Perspective on World Of Warcraft

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Permalink Reply by Ken GB on March 29, 2008 at 10:40am

Added to what was mentioned in that article, it now seems that the FBI/CIA want to 'track' activity in WoW and other online 'games' for suspect behaviour (read that as Terrorism). Digital media makes it far too easy to actually infringe on peoples privacy rights in comparison to the 'real world'. (I'll post the link when I can find it again)

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Gallagher on April 2, 2008 at 11:44pm

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:8uyUTOlRWOEJ:blog.wired.com/27bs...

I think thats it.

Sounds bizzare to me :)

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Permalink Reply by Ken GB on April 3, 2008 at 1:53am

Yes that's the one (posted direct link to it in a comment below). Seems like an attempt to force regulation/government intervention for all the wrong reasons

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Permalink Reply by Boogiepanda on March 31, 2008 at 8:46pm

Players are always going to be unhappy with game mechanics and balance, the longer you play, the more glaring the issues become. Despite any flaws, WoW is an immensely successful venture no matter how you look at it. The game does make a better attempt to balance casual player interest and hard-core interest than many games I have seen, but I have never met a hard core gamer that could not go on and on about the flaws in their "favorite" MMO. Without reading between the lines, you'd never know it was their favorite from what they have to say.

The promise of virtual worlds is that we are seeing more and more control go into the hands of the participant. There are a lot of successful games that provide a very low level of customization (many of the free games in wide proliferation have almost none). How well player contributed content and gaming virtual worlds will mix remains to be seen. It is one thing to be able to affect non-functional aspects of the environment, but entirely another to let players control the horizontal and the vertical. What is interesting is how upset people get when they realize they are not as in control as they thought they were. This is exactly what happens to the players that focus on making the best character they can, min maxing every detail only to find in the next patch the feature they exploited has been "nerfed", but there are many ways this manifests in virtual world games and virtual world communities.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a WoW server where the balance was decided democratically. I doubt there are any "standards" that would help MMOs combat the kinds of problems outlined in the linked article. They are all game balance issues, and the players that really care about such things are never going to be happy. Constant changes at least give them something to do, but the players that don't care are probably going to be annoyed with constant changes.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin McLaughlin on April 2, 2008 at 4:41pm

Ken, I'd be really interested in that link, if you find it (FBI stuff).

Good grief, what an odd article to pick as an example! This essay was a wild rant by a player who obviously wanted a few specific game tweaks to make the world fit his idea of "perfect" better. Most of them are wrong, bad, or just...not thought out at all.

While I agree that some sort of a rubric for evaluating MMOs would be interesting to see, this sort of player rant is NOT where you want it to come from! It's pretty clear that most people (10+ million of them) like WOW pretty much as it is. In fact, it's pretty obvious from all the characters he has made that the article's author likes WOW quite a lot, too! =)

I'm not a real WOW fan myself, but it's more because of the lack of a persistent feel to the world - the lack of VW aspects, really - rather than any specific complaints like that list. Actually, in my opinion WOW is one of the better crafted, better balanced MMORPGs. They did an excellent job building the game they wanted to make - it's just not the game I would prefer to play. My complaint list would focus instead around the static nature of the world, the lack of ability for players to have an impact on their surroundings, the lack of consequences for player action or inaction, and such.

But again, these are not indicative of WOW's overall quality as a game - although they might say something about WOW's ability to claim it is a VW. Of the various MMORPGs, I'd rate WOW as one of the least virtual-worldlike.

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Permalink Reply by Ken GB on April 2, 2008 at 9:34pm

Found it, this is the article on Wired
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/nations-spies-w.html

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