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What's the secret?
Pappy13
Member Posts: 2,138
I've been kinda thinking about what it is that WoW does so well and why is has been such a huge success and I think I have maybe figured something out.
Drum roll please....they have figured out the "sweet spot".
You see a lot of people think that the harder the game, the better. Well that's just not true. Let me explain. Harder is better when it makes the accomplishment better. The harder the challenge, the better the reward. However there comes a point when the difficulty of the challenge makes the reward seemingly impossible to acheive and it's at that point that it becomes frustrating because you start to feel like you'll never get the reward and therefore all the work is for nought. At that point harder isn't better, it's worse. The point just before you reach that point is the sweet spot. That's the point where the reward still seems just within reach. It can't seem out of reach because that's frustrating and it can't seem too easy to reach because the reward doesn't seem as good.
But there's a catch. The catch is that no 2 people have the exact same sweet spot. What's too challenging for 1 person isn't challenging enough for the next, so how can you satisfy both players? The answer is obvious and at the same time elusive. You keep changing the location of the sweet spot. At first you set it up high. Not so high that no one will reach it, but high enough that the average guy probably won't reach it or won't want to reach it. That keeps the hardcore player happy because he wants to be one of the first to achieve the goal and so he's willing to go way beyond where the average player is willing to go.
But here is where the genius is. Now that the hardcore players have reached the goal, you lower the sweet spot. Why? Isn't it obvious as well? Because now you have a whole new group of people where the sweet spot was out of reach before but now feel it's within reach. Sure, the hardcore are upset because it just became easier to obtain the goal, but a whole lot of new people are happy to get a new goal that is within reach. So how do you make the hard core happy again? You create a whole new sweet spot for them. A lot of the folks that haven't hit the first sweet spot are still busy working on it while another group is off working toward a different one.
So the key is to always maintain a sweet spot for someone. You have to have a lot of sweet spots in the game to keep everyone happy and you also have to keep changing them around so even if it's not a new sweet spot for some, it's new for someone else. Blizzard seems to have mastered this. Think about all the times you've heard the hard core complain about making something too easy that was once harder. Think about all the times you've heard the casuals complain that something was too hard? This is Blizzard manipulating the sweet spots in the game.
Still not following? How about an example. With the first expansion Blizzard adds in a whole bunch of rep grinds with some great rewards for people that do them. Many gobble it up, while others view it as uneccessarily difficult to acheive. So after a time, what does Blizzard do? They lower the rep grinds for some things and completely do away with them for others. The result? Lots of new people get to experience things they never were able to experience before and love the change while all those that have already done the rep grinds are unhappy. But that's okay because Blizzard introduces a whole new set of rep grinds (Release 2.4) and all those that were unhappy about the change are happy again.
Starting to make sense? Yes? No? Don't care?
Comments
No, World of Warcraft did so well because it had one of the smoothest releases of MMORPGs to date. There are virtually no bugs in the game. And secondly, while the graphics are unique and eye-candy galore, it can be run smoothly on older computers. Also, having the fact that there is virtually no lag in the game helps too.
I guess the sweet spot you are referring to is really WoW's ability to have content and new areas to explore throughout any level you are. Most other MMORPGs cannot say this - many of them offer the same repetitive grinding to achieve status - but WoW successfully quest-ed all of it, and (mostly) made it smooth enough so players could go from one area to the next without a huge level jump (with a few exceptions, of course).
WoW had a launch like every other MMO out there. There were bugs, long queues for the servers, and lets not forget that dungeons that were missing from launch. To say that WoW had one of the smoothest launches is a farcry. Sure WoW is stable now but it wasn't all flowers and candy in the beginning.
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I would say it's more that they did a really good job of addressing the things that make people quit games quickly.
1. Very gentle learning curve.
2. Few bugs (bugged quests, bugged mobs, etc. are very rare).
3. Decent balance (any class can be spec'd to be useful and effective).
4. Economy, economy, economy!!!! (I think they've done a better job of keeping the economy under control than any other game - mainly due to the 'bind of pickup' nature of the best items)
5. Easy to solo level (you don't have to wait around to do stuff if you don't want to).
6. Easy to level (so once you hit the cap it's doesn't seem like it will be that bad to level up another entirely different class - many games leave you with the feeling that you'd never go through the grief of leveling another character).
7. Lots of different types of things to do. You can solo, group for instances, go on raids, pvp in battle grounds, pvp in areans, roll twinks, work on crafting, play the auction house, explore. It takes a while for the newness to wear off on all of those things.
There are other things too, but those seem to stand out as some of the important things. It's not that other games haven't addressed those issues, it's just that I can't think of any that have done a decent job at addressing all of them - or having addressed them as well as WoW does.
And most imporantly, when no one else is doing these things well, the only place to hang out in the meantime is WoW.
Edit to add one more: Blizzard has allowed the addon community to flurish instead of crushing it. No single solution will make every player happy, so being able to customize the interface (and some functions) has really helped make it a much more enjoyable game. That community has almost acted as an outside development lab for them - where the function of some of the more popular mods have been added to the default user interface. Other games have taken a different approach to addons and I think their users have suffered as a result.
WoW had a launch like every other MMO out there. There were bugs, long queues for the servers, and lets not forget that dungeons that were missing from launch. To say that WoW had one of the smoothest launches is a farcry. Sure WoW is stable now but it wasn't all flowers and candy in the beginning.
The few issues WoW did suffer from at launch was due to too many players, server queues and loot lag being the big two. Sure there was the odd broken quest or the odd skill that didn'y work right.. there will never be an MMO that launches with 100% of its features and 0% bugs. WoW is easily in the top 3 for the best launches.
Apologies Pappy if I missed these points in your post; I'll add two: 1. Mediocre market, and 2. Players' expectations on quality.
During the past 4 years the MMO market has been relatively stale. Sure we've seen decent success with titles like LoTR, but at least for me, I always felt that I was playing a lesser version of WoW. Until something really innovative and fun (whatever that means) comes along, I think Blizzard will continue see gains.
Part of the reason why the market has been somewhat stale is also due to players having the expectations reset. As many have said WoW is quite a polished game. Was it so at release, that's arguable. Either way, players aren't as patient as they once were. And, gratefully the HMS Potential set sail with Vanguard.
IMO, this is a very very good thing overall for the genre. Players shouldn't let studios get away with releasing utter piles of excrement.
Take a peak over at the Funcom forums. Some of the repeated mantras are 'give it time' or 'every mmo releases with problems'. Valid or not, I can't blame players who've gotten spoiled on the more mature titles.
Great post Pappy!
Ico
Oh, cruel fate, to be thusly boned. Ask not for whom the bone bones. It bones for thee.