Reverse network effect

During the dot.com years, many people talked about the network effect. A technology like the telephone, e-mail, or internet chat becomes more valuable to its users, the more users there are. Because there are more users, every user can communicate with more different people, and that attracts even more people to buy into the technology. Unfortunately this network effect works in two directions, and right now World of Warcraft is suffering from a reverse network effect for me.

People are leaving World of Warcraft. Some are powergamers that have been level 60 for several months now, and got sick and tired of seeing always the same few level 60 dungeons. Others are casual gamers, but after 7-and-a-half months of Euro WoW even casual gamers reached level 60. And now they find that on a casual schedule of playing an hour here, and an hour there, you can't really do much at level 60. You need longer game sessions to do dungeons and raids. And even PvP takes a long time, due to long waiting queues.

So in my guild the number of people online on a typical evening has dropped dramatically. Some have already said their goodbyes on the guild forum. Some are still subscribed, but play a lot less often. And with every guild member not online, the game gets less interesting for the remaining people. I was online 4 hours in a row yesterday, and couldn't get a single guild group going. The furthest we got was planning a 10-man raid to Stratholm, but we never got more than 7 people into the raid group, already including people from outside the guild, and we never got a healer. So after over half an hour of standing around, the raid was abandoned.

I should level my priest faster, but playing him all alone isn't much fun, and I'm afraid that by the time he is 60, there won't be anybody left to play with in the guild. Seems many people are planning to move to City of Villains, and after our guild leader decided yesterday that we would play on the US servers, I cancelled my pre-order for the Euro version and pre-ordered the US version from Importmadness instead.

Looking at WoW, and my difficulties to get a group going, I notice that WoW is more than other games dependant on guild groups. The "meeting stones" system to find groups for instances simply doesn't work, because nobody uses it. The system only allows you to sign up for one instance, and then puts you totally blind in a waiting queue, with no idea how many other people there are around wanting to group. The /lfg flag system which other games use is a lot better. Especially FFXI had a good group-finding tool, although the positive effect of the tool was sabotaged by the tough restrictions on group composition. In WoW the best way to find a group is guild chat, because it reaches people everywhere, and you are reasonably certain that you can trust those people. To find a pickup group, you need to go to the busiest city and shout, which is a primitive and badly working method. World of Warcraft could really use a better group finding tool.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link