Wrath of the Lich King

Most of you that read this probably don't know what I am even referring to much less care about an expansion for an online MMORPG, but this is my blog.. so deal. I have been looking forward to this expansion for quite sometime. I am going to delve into the game design behind MMOs and maybe explain to someone who doesn't play, why I was excited about this expansion.

I have run an online gaming guild for about 10 years now. We have played many different games over the years finally ending up in World of Warcraft (WoW for short) and Warhammer Age of Reckoning (WAR for short). Some of the folks playing WAR have come back to WoW for the expansion.

One of the things that keeps a game like that interesting is the interaction. Any game gets old fast if you are just playing it by yourself. Its like Rock Band for those of you that have played it. I play it solo every now and then, but that gets old real quick. But get a group of people together to play and its a ton more fun. It's the same way with MMOs. Its the people and the interaction that makes it fun and enjoyable. Most nights we'll have 15-20ish people online and on Ventrilo (voice chat software) joking around and having a good time while playing together.

One of the big things to do in MMOs is raiding. Tackling very tough 'end game' level content together. Over the years we have done everything from massive Relic Raids in DAOC with hundereds of people all the way down to heroic instances in WoW which was limited to 5 people. WoW itself, which is where I have played for most of last few years has undergone changes. They used to have standard 5 man instances and then the big raids were 40 mans. The logistics of running a guild or alliance of guilds as we did, to have that many players available on a given night and then coordinating them all to raid together to accomplish a goal was crazy.

I have been a raid leader, the one calling the shots for just about every game we have played. I enjoy it, but it gets very old having to try and keep 40 people at least semi happy and working well together. It got very frustrating trying to keep track of what 39 other people are doing, where your weak spots were, who was causing the problems, etc. Balancing peoples schedules with raid success. Dealing with conflicts. Mediating arugments over loot drops. On and on.

Blizzard made a change with the last expansion. THey opted to move away from the 40 man raids and made the biggest one 25. Our hope was that with this change we could leave the alliance we had behind and do 25 man content on our own as a guild. We did for a while, making it through Gruuls Lair and parts of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. We just didn't have enough consistency to really move foward past that.

The problem? Logistics plain and simple. My guild is made up of adults for the most part. Older people with jobs and families and commitments other than playing games 24/7. So when we are dealing with everyone scheduling their gaming / raiding time around sports games and piano lessons and meetings and homework and bedtimes.. it just got to be a headache to try and get 25 people together at one time with 4 hours available to try and get some raids progressing through the content.

Now there are the 'hardcore' guilds. People in that stage of life with no commitments, no desire to do anything but raid. And they do. 6-7 days a week.. often 8+ hours a night. My guild has never come close to that nor had a desire too. So where does that leave the 'casual' raider as far as getting to see content? For both the original release and the BC expansion, there were sections of the game we missed out on all together as they required stuff from lower difficulty dungeons we had not yet completed to get into them.

Why should I .. as an adult player, be unable to see content because I cannot commited 50 hours a week to raiding? Why should I be unable to experience parts of the game because I am unwilling to try and handle the logistics of 40/25 person raids? Blizzard finally listened for this expansion. All the 25 man content they are putting in has a 10 man mode as well. Meaning we can experience the content with only having to deal with the logistics of getting 10 people together which is quite reasonable. The loot you get from the 10 mans is a notch lower overall, but that is not a big deal. Its still very good and really its the challenge of the content we are looking for anyway.

Its very interesting at online games become more popular, how gaming companies are adapting their games and actually listening to their player base to an extent. There were many design changes to WoW with this expansion that made things much easier for the casual player / raider. Its welcome news to the majority of the players out there. Hopefully listening to the people playing the games will become the norm and not the exception to the rule.