![]() ![]() ![]() That leads to a further problem: There’s a whole faction of players who feel that the game just doesn’t have any content for them any longer. Moving the prize is not a way to get people to move up it’s a way to get them to decide the prize is no longer worth it. I declined because the rewards were not worth the hassle of organizing 24 other people and eating up more of my time with that nonsense. When I was raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, I was well aware that I had high enough DPS to do the next tier up. You can say that better gear should be harder to get all you want, but the fact is that most people stop their content consumption at a certain point not because they’re unaware of better carrots. They just… didn’t go raiding and didn’t get those sets. When Cataclysm simultaneously dropped the idea of buyable tier sets for tokens and made Heroic dungeons much harder, a huge number of players didn’t decide that this was the point to step up to raiding. ![]() More often, the reason people are going to a certain place for a carrot is that this is how much effort the carrot is worth to them. I have no doubt it works for some people, but they seem to be the minority. ![]() Ever since the end of Wrath of the Lich King, though, WoW has been making it harder and harder to get those carrots, with the idea being that by moving the carrot just a little further ahead people will jump into more challenging arenas. Rewards like new gear, new cosmetics, whatever – those are the carrots that get you to try content. We talk a lot about carrots and sticks in game design, with carrots being the things you want and sticks being what you don’t. And intentionally or not, I think that hits on one of the biggest things that the current crop of WoW designers do not seem to get. He tweeted something the other day that I’ve thought about more than once: namely, that removing tier sets from LFR didn’t convince him to move up to normal raiding it convinced him to drop that part of the game altogether. In this case, I think there’s a whole magazine of bullets.Īlex Ziebart is kind of a big deal for the World of Warcraft community, what with the Blizzard Watch thing. Amidst speculation that 6.2 is the game’s last major content patch, there’s reason to believe that something should be done, that things need to change, that the center cannot hold.Ĭommunity manager Bashiok pointed out on the forums, quite rightly, that there’s rarely a single silver bullet issue that causes these things. But a 30% loss of subscribers tells a story where it is more than a little sick. THOSE WHO REMAIN QUEST WPW FREEAnd while you can feel free to giggle under your breath at those who take this as a sign that the game is dying (7 million subscribers is not exactly a low number), it also does put the game at subscriber numbers below what it had back before The Burning Crusade. Like what? Oh, nothing major, just World of Warcraft completely losing its sub jump from the beginning of the expansion. It’s been a little while, hasn’t it, friends? In the time since I last penned WoW Factor (which missed an installment purely due to transit strangeness – the only time I’ve ever missed a column, I do apologize), some stuff has happened. ![]()
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