World of Warcraft was an amazing game when it first came out. It was groundbreaking in so many ways and even to this day has over seven million players. That being said, it isn't the same game it once was. Its changed, as I mentioned in my last blog. Well, what's changed, and is it good or bad?
Since release, WoW has basically been on a downhill slope of difficulty. Vanilla WoW started fairly easy for new players, but as one leveled up, the difficult ramped up as well. Around level thirty (the highest obtainable level back then was sixty) the game became pretty difficult in many ways. At level sixty the instances were downright brutal, at least at first. As the game progressed and players got better at the game and obtained higher level gear, those instances became somewhat easier, but still had a rather high difficulty level. Group makeup really mattered and we had to work together as a team.
Flash forward to last week. As I mentioned I just started playing WoW again. I'm playing with some newbies who are real world friends of mine. We were delving into an instance that I remember quite well from the old days. Called Black Fathom Deeps, it was a very unpopular instance for one very important reason: it was way out of the way. As players, particularly if you were on the alliance, it was a long walk to reach it's physical location. Its difficulty was higher than the average as well, I believe. As I mentioned last week, actually getting to the physical location of dungeons is no longer required, so reaching it was not an issue.
We ran the instance until about halfway through, at which point I was disconnected. I was playing the tank (The tank is arguably the most important role in any group, since they protect their friends from taking damage) and texted them to let them know what had happened and that I was going to sleep, since I was tired anyways. The rest of the group left and then they proceeded to beat the instance themselves. Two level-appropriate characters, both of which were DPS and unable to heal themselves, completed the instance by themselves. Beyond that, both of the players were big time newbies. If this is all gibberish to you, this is the important part: this would never have happened even a year ago. The game has become ridiculously easy.
Other things have changed as well. Quests are now homogenized to an obscene extent. They don't make me feel like a hero, as they once did, they make me feel like I'm at work, like I have to punch a card so many times before I get another number over my head, so I can do it again. Their is very little variety, there is very little difficulty, there is very little fun. And its a shame, because Blizzard has clearly put in a tremendous amount of work in this last expansion. They've created a new continent with five distinct zones. Its a huge area and its interesting and new. But its also easy. So easy. There's no sense of accomplishment anymore.
The characters have changed too. In vanilla our level progression was simple. Past level nine, every even level we'd gain a talent point to assign as we'd like, every odd level we'd gain a new ability, which we had to pay for. Money was a little harder to come by back then, and I distinctly remember going up in level sometimes and being totally unable to buy any new abilities due to my extreme poverty. It kind of makes sense too, if you think about it. These are heroes venturing into the wild. If they really wanted to make money, they'd get a job.
The level progression has changed. Dramatically. Basically, to put it in a nutshell, Blizzard has been steadily simplifying and dumbing down the talent and leveling system since release. At this point there is so little freedom on how to set up characters now that they all pretty much seem the same. At its core, this is Blizzard taking away our freedom to fail. There no longer is a best spec. There's just the one spec that everyone can pick. And here's the really important thing that I don't think Blizzard gets, without the ability to fail, we never really succeed at anything. You can't have one without the other, and so its nothing. Its terrible. Of all the changes, I think I hate this one the most.
I mentioned money too. Gold used to be very hard to come by. Players were not allowed to ride any kind of mount until level forty, and then the mounts cost one-hundred gold piece. That was quite a bit of gold back than. I was level sixty on my first character long before I could afford my first mount. Add to that the fact that the level sixty, or epic, mount cost one-thousand gold pieces, most players were chronically poor and horseless back than. These days the first mount is unlocked at level twenty, with the epic mount unlocked at level forty. The game is balanced so that characters will have enough money to buy their mounts as they level.
I guess to summarize, the game has been adjusted to cater to the very lowest common denominator. If we were to rank players in terms of skill, one to ten, I would honestly rate myself an eight in most categories (I'm lower in player versus player). And as such, to have a sense of success or achievement, I need a challenge that's set for players with skill similar to mine, maybe one or two points in either direction. The game has now been balanced to be playable, and beatable, by a one. And that's a problem. I can't enjoy beating a one, when I'm an eight. I guess it kind of relates to my world view with politics as well. Its the philosophy of lowering the standards of everyone to accommodate the few.
The point of my article last week was that many players, myself included, find themselves inexorably drawn back to WoW no matter how many times they quit. I'm somewhat relieved, and saddened almost to the point of tears, that this game is no longer WoW as I remember it. Almost everything that made it great is gone. It has changed and evolved until it only vaguely resembles the game it once was. It is a bloated monstrosity and a shadow of its former self, all at once. After less than one month of playing WoW again I've cancelled my subscription. I very highly doubt that I'll be back again. We had good times, times I won't forget, probably ever. But those times are over, and I'm moving on.
This week I talked about my first real love in the realm of Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games. Next week I'll talk about what I like in the genre, and what, to me, would be the perfect MMORPG.
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