Changing a virtual world

It is impossible to predict what one player in a MMO will do next. Most of the time he will probably just play the game "as intended" by the developers. But the next moment you might find him stripped naked dancing on the mailbox in Orgrimmar, or "singing" the national anthem in Barrens General chat IN ALL CAPS. But while individual behavior is unpredictable, the behavior of the player community as a whole reacts very strongly to external influences, to the rules of game play, and especially to the rewards that are handed out. Any changes to the game have a strong influence on general player behavior.

The latest changes to the World of Warcraft PvP reward system are a prime example. Before the patch getting a decent PvP reward was harder than getting a similar reward from other activities. Therefore a comparatively small number of people was interested in PvP. Blizzard had to introduce cross-server battlegroups with up to 20 servers per group to gather enough players that the battlegrounds stayed open most of the time. After the patch PvP was suddenly the easiest way for a casual solo player to gain epic items. And the reaction to that was very strong, the interest in PvP grew enourmously. When previously there were 5 Arathi Basin battlegrounds open, now there were over 100.

Don't get me wrong. In my "easy epics" article I wasn't complaining that people could now get epics in an easier way. Just the opposite, my warrior who couldn't get epics before, because he was not my "main" character in the guild is now happily participating in PvP to get some decent equipment. But it appears obvious that Blizzard totally miscalculated the strong effect that these rule changes would have on the behavior of the players. The hardware on which the PvP battlegrounds are run simply isn't adequate for the number of players now interested in doing PvP. They made PvP very popular, but at the same time they got many players cursing about Blizzard, because there is lag, players get stuck in battlegrounds, or battlegrounds have to be reset and everybody is kicked out in mid-battle.

These changes in the last patch also sabotaged the effect of another improvement, the much improved LFG system. The new system is a huge improvement over the old system, a very good change. If the improved LFG system would have been the only change in the patch, you could have expected an increase in the number of pickup groups going to places like Scholomance, just because the new system makes finding a more or less balanced group so much easier. But spending X hours in a PvP battleground without organizing a group at all is now more likely to give you a decent reward than spending the same X hours in pickup groups in Scholomance. Therefore less people than before are interested in doing 5-man groups. PvP has lots of advantages now, you can log on, sign up for a battleground, get into battle in less than a minute, and stay for as little or as long as you like, without having to organize your timing with others. It is a pseudo-solo activity. Organizing a PvP group might be more effective for some battlegrounds, and if that group is with your friends it might be more fun. But anything that can be soloed and gives good rewards will always draw a bigger crowd.

Now there is some hope that some people just did PvP right after the patch, because they want to try out everything that is new. And some other people might get the PvP reward they wanted in a week or two and then stop doing battlegrounds. But there is also a risk that the battlegrounds will remain overcrowded, laggy and unstable, with more people having time to play over the holidays. That would put Blizzard in quite a bind. Getting additional server hardware up and running fast isn't that easy. And with the Burning Crusade expansion coming out in 5 weeks it is likely that the next big change to the game will leave the battlegrounds much less popular, so investing a lot in hardware now might not even be wise. On the other hand Blizzard can't easily rectify the balance between PvP and PvE. If they put out another patch next week which doubled the honor point cost of all PvP reward items, a huge crowd of players would be *very* unhappy. Blizzard probably doesn't want better balance at the price of the players coming after them with torches and pitchforks. Their least bad option is to leave everything as it is, fix their server problems with bandaids as good as they can, and wait for the expansion to solve this particular problem. They *wanted* to make PvP more popular, but they succeeded a bit too well. Their beta test couldn't predict that, because there were too few people on the beta servers to fill a battleground, and there are no cross-test-realm battlegrounds.

So you see how changes can be dangerous to a game, because they can have unforeseen effects on the behavior of the crowd. Which is why the Blizzard developers reserve for themselves a monopoly on changing the World of Warcraft. In other games players can have a permanent influence on the shape of the world, for example by building houses. If on one Star Wars Galaxies world the top crafters of the server decide to found a player-run city and all open a shop at that one location, that is changing the travel patterns of the player crowd on that server. In a MMO in which guilds could conquer territories and structures, the influence of players on the behavior of other players would be even larger. Many players would like to be able to have such influence, but it is hard to develop a system which doesn't end up with some unintended negative consequences. Blizzard is carefully experimenting with introducing more player-controlled changes, like the ability to conquer villages for one faction in Outland. But up to now they haven't come up with anything that gives the players the impression to leave a permanent mark on the world, without ruining the game for others. Many players complain that apart from patches the world never changes, always remains the same or resets to the same state. But when I see what havoc the well-intentioned changes from Blizzard developers can cause, I wonder if Blizzard being careful with player-run changes to the world isn't the wiser approach.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link