they did any of that tacky stuff, I hope it's only for limited and I mean limited time in-game. I'm not personally a fan of the current trebuchet design, especially since you're driving around on a bunch of wood tacked together.. it just doesn't make any sense.

Wow used to be awesome with immersion, then it went too far onto the theme park spectrum both aesthetically and mechanically. It's a lonely game to play for many players.

SirChancelot

I have to ask
What game does a good job with expansions, that doesn't make old content irrelevant? Because I feel like most MMOs have that problem, when you reach max level, or new stuff comes out... You don't really go back to lower level areas very often.

Now I feel like ashes has a bit of an advantage here with its node system. Nodes closer to starting areas will grow faster, therefore probably end up being larger, keeping people on the area.
But if the mobs and gathering resources in an area get outscaled, people won't go to that area as often anymore...

VmanGman

The best expansions I have seen are in Albion Online.They have continuously added content and now 4 years after launch every single thing they have added is still relevant. There are 4 years worth of expansions and updates in the game and you can play through any of it and it is all relevant.

Edit: @SirChancelot11

HumblePuffin

SirChancelot11 wrote: »

I have to ask
What game does a good job with expansions, that doesn't make old content irrelevant? Because I feel like most MMOs have that problem, when you reach max level, or new stuff comes out... You don't really go back to lower level areas very often.

Now I feel like ashes has a bit of an advantage here with its node system. Nodes closer to starting areas will grow faster, therefore probably end up being larger, keeping people on the area.
But if the mobs and gathering resources in an area get outscaled, people won't go to that area as often anymore...

You kind of answered this for yourself. One of the biggest ways to keep old content relevant is to make old stuff in that content relevant. Don’t release a new expansion with entirely new mats that never need the old mats outside of leveling to get to the new stuff. As long as you don’t make old mats entirely irrelevant the second you add something else, people will go to the older areas to get those things inserting people back into that part of the world.

Not really thought out, but still an idea on something you could do to keep lower level dungeons/world bosses relevant: quest line at a high level has found a crystal that temporarily boosts power. We want to test that power to see if we can harness it. Quest NPC tells you to go try it out in this lower level dungeon to see if it works. You go in, the aura the crystal has enraged the mobs and they actually put up a fight. You get to the boss and it goes crazy, has some new mechanics, and is harder. Quest npc deems it too unstable after you finish so it requires more testing so it doesn’t become some kind of baked in level scaling for everything.

Like I said not completely thought out, but there are definitely ways the devs can choose to integrate new content into the existing world instead of just separating it from everything creating content islands.

Dygz

There's no reason for you to think it out because the devs have already done that for you.
It's the whole point of having a dynamic world instead of a static one and for having all of the systems tied to the rise and fall of Nodes.

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