Filed by NinjaDoll on October 26th, 2008
I don’t usually postulate about games on this blog but World of Warcraft’s Halloween/pre-launch event has got to take the cake for the most ill-conceived server-wide invasion event ever approved by a lead designer, so I’m gonna rant. Y’all can click through if you don’t want to read it.
On the heels of a buggy major patch that has some people unable to log their main characters in, tame exotic pets in spite of 8,000 points in BeastMaster talents, or find their pets because they’re not in the stable OR in the new pet pocket, they run a world event that includes a plague invasion. NPCs are susceptible to infection, and the only way to cure this infection if you’re not near a friendly pally or priest is to use an NPC. Nine times out of ten, the healing NPC is dead. If you aren’t cured quickly, you turn into a zombie. You are then an enemy to every single thing around you…pets, the healer NPC (if it survived), your guildmate, the opposite faction. And if they don’t kill you, the infection will. Guaranteed. One way or another, you’re going to die.
You take a durability hit. You pay handsomely at high levels to fix your gear. You go back because your corpse is there, and if you need to turn in a quest or get a repair, you’re infected again – not because there are still zombies running around, but because they respawn within a minute or so of being eradicated. Everywhere. The banks, the flight points, the inns, the repair spots.
In every single city, across every server, players are pissed. This isn’t a small handful of the normally vocal minority. These are large groups of newly vocal and supremely annoyed subscribers. Whole guilds numbering in the hundreds and individual players numbering in the thousands. Lowbies are having trouble completing quests. There’s no safe place to log out so you can max your rest XP at this point because the event is accelerating. Accelerating in direct proportion to player pissed-offedness.
Having been part of the team that staged the first server-wide invasion event in an online game, DragonRealms (the Gorbesh War, for those of you who don’t know), and being a crack live event producer in my day, I can say from experience that mistakes like these are rookie mistakes. You expect a new team to fling this kinda shit at players without thinking things through because…hell…they launched a whole game without thinking a lot of things through. During the first year, the second year…yeah, ok, this qualifies as rookie time. But a game that’s nearly five years old, that has seen the error of the ways of their closest competitors? C’mon. What the hell was the producer thinking?
“Fun” and “challenge” are not antonymic. In very broad terms, players love something out of the ordinary even if it means there is attendant risk. The number one rule, however, is that players need the ability to opt out of the event – even a worldwide event – so they can pursue their own courses of “fun” and “challenge” while in the game. If that fact is not at the center of any planned event, then the event is doomed to fail in the one place it needs to shine supreme…public opinion.
So while I’m probably not the best live event writer in the history of MMOs, I’m pretty damned great at it and I have some rules for you, Blizzard – and every other online game that wants to run a live invasion-with-(insert your communicable affliction here) event:
- Avoid guaranteed death. If you must use a healing NPC as your primary cure, make sure it’s an NPC that isn’t easy to bring down or has multiple copies sprinkled around the area so players have the option of heading elsewhere. There is nothing worse in a player’s eyes than repeated risk with no gain. It is also not their fault if they find themselves on a piece of real estate without some method of mitigation. That’s your fault, game designer, and you need to get that through your thick skull.
- Don’t make death a durability hit or, alternately, don’t make death a durability hit unless you balance this with compensation. Players are fine with engaging in annoying live events until the cost overtakes the annoyance. Low level players (newbies mostly) have little coin to begin with. High level players have incredibly expensive gear. That said, spending high amounts of gold to repair my legendary items because it takes “forever” to turn in 200 Marks of Sargeras the way you wrote that system is flippin’ ridiculous. Among the many items that need to make it into your backlog is, “identify systems in the vicinity and move the time-consuming ones out of the way.”
- Pick a universally accessible location and make it sacred. I don’t care if it’s the bank, the church, the toilet. Keep your plague generating out of the area so players have one haven in the midst of the madness. Logging in should be a safe maneuver if only for the first 90 seconds, because all CPUs and ISPs are not created equal. Logging out should be…well…not the last thing they ever do in your game.
- Players require advocates in times of high stress. They have to have heroes within their ranks or they very quickly turn maudlin about the event as a whole – even if there’re only selective breaches here or there. In order to entice these heroes, you need to make it worth their while. In the case of WoW, paladins and priests are the obvious heroes but hanging out in all these spots doesn’t do much for them. They need to earn ranks or baubles or titles or some kind of loot that can only be earned with their particular cures. The perk is elitist, sure, but hey – being a hero comes with advantages, n’est-ce pas?
- Tradeskillers have the potential to really reach into your event and stimulate their economy. Why aren’t they a part of the worldwide event? An uber disease potion that uses scarce components is downright dumb. Up the spawn rate on the component! Spread fabrication across all skill groups so everyone has a hand in crafting the cure. The key here is mitigation, by and for the players, but there’s always some developer notion that tradeskillers are not really players. Duh!
- Never, ever get so cocky about your talent as a designer that you skip essential downside discussions, which are as important (if not more important) than writing the event itself. Every person on the design and code teams needs to attend with 12-gauge shotguns ready to blast holes in the plans because a world event touches just about everything. Roleplay the part of a player (because you never really think like one when working on your own game) and figure out how you’d feel five minutes, one hour, ten days into your event. Watch how players utilize the services in cities and towns and plan to move or copy these services elsewhere for the interim. Got fifty inns? Don’t invade all fifty at once, leave five or six untouched – especially if you’re laying siege to major destinations.
- It’s really hilarious when cutlery gets stuck to your character in the course of an invasion. It’s the stuff legends are made of. Sadly, most invasions take themselves too seriously. Make sure there is a fun component or two tossed into the mix, something totally off the wall or out of left field. Death and destruction and a Hampster Dance. Why? Because levity in the midst of calamity is a very good thing.
If you’re a Blizzard developer who happened by here and thinks y’all did all the right planning for this event…y’all didn’t. If you want to debate this with me you’ll find me in Warhammer until your event is over.
The rest of you can debate me here or add your own rules.