WoW's liberal approach

While Gamespot reports Everquest 2 having 310,000 subscribers now, the number of subscribers of World of Warcraft are twice that, and would be even more if the servers could handle more, and WoW was released in Europe. But if you do a feature by feature comparison, it is hard to explain just what makes World of Warcraft so much more popular.

One possible explanation I was thinking about is that WoW has a more "liberal" approach to letting people play the way they want to. I told you how my level 31 druid got the staff he wanted by doing a dungeon together with a level 60 guild mate. Yesterday I completed another dungeon, the Stockade, in a pickup group in which levels ranged from 28 to 41. And the remarkable thing is that I got decent xp in both cases, and good loot. While in many other games if you group with somebody much higher than you, you don't get xp any more, and there might be restrictions on the loot as well. FFXI was especially bad in that respect, with groups only getting reasonable xp if they were within 2 or 3 levels of each other. EQ2, while having a group level range of about 6 levels, will not drop treasure chests when the slain monster is grey to the highest level member in the group. And even in CoH you need to "sidekick" the lower level members to enable xp for everybody.

Of course the restrictions on group level range are there for a reason: they are supposed to prevent powerleveling. EQ2 is especially fanatic in trying to eliminate this supposed evil; besides the group restrictions they also prevent players from helping others with a quick heal, by making all encounters "locked". You can only heal group members, and people not locked into an encounter. This effectively prevents a level 60 cleric from standing behind a low-level character and helping him to level extra fast. But is such a restriction necessary?

World of Warcraft doesn't seem to think that people have to be slowed down from leveling. It basically offers a fun way to level at quite a reasonable speed while doing quests. This basic leveling speed is already much faster than all incarnations of Everquest and Co., I never felt as if I was grinding a treadmill, but was often surprised that I already leveled again without paying attention. But if I *wanted* to level even faster than that, WoW wouldn't prevent me from doing so. There just wouldn't be any point to it. There is no special reward to reaching level 60, especially not on a PvE server. You can powergame as much as your heart desires, and ignore all the quests and content. But why would you?

While Everquest was a continuous arms race between the developers and the power gamers, and EQ2 continues that tradition, World of Warcraft deals with power gamers in a much more intelligent fashion. It lets them reach level 60 in a month, then they realize that unlike EQ there is no special "raid" zones exclusively for power gamers, they whine a bit on the message boards, and then they quit. Problem solved. The average casual gamer doesn't even notice anything, he is too busy having fun with quests. Furthermore the casual gamer who just happens to want to group with a friend of his who is 10+ levels higher or lower isn't hampered by a stupid restriction which was originally targeted to slow down power gamers.

As long as you keep within the confines of the game (and don't try to hack the client or something), you can do pretty much whatever you want in World of Warcraft. There are much less restrictions which seem arbitrary than in other games. And this liberal approach makes WoW so much more less annoying than its competitors. And up to now it is a success. Very few people have quit the game because it was too easy to level, and a lot of people prefer it because it is not too hard. Now if Blizzard can grow their hardware resources fast enough to keep up with their success, I'm pretty sure they are here to stay and grow. There would need to be a major setback for them not to reach one million subscribers by the end of the year, worldwide.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:23 AM Permanent Link