MMO Rant #4: Please Don’t Clone WoW (It’s Not Perfect!)
No, this is not a request for developers to stop trying to “beat” World of Warcraft, or even to stop making games that are a lot like WoW. Sure, I like seeing originality in games, and I don’t just want a prettier version of WoW, but there’s nothing wrong with improving upon what’s out there (see: World of Warcraft made a high quality, streamlined version of EverQuest). What I’m complaining about is the assumption that Blizzard has done just about everything right with WoW, simply because they have really impressive numbers.
Let me clue you in on something: They’ve done a lot of things wrong. Given, they’ve done a lot of things right, but there are a lot of little things that were done rather poorly in World of Warcraft that could easily be remedied. I complain about this more as a gamer than a developer, because I’ve been playing my fair share of WoW lately.
A couple of little bits about WoW that piss me off, and shouldn’t be cloned by other developers: First up, inventory management. It’s horrid. Don’t make me sacrifice half of my inventory space so I can embark upon a few freaking quests. Give me a quest satchel, or make those items I pick up poof into my quest journal so I don’t have to deal with them anymore.
The UI. Oh, it’s great. It’s solid and functional, mostly. But I have to download mods in order to do a lot of things I take for granted in other MMOs. Don’t make me do that. Let me move my mother-effing windows to the locations I want them. You are not smarter than me!
Looting. Uh, why can’t I auto-loot everything on the corpse when that’s what I do 90% of the time? Give me a button that says “Loot All” like the other games do. Don’t make me move my mouse way up to the corner and click four times to get all the items from the corpse.
The last one I’ll mention (and there are a lot more that I surely could mention) is queues. You get 1.3 billion dollars a year from subscriptions. Um, please don’t make me wait for 20 minutes every night when I want to play. I’m not even going to use the “I pay you for it” excuse. Instead, I’ll use the “I’m enthused to play until I have to wait for 20 minutes and don’t even feel like playing anymore” excuse.
In summary, World of Warcraft is not perfect. It is far from perfect. So don’t make a game exactly like WoW under the assumption that they do everything right, because they don’t.
Edit: Note to self, never make a title that actually has very little to do with the article, or you will be called on it and will therefore look like an idiot. The point of this article has nothing to do with asking people not to outright clone WoW. Instead, it’s an article requesting that you don’t take World of Warcraft as the end-all-be-all glorious piece of perfection, and make the same mistakes they did.
The intent was to point out that the game does indeed have flaws, so it’s not an ultimate reference point for making your game great as a whole (you need to take the pertinent points of its success, such as making a polished title and being a good company so you have a great reputation, etc.).
Summary: I should rename this article “WoW Is Not Perfect!”
It is certainly a valid concern that the industry… or those that finance the industry at least… will take the wrong lesson from WoW. “Clone it and they will come” will be money down the toilet unless there is some tangible advantage in a product.
There are a few things that WoW sucks at. Whoever thought that IRC was the ideal model for putting together groups, managing trade, or assembling guilds needs to be taken out and shot. Oh yes, and a safe way to prevent people from being ripped off when asking other players to use various skills on their behalf.
Where another game could blow WoW out of the water on is finding new and improved ways for players to hook up with other players, to find other players to do business with, to conduct safe and sane transactions with other players.
I want a reverse of the auction house, where I can put gold down for anyone who delivers X number of item Y. I want a variation of that where I can put a list of items and some gold down and the crafter who goes and fufills that contract gets the gold while I get the item in the mail.
I want to be able to click on a person and find out 1) what player says about themselves, 2) what the game says about the players and 3) what other players say about the player (and maybe a way to review comments). I want to be able to put praise out for people who have helped me and give other types of comments about people who have really screwed me over, and I’d like an easier way to find out what other people think about player X.
I certainly would be the last to say WoW is perfect … but you can autoloot a corpse by holding down shift when you right click on a glowy.
It even does ‘the right thing’ and doesn’t assume that means you are saying ‘need’ on an item that needs to be rolled on.
Shift + Right Click on a corpse to Loot All. In fact, I find the WoW “way” better than the EQ2 “way” – I disliked having to do in two clicks (click on corpse, then choose Loot All) what I could do in one click (Shift + Right Click).
As far as queues go, and I know you are speaking “as a player”, but what would you have Blizzard do? Shut down character creation on servers that are deemed to have reached their limit so they don’t become overpopulated? Allow you to keep your spot in the queue while you play on another server (tech guys, look out!)? Send Blizzard some pocket money and help them increase their server load?
An honest question. I’m wanting to see where you’d go with this.
Just noticed the new auto-loot feature after I wrote this (which I wrote while waiting in a queue… which I am waiting in now). I like it up until the point at which I have less than 10 inventory slots left, because that’s when I start getting selective about what I loot. Their auto-loot makes it so I have no idea what I’m auto-looting, which I’m not a big fan of.
If I were them on this one, I’d let people Shift+Click to loot all after opening up the loot window (in addition to what they do now) so you can glance at everything before looting it all if you want to.
On the queues: If possible, add more server clusters to all of your higher population servers. It may very well take $100,000+ on each big server to remedy the situation, but it would be worth it. Alternatively, they could institute a FFXI style “invite” policy for these servers. In order to make a character on the server, you either:
A) Need a character on that server already.
B) Need to know someone on that server who can give you an invite code (single use, limited number obtained per X period of time).
This would prevent people from deciding to roll up a character on a server like Draenor that is already overpopulated.
You could also allow free transfers from the top 10 or so highest pop servers to the bottom 10 population servers at all times, perhaps providing some incentive for doing so.
Whatever the case may be, I’m sitting here in a 25 minute queue waiting to play the damn game, and I’m only not playing because my laptop ran out of battery power and I didn’t notice.
Queues are annoying, but so is being told I can log in and it just kicks me right out. (Thats whats happening to me right now).
The auto-loot could be better (by the way, theres an autoloot-all switch in the interface config menu now) by allowing configuration, or like BG said, a post-open autoloot (leftclick the frame, something).
The new LFG/LFM feature is nice, but it feels… I don’t know, complicated. I was looking for a WC group, and LFG/LFM filled up my group pretty quick. Then someone left. I turned on LFM, but never saw anything happen. We ended up disbanding after some a-hole helped us kill one of the named and left without warning, and we were down to 3.
The UI issue is a big one for me – EQ2 had great UI features. I like that WoW is so configurable through Lua scripts, but since they seem to significantly change the API through every patch, it breaks things in very odd ways. Things like moving around any window, even resizing and scaling windows, bars, etc should be painless. Keybinding is a pain too. I want to bind my second and third bars, but how do I know which are coming out of the ‘pool’ of bars 1-9, and which are independant?
Joining servers is a pain too. They’ve got lots of servers, so the interface needs to be more friendly. First, show me the servers I have characters on. I don’t understand why this is hard. Make it obvious what ‘Full’ means, because it doesnt necessarily mean you’re going to get queued, and ‘High’ doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get queued.
I’m still having fun – but like BG said, there are lots of things that could be fixed.
Ah, but if you have the time to look at what’s on the corpse, you may as well just click on the items themselves to loot them, IMHO. If you’re checking what’s there, you’re probably already scrolling over each item anyway and most enemies don’t carry so much stuff that you’ll be clicking more than 2 or so times.
Playing WoW, I always use Shift + Right Click to save time and glance over the text log if I notice something I want to check out. I’d be genuinely interested to see if most people do this, or whether an auto-loot option on the loot window when opened would be used by many players (and if so, whether they would all bel ex-EQ2 players).
I was never a fan of the FFXI passport myself (I spent 2 days trying to get onto the server by rerolling characters while my friends tried to save enough money for a passport), but if implemented only when the server reached capacity – I wouldn’t mind seeing that work. Though, I can just picture the blackmarket now…
Oh, and I’ve been voided? Judging by the cool name, that can only be a good thing.
With bags being way too expensive for new players/characters, autoloot just doesnt work. For mobs that drop multiple items, I want a one-click once the corpse is open, if I deem fit. The QuickLoot mod does this, I think. Shouldn’t be any reason its not built in.
yeah, a passport system would be best once the server is say 80% full – or something. Us americans got the shaft on FFXI, so who knows if they had a different solution at opening.
You were voided when you weren’t posting, and I just haven’t devoided you… or dioved you. I suppose I could do that now, but I’m still not sure if you’re going to disappear into nothingness again. Pls don’t pull another anyuzer. Kkthxbye.
Just as a little bonus I have been working with my brothers to create 5 Instant download UI_Mods which have been certified by Blizzard already that will completely eliminate your griping =D.
In about three days I’ll post the link to this phat loot
BTW We’ve been working on these Mods for about 4 months now, just thought I’d add that.
except for the thing with the queues….
MMO Rant #4: Please Don?t Clone WoW
[...] Except that, as I read it, he’s actually saying “when you clone WoW, please fix these interface annoyances.” And no offense, Ryan, but that’s not a very deep change (as important as interface is — and it’s incredibly important — basing clone-ness on how autoloot works seems a little bit superficial to me). [...]
Umm…
If someone made a game which was exactly like WoW, only with fixes for these problems, I’d probably still call it a WoW clone.
How about “Please don’t clone WoW, because a good amount of people think DIKU is lame”?
[...] With Enough Generations Of Cloning The DNA Breaks Down: Nerfbat says “Stop cloning World of Warcraft“, then defines not cloning World of Warcraft as “cloning World of Warcraft, minus a few annoyances in the interface”. HRose and Raph both call him on it within minutes of each other. Transcontinental blogosphere GO! [...]
Note that the point of this article isn’t actually saying not to clone WoW, it’s to point out that World of Warcraft, even in all its splendor, is far from perfect. In addition to it being imperfect, please don’t just make a WoW clone. The title was intentionally misleading.
Heh… sorry that you have had to post that on so many different sites now.
Its all your fault Raph!
I like autoloot exactly the way it works in WoW, go figure.
Of all the things I’d like to NOT see cloned, pack management and travel time are among the biggest, but those are apparently some kind of staple of the MMORPG genre, WoW simply cloned them from elsewhere.
[Blizzard gets] 1.3 billion dollars a year from subscriptions.
Actually, no they don’t. They are making a lot of money, but not quite that much. A quick bit of research turns up some interesting info about how much money is really being made in China. This also says some potentially interesting things about non-Chinese WoW subscription figures; subscriptions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia may have been falling considerably over the past few months.
Cosmik wrote:
As far as queues go,[...] what would you have Blizzard do?
Just about anything else besides what they are doing?
One of my gripes was that they took the server my friends and I were playing on, one we chose because we wanted a low population and no queues, and let people from a higher population server transfer there. Guess what happened! Yep, we got to enjoy queues during peak times even though we picked a low-population server to avoid them. I’m sure it was great for the people transferring in, they only had to wait 15 minutes instead of a supposed hour wait on their old server. Didn’t make me happier, though.
Not a coincidence that my friends and I stopped playing around that time. Didn’t care for WoW-style raiding and didn’t feel like fighting queues to play together after reaching 60.
My thoughts.
why can’t u just uber leetsauce all your way to lvl 60 with access to every single item ingame within a day since they are all accessible anyway?
seriously lol.
cloning WoW. But I could be wrong. i{content: normal !important}
Psychochild: I’m still sticking to the consumer-view math, because I still believe they make enough money to fix the queue problem.
lol seriously: I shouldn’t have approved that comment. Leaving out “Loot All” is dumb because it has become pretty standard in MMOs, and there’s no real argument I can come up with to disallow it from happening.
I?m still sticking to the consumer-view math, because I still believe they make enough money to fix the queue problem.
I’m not saying they can’t afford the machines. They could easily drop a few hundred thousand on new hardware to make more servers if they’re suffering from such popularity. (To quote Dave Rickey, “Please, God, give me that problem!”) But, they can still afford that even if they’re making “only” a large fraction of that amount, too.
The bigger news from my research is how much WoW has potentially lost in the non-Chinese territories. The conventional wisdom was that they had about 3 million earlier this year, now they’re down to about 1.5 million if the figures I found are correct. That’s a considerable drop, and supports your position that WoW indeed isn’ t perfect. This may also be why they’re skittish about commiting more resources to “solving” the queue problem. After all, queues mean they’re popular, right?
Have fun.
I would totally believe that WoW is losing subscribers in non-Chinese areas as I’ve known quite a few people who have quit, and all for the same reason: Levelling is fun and easy, once you hit 60 its raiding, farming and repetition, all things you really didn’t experience from 1 to 60. Only two types of people seem to stick around for the post-60 game, PvPers who like the battlegrounds style of play and Raiders. Everyone else (intentional generalization) levels a couple or three characters to 60 and cancels.
Going to jump in on the WoW post 60 sucks bandwagon here. It’s not that the end game is crap, it’s not (ok, well, it is in so far as it made me quit heh). It’s very stock standard high end raid imo. The problem is that unlike other games that have high end raid content, a player isn’t really exposed to it pre 60. Suddenly the player dings 60 and the game doesn’t change just change gears, it changes direction completly. And thats a really hard pill to swallow, I mean c’mon, I hit 60 fer christs sake, I’ve been looking towards this moment and this part of the game for 59 levels, and this is what it turns out to be.
Unlike other games, DAoC, EQ for example where I had a very good idea of what the “end game” was whilst still only mid-level, WoW was very much a slap in the face, a very bitter pill to swallow. Most games I quit burnt out but not disgruntled. WoW I quit disgruntled not even close to a burn out.
Why does anyone pay a monthly fee for a game that they have to wait in line to play? Seriously, why?
Cyan, thats exactly the rub – for a game that you pay for regularly (whether it be monthly or otherwise), you expect to be able to PLAY said game.
I think there are plenty of ideas to alleviate the queue problem, brought up above and probably some others we haven’t mentioned, but in the case that a queue is necessary… make the experience somehow pleasant? I don’t know, minigames or something. Or be able to minimize the game and have a popup dialog or other message saying you’re in.
or at least a minimal set of guild tools (chat/basic management for officers). The queue system sounds like such a buzzkill.
Yep – with one or two criticisms of the great and powerful WoW, the apologizers come out in defense. The point, as I see the article’s original intent, was to tell devs not to re-implement the server, client & interface of WoW. So in that vein, here’s my list:
1) Make guilds inter-competitive: Thrall should have a favorite guild and assign a MAJOR quest once per week. To maintain the most favored guild status, the guild must be the highest rated X (money donated, Scourge kills, battleground wins). So the guild must retain the guild favor AND succeed on the quest.
2) Character “crowns” – same thing as above, only on players, done per player class. “Land’s Paladin” or something because the paladin helped a bunch of lowbies through another quest, and the lowbies voted at the end of the dungeon (or similar).
3) True battlegrounds. Currently, players can raid, and even kill race leaders. This shouldn’t even be possible unless one side or the other is dominating a server.
4) Free for all. At least one or two servers.
5) Kill the chats. The only chats there should be is Team and Guild chats. And open /shout is stupid, annoying. If you want to team, implement a queue system, find other ways to have players hook up. At least implement it from a strict RP server perspective.
6) Reward guild leaders of large sizes monetarily.
7) Guild leaders should be able to implement quests for advancement within the guild. Money, Faction fame, Kills, Drops and Level.
==
Side effects of the success of WoW should be “forgivable” in some instances. For example, the side effect of a 20 minute wait, Blizzard needed to make a decision about this: do we take money and run or do we support a specific client level experience.
They chose the former. About two months later of tons of waiting, that’s when I quit. They should have at least implemented a minigame about the servers’ activities.
MutantForHire — the game you’re referring to is Eve Online, which has a robust economic system that can be as complex as you want (much more complex than I can get into here), as well as the ability to set your own (or your company/guild’s) faction for other players/guilds.
What I find amazing is that there are many people that I’ve spoken with (or read) who have very similar opinions to myself about certain concepts — including many of Ryan’s thoughts. Yet I haven’t found a game which espouses those ideals. So who out there is “doing it right” ?? Have we seen it yet? Is it in development still?
I agree the more seamless you can make the gameplay in respect to non-action functions, the better off you’ll be.
Loading times, ques, etc have got to be the worst category – this is essentially likened to dead air time on TV or Radio.
Secondary to that would be “management related” functions such as finding groups, sorting inventory, banking, controlling character movements and camera angles, etc.
If I was collecting things IRL, I would logically group the items into like classes, not necessarily pile them into my bags LIFO. Adding some intelligence to where looted items are placed or how they are grouped in relation to my storage slots would make the confusing explosion that occurs whenever I hit the “open all bags” macro a bit less daunting. Even better, how about the ability to sort through your inventory without having to tooltip every icon that looks similar to what you *think* you’re looking for (after of course you’re able to find it).
I would say third to this would be look and feel type improvements. I don’t know about you, but I have found some seriously graphically challenged games addicting because they play very well, and the management aspects are very smooth.
You’ve just sold me on WoW. Honestly, if the only things you can complain about on the top of your head are tiny bags and non-movable windows then I’d say WoW is a pretty damn good MMO.
WoW is a good game. The few things I mentioned here are far from all I can complain about, but I’ve tried to keep my posts relatively short recently because people get tired of reading my crap after a while.
If World of Warcraft wasn’t a good game, there wouldn’t be so many people playing it.
I have to complain only about two things:
1.
Not enough bag space in general, even with five bags
2.
The Soulbound concept is most annoying. (Yes, it might be supposed to keep the urge of buying off ebay a bit down. But I don’t think that worked)
[...] In response to Nerbat’s article, Raph writes, “…he’s actually saying “when you clone WoW, please fix these interface annoyances.” And no offense, Ryan, but that’s not a very deep change (as important as interface is — and it’s incredibly important — basing clone-ness on how autoloot works seems a little bit superficial to me)”. [...]
No, WoW is not perfect, but then again no other game (( EQ live, EQ2, Vanguard)) are perfect either. I agree with you that there is many good things in WoW that I honestly wish other games would do as well, but then you do run that risk of just becoming a WoW copy cat.
Still it would be interesting to see a list of what people really like about each of these games, and of course the dislike list. Yes, some times I wish the best parts of each on line game I have ever played were taken and placed into one game.
Like Vanguard, I was hoping for something new, and in many ways it is, but I get this feeling that they copied too many things from WoW.
The Problem that I see now is that any new online game faces being compared to WoW. At one time it was EQ live other games were being compared to. I think no matter what, any new online is going to be compared to another.
Question is, is it possible to make a new and fresh online game that is totally different than anything out there, without falling back on borrowing ideas from this game or that? Have all new game ideas been used up?
I left WoW because they tend to cater to the most popular classes. The most popular classes will continuously get the less popular classes nerfed. All in all I got sick of their nerfbat.
They had months to thoroughly test the power of each class, radical nerfs should not be needed. Guild wars did class balancing far better, and WoW could learn a few things from that game.
Schoulayer: Nope, the less played classes got a boost, the most played classes a nerf. And I think they do it pretty well, as long as you remember you cannot make a game balanced for 1v1 and 5v5 at the same time!
I quit WoW not because of the game, it’s a fun game, but becuase of the player base. Once you loose your mates due to a long break or if they simply quit, it is hard to cope with the pick up groups as most are half-afk’ing/ annoying /aggro-junkie kids. WoW opened up the market for an entire new MMO group.. and this has it’s disadvantages! I won’t be choosing my next MMO on player base, but on maturity. For expample: AoC instead of WAR.
awsome dude
There are many good things about wow. Wow is going to fail eventually. I believe there last patch is going to be a start.
The bad issue with wow is the amount of time you consume to progress. They made it easier with BC to progress for casual players. With Wotlk, it was even easier. But with patch 3.1 they regressed back to Hard Core Raider style.
If they didn’t notice, their subscription increase was in parallel with these easier progressions. People will spend a good amount of time farming, ect.. ect.. but now it has become too much of a time consumption. In the end, all wow will have are people who don’t really have a serious job. Unfortunately, those type of people have issues paying for an account on a regular basis. its already starting to happen. Unless you have a guild that has 500 players in it, its hard to get everyone together to progress, even then it takes too much strategy now, making the game more work than pleasure. Even with large guilds, they fall apart because their leaders can not keep that many people together and have a real life at the same time. Too much work.
What makes wow successfull is the social character building. I’m not talking about RP but rather forming a guild relationship with people. Once the game become too much business and work rather than a pleasant social experience, the game will fail. This seems to be the direction the game is taking.
So the next MMO will have to be fantasy based like wow. The same classes and such. rather than focusing on making the playing aspect of the game harder though, the focus needs to be on providing new experiences for social groups. Wow seems to have new experience and challenge together. This is bad. It causes the weakest link to be an outcast and sets up internal conflict. This destroys the very part of the game that makes it succesfull–relationship building.
In addition, the new game should not equate new content to higher levels in both the character and mobs. This goes back to the social aspect again. it was hard enough finding friends to level with, now you have to go through 80 levels to get up to par with your friends, and that doesn’t include rep grinding, obtaining gear, running all those instances for gear, building proffessions, ect. ect…. What next 100, 120, 300 levels? At what point does building new relaionships with the payers become totally out of reach?
Bottom line, the game is loosing its social aspect as the player base is not constantly getting refresh due to higher levels and complexity fo the game. wow was successfull because it was so simple, but they made the mistake of being envaded by lovers of the game, whom are now in their development process and making the game way too complex and time consuming. Sooner or later they will run out of players at the high end because no one likes to fail at a game when the depedent factor is the playing style of another character. On the lower end, no one will be able to build relationships fast enough because they are taking too long to level. Its almost like the game is becoming bi polar. With one group of players at the lower end and the other at the higher end and there is no middle ground or balance. Eventually, if you don’t start off the game with a group of friends you will be become so bored you will just quit–no new players. This is very bad.