Impact of MTX on WoW Game Design

[rrayy]

Have you bern paying attention?
Between its rapidly waning power on the world stage and the impovetishment of its citizens to the point that they died of Covid the most of pretty much anyone - despite having a rather low population density mind you!

And did you forget Trump already?
His steel bans were counterproductive to the point that it rapidly became clear that the US has neither the skill and technology nor the infrastructure and industry needed to keep producing the advanced materials on which everything it produces relies.

It is basically a corpse kept dangling as if alive by a world that hasn't quite figured out how it can work without it.

This is so utterly false it is hilarious.

- - - Updated - - -

it 100% has an impact on the game,all those take a fairly long time to make,time that could be spent on the actual game,not shop

NO it doesn't because the small amount of time it took to create that mount wouldn't be used at all if the mount wasn't created. It has ZERO impact on game development.

[anon5123]

giving players pointless busywork, starving them of loot as a design choice to keep them playing

this is literally every MMO

MMOs are designed to be time-wasters to keep you playing as long as possible, to keep you subscribed and paying the monthly fee as long as possible

If WoW didn't have any kind of timegating, you would be able to complete everything in 1-2 weeks and then quit.

[melodramocracy]

WoW has been designed around dragging out MAUs since the very beginning. Zones were designed to make it take longer for the player to get from point A to point B, meaning that they accomplish less in their play session and require more play sessions to progress through the game, which in turn means they have to stay subscribed for longer, which means more money. Additional raid tiers were added in Wrath to drag out raid progression. Rather than just killing Kel'Thuzad and saying "I did it! I've beaten WoW!" and unsubbing until the next raid drops, now you spend weeks progging to beat the Lich King on normal... and then you have to spend weeks progging to beat him on heroic. And then you have to spend weeks progging to beat him on Mythic. Oh, and now you have to spend weeks doing daily chores in order to get geared just to even do normal in the first place...

The end goal of ANY MMO is to retain players. An MMO with critically low populations, if you've ever had the misfortune of playing one, is truly a sad state of affairs. On that same note, the goal is to provide players with short and long term goals, provided through sizable chunks of content.

No dev wants to hear the playerbase say "there's nothing to do", which was an often repeated sentiment in the past. Nor do they want to see wildly fluctuating subscriptions where people raid, and then leave for x months (see above about retention)

WoW absolutely has a number of blatant timegates in place, no question. But to view anything in the game that might take longer than x hours, or reward systems that are RNG based as some sort of devious plan against the player just seems to be an unhealthy viewpoint.

[Steelangel]

Have you bern paying attention?
Between its rapidly waning power on the world stage and the impovetishment of its citizens to the point that they died of Covid the most of pretty much anyone - despite having a rather low population density mind you!

And did you forget Trump already?
His steel bans were counterproductive to the point that it rapidly became clear that the US has neither the skill and technology nor the infrastructure and industry needed to keep producing the advanced materials on which everything it produces relies.

It is basically a corpse kept dangling as if alive by a world that hasn't quite figured out how it can work without it.

Sure dude, keep smoking whatever it is you got.

[loras]

Sure dude, keep smoking whatever it is you got.

The only smoke i've seen "recently" is that of crematories trying to deal with an overabundance of corpses, New York comes to mind.

[huth]

What about F2P games only keep updating because of MTX? Some thing like path of exile for example likely wouldn’t have survived long enough to mature to the great game it is now without MTX as if it just had a launch price in its early state it likely would have done rather poorly in sales.

Let's be real: justandulas pretty much just told us that they won't be accepting any disagreement and aren't interested in discussion.

[MoanaLisa]

Let's keep the discussion on the game and not politics, pandemics or anything like that. There's another forum for those topics and this isn't it.

Thanks in advance.

[shadowmatrix]

And there lies the conflict of interest caused by micro transactions.

The conflict is caused by a desire to complain.

[Cthulhu 2020]

The end goal of ANY MMO is to retain players.

The important part is HOW games try to retain players. FF devs, for example, play the game in their own time. They are gamers. They play a game that is their job to make. The same was true of the original WoW devs. They made an awesome game that people wanted to play. In FF, you do content and get rewards. There is very very little time gating for anything (weekly lockout on loot for only the most recent raid, weekly tomestone limit) and the only chores that exist are 100% optional and only for vanity items and not tied to player power at all. Pretty much everyone loves that they can take the game at their own pace and do what they want.

As much as people might argue much of WoW's content is "optional" you'll find most people arguing that they feel compelled to do a lot of the content or they feel they'll fall behind. When a huge portion of your player base feels that way, THAT'S NOT GOOD GAME DESIGN, that's executives who have looked at gacha games, saw that they made tons of money from engagement metrics through boring repetitive dailies, and said "HOLY SHIT YES, MAKE THAT, MONEY".

WoW absolutely has a number of blatant timegates in place, no question. But to view anything in the game that might take longer than x hours, or reward systems that are RNG based as some sort of devious plan against the player just seems to be an unhealthy viewpoint.

It's not an unhealthy viewpoint, it's a realistic viewpoint. The unhealthiness comes from the game design, which is designed to make players engage as much as possible. Not because it's fun but because they feel lowkey or highkey compelled to do things. You can argue all day that that's not true, and yet 90% of players, whether they've quit WoW or not, will say that WoW is all boring chores that nobody WANTS to do, they just felt they had to do it. It's not some devious plot AGAINST the players. It's a plot that completely removes player enjoyment from the equation for engagement metrics. There's no MALICE in the design, only greed.

[MoanaLisa]

It's not an unhealthy viewpoint, it's a realistic viewpoint. The unhealthiness comes from the game design, which is designed to make players engage as much as possible. Not because it's fun but because they feel lowkey or highkey compelled to do things. You can argue all day that that's not true, and yet 90% of players, whether they've quit WoW or not, will say that WoW is all boring chores that nobody WANTS to do, they just felt they had to do it.

That's a questionable statistic given the lack of any knowledge in the general public of what players who never post to forums, FB, or Twitter are thinking. Personally I find it quite easy to not do stuff I don't like. This idea that most players are mindless drone/zombies doing whatever Blizzard wants them to do even if they hate it is non-intuitive and quite probably wrong. It's not that difficult to imagine that most players who are paying their $12-$15 a month to play find something about the game that they enjoy.

It's sort of laughable to generalize from forum posts, especially this forum where too many threads are created by people who are not subscribed and have not been secretive about it. It's the worst sort of echo chamber to take too seriously.

EDIT: I'll also make the very obvious point that anyone designing, creating or selling a product is a lunatic if they don't consider customer engagement important.

[intenz]

You can make the argument that MTX reassigns too much manpower that could be spent on real content, but there isn't much MTX in WoW for it to be a big deal. WoW's problems are much deeper and reflect the expansion of the company from a small club of gamers to just another soulless bugman tech company.

[MrFawlty]

The conflict is caused by a desire to complain.

Do you know what a conflict of interest actually is?

[Echo of Soul]

I think it was a mistake to make the game P2W through the WoW Token and boosting. It kinda devalues most items in the game.

[Cthulhu 2020]

That's a questionable statistic given the lack of any knowledge in the general public of what players who never post to forums, FB, or Twitter are thinking. Personally I find it quite easy to not do stuff I don't like. This idea that most players are mindless drone/zombies doing whatever Blizzard wants them to do even if they hate it is non-intuitive and quite probably wrong. It's not that difficult to imagine that most players who are paying their $12-$15 a month to play find something about the game that they enjoy.

It's sort of laughable to generalize from forum posts, especially this forum where too many threads are created by people who are not subscribed and have not been secretive about it. It's the worst sort of echo chamber to take too seriously.

EDIT: I'll also make the very obvious point that anyone designing, creating or selling a product is a lunatic if they don't consider customer engagement important.

It sounds laughable, and yet the droves of people who are unhappy or even quitting say they feel compelled or they "fall behind". People tend to best be able to relate to viewpoints when they themselves have that same view. You can do something and not feel compelled to do the daily chores and allow yourself to fall behind. It's not hyperbole to say that lots of players feel differently. Reddit and twitter posts get thousands of upvotes when someone talks about how lame it is that WoW compels you to do chores.

It might not be a problem for you, but it is a problem. To ignore it would be foolish. But then again, in 2004-2007, EQ was having the same problems. The game had tons of issues. The long standing fans of EQ said there was no problem and the people complaining about the problems were just wrong, or that there weren't that many people complaining about those issues. I see history repeating itself from back then. If you want to ignore the issues, ignore them. That's your prerogative. If you enjoy the game, then you don't need to worry about the complaints... at least in the short term.

In the long term, if WoW loses enough players, it gets relegated to life support, it stops getting regular updates, servers empty, etc. WoW joining the halls of valhalla with UO, EQ, DAoC, and all other great MMOs that shut down or went to life support, it's not a matter of if but when. And the current devs are making it happen faster than it should have.