Innovation in MMOs, WoW and Ghostcrawler's perspective on it

[Relapses]

Considering that all that stuff provides almost zero (0) character progression, it's safe to say that it isn't going to hold anyone's interest for any given amount of time.

God forbid a game whose central purpose is to encourage group content... encourage its playerbase to engage with group content.

[Varitok]

God forbid a game whose central purpose is to encourage group content... encourage its playerbase to engage with group content.

They can make whatever game they want, if the single player PVE is not plentiful enough, people won't play. MMO's are a dead genre to modern gamers, they only appeal to millenials, Gen X and some early Gen Z. People just do not have time to organize 25-40 people groups twice a week for 3ish hours to stay competitive.

[Mecheon]

Considering that all that stuff provides almost zero (0) character progression, it's safe to say that it isn't going to hold anyone's interest for any given amount of time.

Transmog absolutely has character progression and is the true endgame.

The stronger your character is, the more transmog they can get. Raids are merely a source for new appearances

[Relapses]

They can make whatever game they want, if the single player PVE is not plentiful enough, people won't play. MMO's are a dead genre to modern gamers, they only appeal to millenials, Gen X and some early Gen Z. People just do not have time to organize 25-40 people groups twice a week for 3ish hours to stay competitive.

It is plentiful enough. You just can't get maximum player power from solo content. And that's fine.

[Stickiler]

People just do not have time to organize 25-40 people groups twice a week for 3ish hours to stay competitive.

This is kinda silly, given you only need 10 people, and for like 4 hours a week total.

[Hitei]

Yeah but it is worse now because you barely get exceptions, whereas in the 70s-000s the sequel shit helped studios finance riskier projects, like how entertainment news used to subsidize actual news.

No, there were significantly fewer expectations back then, when the cost of making films was so entirely prohibitive, equipment was difficult to obtain, and there were less studios, both in general and terms of studios willing to bother with some innovative concept. There are many MORE exceptions now, when there are thousands of smaller studios willing to do experimental/non-adaptational things and distributors like Hulu/Netflix/Prime/whatever willing to pick up small independent projects or even single individuals with an idea and run production to get those ideas made.

[Beet]

Forced multiplayer is a very effective way of killing your game right away.
GC has grown senile, still riding his reputation from 15 years ago.

Ever since he joined Riot he just fucked things up there pretending to be the all-knowing god dev.
Riot's MMO is also in dev hell despite the infinite amount of money they have over there and he just fucking bailed on them too.

Why are people so caught up on the ramblings of an old man...

lmao you guys crack me up. All this hate for the people who actually helped make the games good. WoW was top notch when Kalgan and GC worked as a team on it. The entire reason WoW was so big is because people saw it as a social experience. I was just talking to my ex about this last week. How she and so many of her friends played WoW simply because the game was a chill way to lay back and have fun with the players. Girls who never gamed before were playing WoW like crazy because it was social.Back when realm forums actually had people posting. If anyone can make another MMO that has a feeling of old WoW but updated, I’d bet on GC.

It’s quite sad now how little anyone gives a shit about WoW. Blizzard went overboard by providing four raids in the end. Asmongold, not a fan of him but he’s right about this issue. Raids should have just been 10 and 25 man period. Or 10 and 40 man. But with lower difficulty to make up for needing 40 people. WoW was at its peak when you took anyone in your guild to the raid unless you were stuck on some super hard boss fight and those became rare. An MMO with end game mega big raids that have a wide variety of bosses from the loot piñatas for average joes and then hard bosses in the end for the others.

[Amariw]

His heart's in the right spot, but gaming is so mainstream now that to have any sort of success beyond VERY specific niches you basically need to account for the lowest common denominator in your audiences - which is usually a terrible, entitled, borderline toxic player who would sell their party member down the river for 2 gold if they were given the chance 9 times out of 10...

That's reality. It's not being cynical or misanthropic, it's simply the result of mainstream success that has reached enormous sections of the population with a massive overabundance of product to choose from. People want everything and they want it now because they can have it, and if your game doesn't give it to them (or gives them something else of significant enough value) they'll just go somewhere else to get it, because it's super easy to do that.

It's the same reason meta discrimination is rampant in WoW PUGs - it's easy to do. When there's twenty DPS applying to your key within the first minute, why wouldn't you pick the highest performing meta specs, even if the difference is minimal? All other things being equal, even if it's 99% vs. 100% why would you waste those 1% if you don't have to? Same thing applies here - if a game doesn't give you the instant gratification and affirmatory ego-stroking you crave, then (all things being equal) there's another game you can download within 10 minutes that will.

Now, objectively speaking in terms of sociocultural benefit that's not a good thing. But these are commercial products, they don't care about the well-being of a society, they care about how much money they can squeeze out of its members. And that's fine - it's not their responsibility to educate people, it's ours, as members of a responsible society. Another discussion entirely. This is the reality you have to deal with, and there's preciously few angles of attack if you want to game that reality.

I mentioned it before, but the most fruitful mechanism I see is precisely what Ghostcrawler is calling "innovation": give people something they can't (easily) get in other games, and they'll put up with modified behaviors and expectations. That can be a number of things - it doesn't just involve game-mechanical innovation, it could just be as mundane as hype or social prestige for playing the "in" game. But those factors don't all last the same time, and they're not all sustainable; hype in particular is notoriously fickle and may catapult you to untold heights as well as crater you into the ground. And mechanical innovation is, at the end of the day, really hard to actually do, at least in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Ghostcrawler's idea of "let's make our innovation other people!" sounds very naïve and idealistic to me. The idea that your game becomes a place to "hang out with friends" is Utopian at this point in time - that's not how gaming works anymore. It barely worked like that in 2005, before the advent of social media and the explosion of gaming as a mainstream activity. People socialize on PLATFORMS, not games. You "hang out" on Discord or your Steam friend-list. Not in some new MMO. You'll never get people to do that, because people don't game like that anymore: they have decoupled these activity streams, and they're multitasking constantly. It's entirely common to have people be in voice chat for their game, hang out in a separate voice channel with some friends, and have a Twitch stream of their favorite streamer running in the background to boot while they're gaming. That's reality. Not a group of friends chilling on "New GC MMO" during a Thursday night, chitting the chat as they mine some herbs and later maybe kills some dragons together. People like that exist, but they're not the mainstream, and they're not a sustainable audience. And if you think they are or that these days are coming back, you may be suffering from some form of nostalgia-driven delusions. Now, we of course don't know what exactly GC means by what he's saying, and maybe he's got something less traditional in mind. But it sure sounds like someone pining for the "good ol' days" of WoW and EQ that are not coming back.

That being said, I don't think he's wrong that multiplayer is and remains important. But I think he's making a cardinal error in his thinking on a conceptual level: he's still talking about "single player" and "multiplayer" like they're simple, distinct categories. They're not. That's the key here, and in many of the behaviors we see in contemporary games, be they WoW or Diablo or whatever. People are fine playing with other people, but they want to be at the center of things. Other people work as ancillaries to their own experience. They don't want pure single-player games that work offline and never engage with anyone so much as they want games that are technically multiplayer, but let a single player do whatever they want whenever they want to do it. They want all the benefits and none of the responsibility. They want to be around other people, but they don't want to have to play with other people unless they want to. Other players are, by and large, NPCs to them. That's how a huge number of people engage with games like MMOs. Not by finding ten close in-game friends they form a guild with and schedule raids three nights a week - but by always having someone around to do a dungeon when they feel like it, but never having anyone around when they just want to mine nodes and collect herbs. That's what "single-player MMO" notions are about.

The moment you force people into social interaction, that's when you lose. It's fine if you enable it. In fact, the easier you make that, the better. You give people a dungeon finder queue, and 9 out of 10 will pop it on the regular. But you ask those 10 people to go make their own dungeon group, and 8 of them will say fuck it and not bother with it. They're fine socializing if they don't have to do anything. But the more you build on the premise of people socializing, the less appealing it becomes to the mainstream. It's too much work, takes too much attention, and costs too much time in an age where you can just push one button in another game and be put right where you want to be, doing just what you want to be doing and nothing else. You can lament that all you want, but it's reality, and any new game that wants to be mainstream better take this kind of degeneracy on board REAL quick.

Soz for quoting entire thing, but one of the very rare times i saw a long but solid analysis in this forums (not to diss the forum, it's just rare in general), and i think' youre right about a bunch of things. I could see an mmo encouraging social interaction to do better than you assume, but it can't happen the way vanilla wow and everquest did that because like you correctly noted, those times are over. I'm assuming Ion knows this, but I could be wrong and that'll be a bit sad.

- - - Updated - - -

It is plentiful enough. You just can't get maximum player power from solo content. And that's fine.

It's not maximum player power that's lacking in single player, it's the type of fun content they used to do to make it engaging. Actually having reasons to kill elites, not jumping around the minimap zerging "rares". Fun mage-tower like content (horrific vision comes to mind, but without the awful grind). Basically a reason to be in the outdoors, whether you purely solo or in between mythic+/raids/arena.

- - - Updated - - -

Odd, most people I played classic with just enjoyed it cause the game was overall easier than retail. No 10-15 button rotations. had nothing to do with the social part.

The rotation was simple but i disliked it bad as a vanilla player. The fun part is it forced you to engage with people. Now i don't have as much time for that and game isn't new to me anymore, but back then it was amazing. It created memories that lasted more then a decade. And in many ways the leveling was much more involved. My retail friends dont understand why i always take my time leveling and don't rush it, but its because vanilla wired me to think leveling is meant to be fun.

[Tyris Flare]

No, there were significantly fewer expectations back then, when the cost of making films was so entirely prohibitive, equipment was difficult to obtain, and there were less studios, both in general and terms of studios willing to bother with some innovative concept. There are many MORE exceptions now, when there are thousands of smaller studios willing to do experimental/non-adaptational things and distributors like Hulu/Netflix/Prime/whatever willing to pick up small independent projects or even single individuals with an idea and run production to get those ideas made.

Yeah this is why theaters are filled with all those amazing low and mid budget movies!

Oh wait, those are almost dead. Many of the best unique movies of the 90s and 00s simply would never get made today. Matt Damon had some good commentary on this - the lack of DVDs sales is a big part of the death of those films. Now at best they turn into streaming shows nobody watches instead of $50 million movies.

https://independent-magazine.org/202...budget-cinema/

There are about a million articles on this topic as well as interviews with actors and directors.

[Hitei]

Yeah this is why theaters are filled with all those amazing low and mid budget movies!

That is correct. Theaters have significantly more low and mid budget movies, and more non-adaptation/sequel movies than previous decades. Of course, I don't know why you'd even bother with this dumb goal post shift when theaters haven't been how most people consume movies for decades now, but yes, even in theaters there's significantly less retreading than in previous eras.

I mean if you want to plug your ears and pretend that Talk to Me, a <$5M movie isn't currently in extremely successful wide release, and that Everything Everywhere didn't sweep the Oscars, critics and most mainstream viewers last year with a $15M budget, be my guest. Again, not sure why you're goal post shifting to budget when the discussion was about muh-current-year being sequel and remake heavy, but yes, even in terms of budget, modern media is significantly friendlier to indie and low budget productions.

[Relapses]

It's not maximum player power that's lacking in single player, it's the type of fun content they used to do to make it engaging. Actually having reasons to kill elites, not jumping around the minimap zerging "rares". Fun mage-tower like content (horrific vision comes to mind, but without the awful grind). Basically a reason to be in the outdoors, whether you purely solo or in between mythic+/raids/arena.

I wouldn't mind something like that honestly. Supplemental single player content whose rewards scale with difficulty are fine in my books. (As long as we're not advocating for single player content to be an additional pillar of player progression.) I think Blizzard is trimming back on this kind of content since Torghast was an evolution of Horrific Visions and many players likely still have a bad taste in their mouth from how badly they fucked it up. One of the recent dev interviews mentioned wanting to have more evergreen content so not all hope is lost.

[WowIsDead64]

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence for a reason.

When you get allegedly unlucky with drops but everyone else is getting an average of the normal drop rate for that item, this isn't evidence that the RNG is broken or that Blizzard is out to get you.

I have been playing Wow since WotLK. Yeah, I've seen low drop rates for some specific items, causing me to do 10x more attempts to get them. But SL is first xpack in Wow's history, that has such amount of duplicates. Something is definitely changed. It's obvious, sorry.

May be not fraud. But so called AI-loot. And AI-loot =/= RNG. RNG is acceptable for us, because it somewhat FAIR. It's not me and it's not devs, who decide, when I get my reward. It's some sort of RNG God. Yeah, it's still them, who set drop rates, and drop rates control average amounts of tries to get items. But you can still get item earlier or later, depending on pure luck. But once loot is given according to some algorithm - it's devs-controlled. And I don't want devs to decide, when to give me my rewards. Because it's obvious, that they want to do it as late, as possible. I feel manipulated in this case. And when I'm manipulated - it's no longer game. It's just smart way to turn me into fool and grab my cash.

I don't understand, why they do it. We already have ilvl gating on a top of "coupon collector's problem". I.e. once I earn next cypher upgrade - my progression is reset and literally starts from scratch. I don't understand, why we need this duplicate-fest on a top of this system. But it only makes things worse. It would be much better, if I would collect my rewards gradually. Because it's so bad, that I already have 5/6 cypher upgrades, but my head is still f**king GREEN. Yeah, I've had to collect enough relics to buy gloves. Otherwise they would be GREEN too. But it's bad, because I don't want to even mess with elite location.

P.S. Class Halls - is perfect content. Yeah, Blizzard can fail 3 important 80% missions in a row. But at least I can eventually get rid of RNG via follower gear upgrades.

[Garymorilix]

lmao you guys crack me up. All this hate for the people who actually helped make the games good. WoW was top notch when Kalgan and GC worked as a team on it. The entire reason WoW was so big is because people saw it as a social experience. I was just talking to my ex about this last week. How she and so many of her friends played WoW simply because the game was a chill way to lay back and have fun with the players. Girls who never gamed before were playing WoW like crazy because it was social.Back when realm forums actually had people posting. If anyone can make another MMO that has a feeling of old WoW but updated, I’d bet on GC.

It’s quite sad now how little anyone gives a shit about WoW. Blizzard went overboard by providing four raids in the end. Asmongold, not a fan of him but he’s right about this issue. Raids should have just been 10 and 25 man period. Or 10 and 40 man. But with lower difficulty to make up for needing 40 people. WoW was at its peak when you took anyone in your guild to the raid unless you were stuck on some super hard boss fight and those became rare. An MMO with end game mega big raids that have a wide variety of bosses from the loot piñatas for average joes and then hard bosses in the end for the others.

See?
Riding his reputation from 15 years ago much.

What did GC do post-wow?
Fucked up a couple of seasons of League then went radio-silent after announcing an MMO.
Then he left that MMO and announced another MMO.
Not much of a modern resume.

You can literally play normal raids to 'invite anyone in your guild' and you don't even have a raid-size lock. You wanna do 40 man raids? Go do them. 10 man? Go do that.
Mythic is the only thing locked and honestly, you don't seem to be the kinda player who should worry about Mythic raiding so sit down.

The first 3-5bosses of each raid are already loot pinatas for like the past 20 years, mate. Raids are literally structured like you described it in your last sentence.
Tell me you don't even play the game without telling me. 10 year badge, why should I be surprised tho...

[AudibleEscalation]

Not much of a modern resume.

Team Lead for Systems in WoW
Lead Developer for League
Head of Creative Development for Riot
Executive Producer for Riot MMO project.

I mean - he's been at senior team lead/manager positions most of his adult working life.
But to say he doesn't have "modern resume" is a bit misleading. He's been heading game development teams and for a long time.

I'd say that's pretty relevant modern resume for a studio head.
I'm guessing he's actually hiring a proper team - this is just not him and Holinka winging it.

He'll be just fine as a start-up studio owner.

[Garymorilix]

Team Lead for Systems in WoW
Lead Developer for League
Head of Creative Development for Riot
Executive Producer for Riot MMO project.

I mean - he's been at senior team lead/manager positions most of his adult working life.
But to say he doesn't have "modern resume" is a bit misleading. He's been heading game development teams and for a long time.

I'd say that's pretty relevant modern resume for a studio head.
I'm guessing he's actually hiring a proper team - this is just not him and Holinka winging it.

He'll be just fine as a start-up studio owner.

I don't care for titles much.
You shouldn't either.

League was going downhill under his watch.
After he went over to the MMO team it started to get better.

It shouldn't be hard to criticize a man for his actual work, that's what a 'resume' is, not a bunch of HR buzz words thrown together.

[AudibleEscalation]

I don't care for titles much.
You shouldn't either.

I don't. But they do show relevant working experience. Videogame industry isn't different from any other industry in that sense.

It shouldn't be hard to criticize a man for his actual work, that's what a 'resume' is, not a bunch of HR buzz words thrown together.

I wonder. Do you actually know what a Executive Producer does? Or Head of Creative Development? Like what the normal day-to-day deliverables are and how they're measured in yearly performance reviews?

I'm not sure I do. But I don't work in videogame industry. They sound like pretty high-level managerial positions to me. Kinda doubt he had his fingers in day-to-day design or coding. Sounds like "big picture stuff" to me.

I haven't actually seen his resume. So I don't know what he'd done (beyond those titles).
It's easy to criticize, but you don't call an electrician when your pipes spring a leak and then blame them for doing a shitty job for fixing it.
I hope.

[exochaft]

I wouldn't mind something like that honestly. Supplemental single player content whose rewards scale with difficulty are fine in my books. (As long as we're not advocating for single player content to be an additional pillar of player progression.) I think Blizzard is trimming back on this kind of content since Torghast was an evolution of Horrific Visions and many players likely still have a bad taste in their mouth from how badly they fucked it up. One of the recent dev interviews mentioned wanting to have more evergreen content so not all hope is lost.

Single player content can be an additional pillar of player progression... although I think you might have meant something akin to not wanting single player content to superceed raiding or M+ in terms of player power acquisition? I suppose an argument can be made that you don't really want to overload your MMO with single player content, but the game has changed over the years to where WoW feels like a single player experience where one begrudgingly groups up with others if you feel like you can deal with them. However, beyond this the game could probably use other activities to do in between group content anyways, because either you don't always want to be doing multiplayer content or everyone else you want to do multiplayer content with isn't always on.

If anything, I feel like Blizz overdesigns and overcomplicates their attempts to make content that's more solo-focused (or can be done solo), or they give up too easily. Mage Tower is probably the most successful attemp they have, and they got rid of it at the end of Legion only to realize players actually liked that sort of content and would like to see more in the future; whether they expand this feature further is yet to be known, but it makes a perfect evergreen activity. Torghast probably would've been a LOT more well received if they didn't force players into doing it for power progression while simultaneously trying to balance/tune Torghast to keep people from getting too strong inside; while everyone can have their opinion about Torghast, the earlier testing versions were probably the best, when it felt more like an "anything goes!" content verses being overly micromanaged. Overall, it's super easy to tune the fun out of content, and Blizz has a sordid history when it comes to such tendencies.

Personally, I'd love to see CMs come back. Since we got rotating M+ dungeons, you could have CMs provide seasonal rewards that change with each new dungeon set. Don't know if I'd go so far as to make a rating system akin to M+, but just keeping the bronze/silver/gold tiers and providing rewards based upon that would be fine. Instead of the realm-specific titles for fastest times, maybe just make a new platinum tier that you can aim for if you're gung-ho for maybe an aFoS/title since doing realm-specific stuff feels a bit dated with all the changes to the game now. Doesn't even have to provide a path of power progression, can be purely a parallel path of progression. I wouldn't be opposed to a power progression system, but it'd only work with some revamps to how the game does power progression; so basically, without some fundamental changes to the game, no power gains in CMs is the way to go.

I suppose there could be some love for the island expeditions making a comeback in some form, as the "need" to do them for power gains is what deterred many people from enjoying them (as well as some balance issues). Once progression from Azerite wasn't an issue, IEs actually became a kind of "chill out" activity that rewarded a bunch of pets and cosmetics, and the addition of the improved vendor for IE's. Ironically enough, Blizz originally sold the IE's exactly as a "chill out and take your time to explore" activity, and there's remnants of what were probably lore and quest activities on said islands... but again, the Blizz habit of overcomplicating things and trying to shoe-horn all activities into a power progression system left a sour taste in most peoples' mouths.

If anything, I think Blizz should at least focus on the smaller group content versus large group content in general, not only because historically participation in large group content is extremely low, but also because smaller group content is what most people likely want now (whether it's due to time restrictions, not having lots of people to play with, etc.). I wouldn't even be shocked if you saw an uptick in mythic raid participation if you dropped the raid size from 20man to 15/10man (or even flex), as the logistics required for doing content exponentially get harder the more people you need to do them. Focusing on 5man or smaller content is probably where Blizz needs to focus their efforts when it comes to either making evergreen or future power progression content.

[AudibleEscalation]

It's not maximum player power that's lacking in single player, it's the type of fun content they used to do to make it engaging. Actually having reasons to kill elites, not jumping around the minimap zerging "rares".

Problem with that (or rather modern gaming) is that you'd need to slow down the pace of game quite a lot in order to make it feel engaging and "impactful".
They tried to do that in the Maw and I don't think it was hugely succesful zone. In fact I think many people hated it, because they couldn't just blitz through it.

It's hard to keep fast paced game play and make it somehow impactful and "fun". The compromise they've landed on are the "assault" zones, which are fast paced, impactful and but can't be blitzed completely by soloing (though you're not forced to group).

But I don't think very many enjoy those things either - because they become repetitive and boring quite fast. The problem with fast paced game is that you need to have some kind of "procedurally generated" adversary - otherwise players burn through the content in 10 minutes and go back to being bored.

Sure the Mage Tower, Visions etc were pretty good, but I think the production cost of those things means there can be only one such challenge in every major patch (and probably not even that).

[Ielenia]

May be not fraud. But so called AI-loot. And AI-loot =/= RNG. RNG is acceptable for us, because it somewhat FAIR.

Okay, let's humor you: what is "AI loot"? Because this is the first time I hear this term.

I don't understand, why they do it.

That's because they don't.

Because it's so bad, that I already have 5/6 cypher upgrades, but my head is still f**king GREEN.

Your luck is bad. Plain and simply. No more, no less.

[Soon-TM]

The problem with fast paced game is that you need to have some kind of "procedurally generated" adversary - otherwise players burn through the content in 10 minutes and go back to being bored.

Well, that's what you get when you are in charge of an MMORPG and you twist it bad enough that it might resemble an esport (if you don't look too closely). You reap what you sow.