The Funeral of WoW Gold

September 10, 2008 - I will say one thing about World of Warcraft: Ashbringer right off the bat - it’s a hell of a lot better than the core World of Warcraft (wow gold) series. Perhaps it’s because a Blizzard employee, Micky Neilson, is writing this mini-series, but it works with the lore in a way that doesn’t feel like window dressing. It also features a far more compelling cast than its counterpart.The catch to working in the WoW storyline however is that Blizzard has created something dense. You don’t screw with this stuff. You could read up on the history of Azeroth for hours and still be missing details. I fully expect world of warcraft’s history to be as deep as Lord of the Rings in a few years. There is a definite agenda here to create a world with a rich history. The more power to them, I say, but that comes at a price - this comic book gets dragged through the mud at some points because of the story its involved with.Ashbringer effectively spans the history of Warcraft, from the end of the second game up until, I suspect, the launch of the latest WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I love the book’s ambition, but its length forces it to move quickly while still recounting a lot of history to be accessible. I think new readers will either get annoyed with the frequent lengthy expositions or be frustrated that the “cool stuff” seems to be happening elsewhere. I’m lucky - I played through Warcraft II and Warcraft III, so I got to see the fall of Arthas. Many readers here are likely not so fortunate.What also works against the book is the pacing. Because of its need to work with extended portions of history while steaming ahead to the point, the script rarely stops long enough to do a significant amount of characterization. To be sure, there is a fair amount, but it never felt enough, like the true prize was being pulled away at the last minute. Were there some way to do less expositon and more character development (recap page!), I think the plot would have played much more effectively.Odd pacing and history lessons aside, there’s quite a bit to like here. The main character, Alexandros Mograine, is an effective lead. Together with his two sons, Mograine is likeable enough; he avoids becoming a dull action hero because of his interactions with his family. As I mentioned before, more would be good, but at least there’s something here. Neilson also does a good job of mixing action with calmer moments. Just when you’re tired of people talking, they get to killing things. Sadly, as I mentioned, much of this talking is merely relaying information to less-experienced readers so they can catch up. That would have been better off developing characters. In this case accessibility slows down the story - there has to be a better way of managing the two.Another very impressive aspect to Ashbringer is Ludo Lullabi. I wasn’t sold on Lullabi after a few issues of the core WoW series. His art was capable but was poorly framed and lacked a lot of finesse. There are still many issues here, but the overall storytelling in this issue is far better and so is the general composition of characters. I suspect this might be due to the partnership with Tony Washington, but it’s hard to say (sadly I don’t have the other books on hand for reference). There are still a few instances of awkward action framing, detail issues and a few cases where Lullabi didn’t allow enough room for the extensive narrative, forcing some 5 million words into a very small space (that one is as much Neilson’s fault as Lullabi’s, I’d say).All in all, Ashbringer is a very capable title that will serve fans of WoW as well as it serves those new to the universe. The art is crisp and very attractive and the characters work well despite a reliance on exposition to catch readers up on the elaborate history of Azeroth. With a little more fine-tuning and balancing, this series could be very memorable. In fact I’m actually wishing it would be a bit longer. Here’s hoping Blizzard directly contributes to more Warcraft comic book efforts.
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This is my first column for DailyGame, and I’m very excited to periodically write for the site about a range of topics concerning home consoles, MMOs and the overall videogame industry. So let’s get to it and talk about the industry’s biggest combined superstar / cash cow: World of Warcraft. (Currency: wow gold)
Anyone who follows the MMO genre and PC gaming knows the second WoW retail expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, is expected to ship this holiday season. While people are excited about the expansion itself, its release begs the business-side question: What impact will it actually have, if any, on worldwide WoW subscriptions? The answer may surprise you.
Let’s look at what we know about WoW subscription numbers to date. It’s fairly well known that MMO lifecycles have three general phases of subscription growth: acquisition, plateau and decline, as shown below.
The acquisition phase starts with launch and is marked by a rapid rise in subscriptions. The plateau phase is that literal plateau portion of the top of the chart, where the number of new subscribers each month roughly equals those who stop playing. Eventually the game starts to consistently lose more subscribers than it adds each month, thus putting the game into the decline phase, as shown by the accelerated drop in subscriptions to the right of the plateau. That decline usually gives way to the flat area at the end, a steady state that can go on for years before an MMO finally gets shut down. Like The Simpsons on TV, a once-great MMO will stay alive as long as it remains sufficiently profitable.
If the chart above shows a typical cumulative active subscription curve for an MMO, what does WoW’s subscription curve look like? MMOG Chart has culled exactly this data from Blizzard press releases and various pieces of information about subscription estimates in North America, Europe and
Asia.
According to the data from each of the three regions, subscriptions have been growing since WoW’s November 2004 launch, except for a slight dip in Europe in late 2005. Growth in Asia has far exceeded North America and Europe, which is not surprising considering China’s broadband penetration growth and Asia’s history of large MMOs before world of warcraft, particularly Lineage. However, WoW’s initial growth finally slowed by mid-2006, at the time appearing as though WoW was headed for its plateau. But with news of The Buring Crusade expansion coming in January 2007, subscription numbers picked up again in the second half of 2006, a growth pattern that continued through 2007, though not as fast as before.
Aside from the assumed effect of The Burning Crusade in January 2007, each holiday period (2005, 2006 and 2007) so far has seen a boost in subscriptions as Blizzard has been very aggressive with advertising and PR around each holiday period in WoW’s life.
What we know from examining WoW and other massively multiplayer games is that once they leave the launch phase, the only thing that usually increases subscriptions — or at least slows the churn — is the release of new, meaningful content. This content is either in the form of patches, such as the WoW 2.4 patch this past March that included a fairly significant amount of free content, or retail expansion packs such as The Burning Crusade.
Based on the MMOG Chart data, it’s hard to argue that WoW has reached the plateau phase. After all, the game grew by roughly 2 million worldwide subscribers in 2007. We don’t yet have specific information about subscription numbers in 2008, but we do know a few things:
WoW patch 2.3.0, released in late 2007, reduced the amount of time and effort it takes to level a character from 20 to 60, thereby putting a fairly significant dent in the “grind” needed for existing players to level-up additional characters, or for a new subscriber to reach the final stages of the game, where the most popular content is available.
After the March 2008 release of the WoW 2.4 patch, Blizzard announced it would not release any other significant free content updates, because it would be focusing its resources on releasing Wrath of the Lich King by the end of 2008. This might support churn, at least temporarily, as subscribers who already have maxed-out Level 70 characters might feel less compelled to continue playing until the release of new content.
Age of Conon, a competing fantasy-based MMO released by Funcom in May, is widely believed to have lured tens of thousands of players away from WoW, at least temporarily.
Blizzard made WoW available in Russian in August 2008, opening the game up to a potentially large new audience with a rising gaming industry.
It’s clear that Blizzard is still aggressively trying to grow the WoW subscriber base. One good indication of exactly how much growth there has been in 2008 is available from Warcraft Realms, a site that tracks player activity each month since May 2005. Take a look at the chart below for the combined U.S./Europe player base:

Don’t look at the magnitude of the numbers, as it is a sample using a volunteer census method. Rather, look at the shape of the chart. Amazingly, it mirrors the same growth pattern from the game’s launch to December 2006. The January 2007 release of The Burning Crusade saw a huge increase in active players, but this growth almost completely receded by the following Fall, indicating that perhaps the expansion simply brought back many lapsed WoW subscribers. The next peak, in early 2008, coincides with the annual Blizzard holiday WoW marketing blitz as well the previously mentioned 2.3.0 patch.
After all the volatility in the Warcraft Realms chart since The Burning Crusade’s release, the total active players (again for EU + U.S.) has fallen to only slightly above where it was in December 2006, before The Burning Crusade launched. All this chart estimates is the number of active players; it does not necessarily reflect a drop in subscriptions. Given how the growth has not been steady since The Burning Crusade’s release, it does give credence to the idea that WoW has entered a plateau phase again. And without major content releases, WoW playing activity is now returning a “base” level, possibly an indicator that overall subscription levels would have hit the plateau well before now if not for such releases.
Based on the semi-scientific analysis of the above data, the current 10+ million subscriber base and how the market reacted to The Burning Crusade’s release, it is quite possible that Wrath of the Lich King will sell at least 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone in the first days of release, and an additional two to three times that number in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world combined. As for what Wrath of the Lich King will do to subscription levels, it will certainly retain most existing subscribers, and it will likely lure back lapsed ones as well. It’s very likely we might see WoW pass 11 million worldwide subscribers by mid 2009. The question is, how many of them will truly be new, and how long will they stay?
What’s all but guaranteed is that a huge spike in the number of active players will follow the Wrath of the Lich King release, and subscriber numbers will rise as well. But given what we’ve seen so far in 2008, it is likely that active players might level-off again. If at the end of 2009 WoW’s total subscription numbers are less than 10 percent higher than they were when 2009 started, I will submit that WoW will have officially entered its plateau phase. But even if that transpires, and if after four to five years WoW has declined and leveled-off into a steady state of a mere three or four million worldwide subscribers, it will still be a cash cow.
– Jeremy Miller
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“My experience with raids is mostly through playing,” Schubert admits, “so this is all theoretical mumbo jumbo, but I look for patterns.”Many claim that only a very small percentage of world of warcraft (Buy wow gold ) players raid, but research found that “more than half of the level 70 characters have a piece of raid loot on their character. When they reach level 70, they don’t want to stop, and they at least give raiding a try.”A raid encounter is “a Mario boss,” he says, “only with 25-40 people.” The puzzle is designed for that amount of people. With Mario, there are a number of things he can do, and you know what those are. “The problem with raid encounters is you don’t know what everyone can do.” You try to design raid encounters that require a mix, but you don’t know who’s going to show up. Players have certain tools, but not everyone has everything.In a game like Everquest 2, a boss can manipulate players via the player’s magic pool, because everyone has it. Positioning is another common element. “The reason positioning is so heavily used,” he says, “is that it’s a tool everybody has. Everybody can determine a position.”Casual players are an important consideration as well. “How many people can die in your fight before the whole thing falls apart is directly correlated to how casual-friendly that game is. Husbands, wives, girlfriends, are all bringing more casual people,” says Schubert.WoW is approachable in this way, but if only one person has to die in order to fail a raid, it’s less likely you’ll bring those casuals, and it’ll be more hardcore oriented. This has difficult social implications.Considerations When Designing EndgamesIt should be content-heavy, while watching for overpowered classes. Repetition is a concern - how many times do people have to kill the same boss? “If you have a really really really long raid dungeon, players are going to kill the first boss a whole lot more than the last boss,” Schubert advises, “so you should consider how you reward them for that.”The bench – if you need 25 to raid, you need to have 35 people in case your main tank is sick or you lose your healer. But this also means you have a lot of people sitting around doing nothing – “Most people aren’t going to sit on the bench forever,” Schubert says. “This creates real politics that is a headache for your guildmaster to manage.”Considerations For Endgame PhysicalityTechnology – can your server handle 100 people versus 100 people?How do you test it? “In Shadowbane, we redid our siege system a month and a half before it went live,” Schubert says. “We basically had one iteration of our game, played for a month and a half before we went live. Is that enough time to determine whether a game is balanced, fair, and stable? From experience, I can tell you no, no, and no.”Fragility – if the endgame depends on a guild, and there are key players, the guild may be crippled when they lose that player.Critical mass – what happens if your game doesn’t get enough people for it to take off? Or more likely, what happens if you lose people, and you don’t have enough for a raid or an endgame?Interface – endgame interfaces tend to look much less like the interface of a lower level game. You can’t play endgame of World of Warcraft (Currency: wow gold) with the newbie interface.Homework – “every time you add a consumable – a potion, or a stim-pack – you have to think about how you’re creating homework players will see as necessary before they get into that raid,” says Schubert. Players will be grinding to get things they think they need for the raid.Guild management – managing a guild is difficult and fiddly, says Schubert. “For the love of god, will someone please design an MMO that gives these guys the tools they need?”Matchmaking – “if you can get people who are likeminded together, your endgame is going to be stickier.”Final Words“Do massively multiplayer games need an endgame?” poses Schubert. “I argue yes. Massive is your selling proposition, and the endgame does that. That’s the stuff that captures the imagination.”

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History, legacy, and lore is important to players, Schubert says, but not necessarily the history of the game world. More specifically, he means the social history of the game. “When my raiding guild killed [a certain boss] in World of Warcraft (Buy wow gold ), we were the first to do it, and a cutscene was going to be activated, and by the time we went to turn in the quest, there were 250-300 people just standing around waiting for us to turn in the quest. People feel like they want to be part of that history,” Schubert maintains.Aside from the fact that the endgame represents the true massiveness of an MMO, “The other most important thing about elder gameplay is that it occupies the time, and keeps the investment, of your most devoted customers. If we start with the maxim that it costs 10 times as much to get a new player as it does to keep an existing player, which is a pretty standard marketing maxim,” then you should cater to those people, he says. They’re important people to the game, and they need something to do.Territorial ControlOne major endgame scenario is territorial control, which is popular because it’s cheaper, both for players and designers.“One important thing in territorial games is respawn and attrition,” says Schubtert. “How long does it take for a player to get back to the fight?” Designers need to make it so that the balance can change properly such that through attrition someone can lose their respawn points or graveyards. You also don’t want to have players spending the majority of their time running back to the battle.“You don’t have to have a political map,” he says, “but if you don’t, you’re stupid. The thing is a newbie can see these maps, and understand what’s happening.”Looking at WWII online, you can see how territory changes hands from day to day on the game’s front page. “This sells your endgame. It makes people want to come to it, and acts as advertising.”Six Rules Of EndgameSchubert outlined his six overarching endgame rules as such:1 - Player versus player endgames always excite the imagination more than player versus environment endgames.2 - Players aren’t as hardcore as they think they are.3 - 5% of your population can destroy the other 95%.4 - Teamwork and numbers dominate.5 - Fairness matters more than in PVE.6 - Losing repeatedly sucks.“If your endgame is PVP, you need to think about how PVP is introduced to characters at the low levels,” Schubert cautions. “If players decide along the way to the endgame that they don’t like your PVP, they will decide the endgame is not for them.” Argues that you should protect players more at the lower level, so they have a positive PVP experience.“People don’t pay money to suck. People do not want to pay $
15 a month to be the Washington Generals.” This is something he learned when making Shadowbane – “the winners now had lots of resources and the city could thrive, and the losers had nothing. So what happened is eventually the losers stopped logging on, and the winners eventually had nothing to fight.”“We had one server where one guild was so in control, that they banned a player class so they’d have somebody to fight,” said Schubert. Players woke up in the morning and found that they were “wanted.”The solution, he says, is to be able to hit a button, in the game (so to speak) to indicate that one group of players have won, and that they can begin again.

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Damion Schubert, lead combat designer for BioWare Austin, argues that your endgame – what happens when MMO players have finished all the lower level quests and “made it” in the game universe – realizes the true potential of MMOs.“People talk about massively multiplayer online games – whenever they gravitate to one of these games, they always gravitate to one of the big ideas,” says Schubert. “What would happen if you could burn down another guild? What would happen if you had a boss that needed 25 people to kill? What if you had a battle that was 100 ships versus 100 ships?”“The most important thing about your endgame, about elder gameplay, is that it’s one of the few things in your games that’s actually massive. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re talking about here.”“Whenever you’re talking about things with your producers, (the endgame) looks like something to cut,” he says, “because maybe nobody will even get to that level. I think a lot of producers underestimate what happens at the endgame.”It’s commonly said that in World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ), the game starts at level 70. That’s what Elder gameplay is all about. “It represents the third act of the series,” says Schubert. “You’re taking whatever you built inside the gameplay experience, and you’re applying it to something that’s interesting and challenging - you’re at the apex of your character’s development.”Schubert says that most MMOs are pretty easy, most of the time. “It’s like popping bubblewrap. It’s low-investment activities.”The endgame, he says, often represents the game’s true challenge.
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