11 Innovation Lessons From the Creators of World of Warcraft

Ant writes "Colin Stewart's OC Register Inside Innovation blog has up a post discussing Blizzard Entertainment's success in the games industry. According to the site, Blizzard has learned eleven lessons on innovation that can help almost any business. The industry leader used these innovation methods not only to create the world's most popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, but also to keep the game fresh and challenging for more than 10 million players. Because many of those customers pay $15 a month to continue playing, Blizzard's ongoing creative achievement is worth more than $1 billion a year in revenues, not counting the multi-millions it tallies from its other games."

Platitudes

Look, the game is pretty, fun for a while, and very addictive. They took the tried and true method of giving item hoarders, dungeon crawlers, D&D fans, and basic gamers a basic concept that each one could easily get addicted to. TFA had nothing you didn't already know. They basically took the best parts of Evercrack, UO, and D20 systems and made a pretty game out of it. End of article. Making red-colored crack and successfully getting a whole bunch of people addicted to it isn't really that impressive, and neither was TFA.

Re:Platitudes

In some ways you are correct. The game isn't very remarkable or innovative.

But on the other hand, people are finicky. To have kept the subscription count as high as they have for as long as they have is impressive no matter how much you want to label it as obvious and inevitable.

Simply put, Blizzard's best skill has always been to shine and polish an old idea.

Re:Platitudes

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I think the reason that WoW STILL has 10 million subscribers is simply because it takes a LONG time to do things right. Levelling goes very fast(faster than ever since patch 2.3), but grinding for reputation, items, gold, and professions is a huge time-sink, in terms of hours. If you are the kind of person who ISN'T allowed to play for 12 hours a day, it can take many many months to move toward end-game content.

And that is to say nothing about PvP and Battlegrounds. The only other online games I've ever bothered to get into are Quake2 and Quake3. There is something irresistible about CTF and the other battlegrounds games. But to kick ass, you need a twink, which obviates the need for your main to spend all kinds of time grinding to fund your twink.

Then there is arena, where you attempt to twink your main, basically.

To have it all, it takes a huge time investment, which is reflected in the number of subscriptions Blizzard maintains over the long-term.

Now, I am not saying it is wrong for Blizz to extend the gameplay time by making it take forever to get anywhere on foot, or low drop rates, or the price of an epic mount versus the amount one can reasonably grind in say, 50 hours of play.

Well, the travel time actually is nothing short of ridiculous. Travel-time between "flight points" should be instantaneous. Just replace flight points with portals. PLEASE! Travel time between kalimdor and anywhere in outland is just crap. C'mon now.

OTOH, Blizz has been pretty good about regularly adding new content (even outside expansion releases), adjusting item and talent specs, and generally making the game more accessible to people with less time on their hands.

They've struck a good balance between making their product more open to new subscribers, as well as maintaining their long-term customer.

They've executed a well-crafted plan to widen their subscriber base while retaining a solid number of existing customers. That is the hallmark of any successful business. </verbose>

You'd be surprised how non-obvious it is

You'd be surprised how non-obvious it is to some people exactly wth Blizzard did right, even when it's spelled out for them.

E.g., Sony has been in a frenzy to copy the secret sauce of WoW into their own games for years, but it mostly resulted in blunders of epic proportions. Yes, eventually they got some things right-ish by sheer trial an error, but it's been a lot of trial an error, and a lot of changing people's characters and skills completely, for no good reason.

Just as one example, and I'll deliberately pick a mild one, because I'm not trying to start a flame war: the rested xp bonus in WoW. It's been discussed to death since WoW beta, and spelled out repeatedly why it's there and what effects it has, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer to copy it. Right? Well, Sony's first attempt was to go, basically, "oh, yeah? Well, we'll give ten times more in EQ2! And not make you go to an inn either!" So effectively, unless you were in a group all the time and/or playing 16 hours a day, the rested time would rise faster than you could possibly use it. Even as you'd run to the next mob in the middle of nowhere, you'd gain at least half of what you used on the last mob.

Now it's definitely not game-breaking. I did say I'd pick a mild one. And, hey, I'm not gonna say "no" to free xp. But it missed the point by a mile.

As a less mild example, Sony seems to have done a lot of over-simplification to their games (arguably even the much maligned and surrealistic SWG NGE) based on their and their fanboys' view that, surely, WoW only gets so many people because it's simplistic stuff for retards. Actually it's the contrary. WoW is a more complex game by far, and that makes it more interesting. It's intuitive and has a gentle learning curve, as it feeds you that complexity gently and gradually, but that's very different from being oversimplified. Essentially, Sony lobotomized their games, well at least SWG is as good as lobotomized, based on not understanding what they're trying to copy.

So, yes, bleeding obvious as that stuff might seem to _you_, I'd say it's good to see someone spell it out. Because some people seem that unable to comprehend it on their own.

And just to go through that list

Just to go through that list and tell you from first hand experience how non-obvious that can be to some people:

1. RELY ON CRITICS

I've actually been in places where they treat you like an Enemy Of The People criticizing the Communist Party, if you dare question the tiniest detail of their masterpiece. Heck, half the industry still is in a mind that deleting posts and suspending accounts is the right way to deal with bug reports. Sony is still infamous for beaming into space the people protesting one of their most heavy-handed and ill-advised ban-sprees.

Others just let the fanboys run amok and call everyone names if they report a bug or make a sugestion.

Heck, I've worked in one place where even internal criticisms didn't make it past the designer's continent-sized ego.

2. USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT

It should be obvious, but it isn't. I've seen for example FPS where the demos were recorded in god mode. That should have been obvious right there that even the devs can't play it on the normal difficulty setting. It's one of the things that should give one pause for thought, you know: if playing the game as you ship it isn't funny even for you, then why inflict it on the rest of the world like that?

3. MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS

Again, it should be obvious, but it isn't. E.g., one syndrome of many games is to rush to do an expansion pack, while the old crap is left as it is.

But more importantly, it really ties in with #1 and #2 above. What it says there is that long before the customers even see the product, they have internal teams trying to find out what sucks about it. In an industry which routinely ignores even the beta-testers' bug reports, that would explain why Blizzard's games are launched more finshed and polished than other games get after a dozen patches.

4. GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Basically what TFA there really says, is: if your co-workers or testers say "dude, that idea sucks", then listen to them. In fact, see #3, encourage them to be honest and think about which stuff sounds good and which doesn't.

As an example of where that obviously wasn't the case, take SWG's NGE. There's (among many other blunders) a quest for example whose reward is a scope for a sword. Worse yet, it's really a potion, because they don't have item slots and such, so you can't actually attach it to the sword. The very fact that someone just shrugged and coded it like that, tells me that any kind of internal review or criticism, is non-existent or doesn't work. In any normal place, one of the guys who has to script, review or test it, would go "excuse me? am I the only one who thinks it's freaking stupid?" That noone listened, or maybe even they felt so much like a cog with a quota that they didn't even bother reporting it, speaks volumes.

Similarly in EQ2 there still are such dumb quests in the game as killing bears and deer to see if they stole a book. I mean, FFS, what would they do with it and where would they keep it? And then you get to kill your faction's own foresters to see if they stole the book. And that's the good faction, btw. And later you have to beat up badgers until they tell you where a sage is. (And it's not a druid quest or anything.) You have stuff like giving yourself a quest to avenge a knight, then digging up his tomb and taking his shield as a reward. You have stuff like giving yourself quests, and then giving yourself some money and an item as a reward. How schizophrenic is that? Etc, etc, etc. That that kind of mass-produced drivel even made it into the game at all, much less survived there since launch, tells me that their internal review process doesn't work. Or maybe reviews only if you met your quota of lines of script/code.

And again, I've been in one place myself where ideas were a one way street, from the High Priest... err... designer to us peons, and it wasn't the peons' job to criticize them.

5. DESIGN FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CUSTOMERS

Again, this should sound obvious, but it's not.

For a start plenty of places see to go by the idea that if you don't fit their games, then it's your fault and shortcoming. Go away you pesky casual gamer, we don't make games for losers like you. We're hardcore. And certainly have their posses of fanboys let loose to tell everyone just that.

But TFA goes into other details, such as how both the Japanese and the Chinese objected to a Panda dressed in Samurai garb. Or how you'd account for Koreans and Chinese playing in Internet cafes. It takes a certain frame of mind and culture to take such issues seriously, much less try to think of some in advance.

6. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT FAILURES

Actually, here they say that the reason their games are all successful, is that they simply canceled the failures. This is certainly not the norm in the PC Games industry, where any dud is shoved off the door and partially patched later.

7. MOVE QUICKLY, IN PIECES

Basically it just says that they do it iteratively. They build a piece, review it, then build the next one, etc. This is certainly not the norm generally, and definitely not in the games industry. Most just build until the end, and only then try to even debug the behemoth, much less review the gameplay.

8. STATISTICS BOLSTER EXPERIENCE

This is basically the game design variant of "profile before you optimize." This is how you know whether those people whining about holy priests are just whiners, or you have genuinely a problem. The game can generate a ton of statistics for you, so use them.

I can't offer any MMO insider insight here, but I've seen it happen on a MUD. After years of calling everyone a whiner, some dev actually built in some statistics-generator. What do you know? Those whiners were actually right.

Now I'm not saying, "listen to the whiners" necessarily. Listen to your own statistics. Those don't lie, and those don't distort their data according to wishful thinking. They can tell you right there whether those complaining players have some point or not.

9. DEMAND EXCELLENCE OR YOU'LL GET MEDIOCRITY

Pretty much self-explaining. If you set the standards low, people will aim even lower.

10. CREATE A NEW TYPE OF PRODUCT

This one is mostly bull. Blizzard has the merit of polishing the existing genre, but they did _not_ invent MMOs, and weren't pioneers. If there's one game that did help get the ball rolling, it was Everquest. That's when everyone and their grandma suddenly wanted to make a MMO too. And at that, mostly because it looked like a money-printing license. Blizzard was just another company jumping on that bandwagon. They get kudos for being the only ones who didn't do it half-arsed, yes, but they didn't create that new kind of product by any kind of reckoning.

11. OFFER EMPLOYEES SOMETHING EXTRA

This is not only insightful, it's what most wannabe PHB's don't get. For most people, job satisfaction isn't measured in money alone. You may have more success retaining people, and it might even cost less, if it's a fun and relaxed environment, than if you sell your soul and yourself into slavery for a 5% higher wage. It's also more satisfying to stay in one place where you can actually achieve something, and have your achievements acknowledged, than being wage-slave #5131027. Etc.

Admittedly, his example of an advantage isn't exactly unique to Blizzard. Any games company has the advantage that most fresh young programmers would rather make a game, than a boring database program. Even for half the salary. It's how you go from there, that might or might not make a difference. Most places are content to just milk everything out of that naive idealism, e.g., get all the unpaid overtime they can out of you. So they run through employees like the PacMan runs through pills, as by 30's almost everyone is burned out and disillusioned and quits working in that industry.

So it would be more interesting to learn what else makes working for Blizzard fun. That people like to be paid to make games isn't exactly new or unique to them.

Re:Platitudes

Way to miss the point, genius. The article wasn't about WoW, it was about Blizzard's internal policies and processes.

What's an "article"? Is it something you're supposed to read before commenting?

Re:Platitudes

This is absolutely true. Certainly WoW is very polished, and has alot of fun to it. But what keeps you going after your 200th night in the Black Temple or Hyjal, is your sense of obligation to your guildmates. It is the social connectedness people develop with the people they play with that keeps people playing, even when they have grown rather bored with the game.

Congratulations on inventing MMOs

the company created a new type of product line by selling ongoing subscriptions for online access to the game, said Unnikrishnan at CSU Fullerton.
"Blizzard remains ahead of the competition because the company was able to parlay its strength in one game format to create an online service, which created a whole new product line and different type of revenue stream," he said.

Wow. Imagine a world before WoW where there were absolutely no MMOs an no one had ever thought of a monthly fee for these games that didn't exist.

The irony of this whole piece is that just about every single on of Blizzards "innovations" are things Sony Online was doing with EverQuest for half a decade before it (Beta tests, test servers, employees playing the game, upgrades, cancelling titles that didn't work, broad demographics, stats analysis, the fun of a gaming company).

The more interesting thing is, EverQuest only ever achieved roughly a twentieth of WoW's subscription figures. So, more valuable than simply listing the things SOE already did as Blizzard innovations* would be to look at what Blizzard did differently that got them 20 times SOE's subscriber base - and fifty times that of most other competitors.

As a fluff piece, it's nice to congratulate Blizzard for innovations they didn't come up with. The thing is, they evidently did something different and the article manages to miss that far more fascinating angle.

*Note: Not claiming SOE came up with the innovations either. Ultima Online was doing much of it several years earlier still. And they took over from a lot of MUDs, MUSHes, etc. If anything, there've been a series of advances that have been made one at a time, everyone else copying whenever someone else has success with a new idea.

I'd suggest Blizzards real achievements were something more like:

Truly earn loyalty from your customers: People who bought Diablo and Starcraft played for years on a service they didn't have to pay any extra for. Any other company would have turned those servers off once they weren't making money from boxed copies of the game. Blizzard kept providing it and earned a fierce loyalty from their fans where everyone else leaves their fans feeling screwed the moment the dollar signs don't add up in the short term.

Set the barrier of entry LOW: While SOE was playing with the brilliant idea but agonizing experience of StarWars Galaxies and everyone else was chasing prettier graphics, Blizzard put out a game with cartoony graphics that everyone and their mom could play. Ten million general players doing something simpler beats out a few hundred thousand beardy ones and housewives with enough time to learn your complex game mechanics.

Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."

Re:Congratulations on inventing MMOs

Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."

My MMO playing friends would from time to time claim that the continuing fees of MMOs were there at least in part to ensure that there would be continuing updates and new content, aside from server maintenance costs. Naturally, I'd look at it as a slap in the face if, having that attitude, a company asked me to pay an additional charge for that content in the form of an expansion pack.

Something I've always wanted to see would be a serious, impartial, disinterested observer sitting down and going through a point-by-point comparison of WoW, Guild Wars, and Diablo II, and maybe throw in FFXI or some one of the other popular MMOs, just to see what is objectively different between them. It would be interesting to see in light of all the noise of fans crying that such-and-such is an MMO, is worth the money, etc. Of course, that latter point is nearly entirely subjective. Most of what people claim to get out of modern MMOs I was able to get out of games like Halflife--and that without paying every month for it.

Lessons learned

From Blizzard:
1) Money doesn't buy you happiness.
2) Money will buy you lots of shit that make you happy.
3) Did I mention we have lots of money? I know it's not really a lesson, but it's our list and we're rich, beyotch!
4) Money isn't very flavorful. We had a buffet lunch of money once and after the 10th or 11th thousand dollar salad, I had to switch to the lo-carb dressing. Ugh.
5) Money.
6) If you have money, girls (some) will like you for it. As long as you have a proper pre-nup, wear rubbers (always) or get a Vasectomy to reduce risk, enjoy the ride.
7) It's amazing what you can do with money. This one time, we filled the company pool up with crisp dollar bills. The first guy to dive in got massive paper cuts from the crispness. Wow, like millions of dollars worth of cuts. We had to drive him to the hospital, while we used $100 bills to try and stem the flow of blood.
8) The morning commute into the office is so much nicer in my Ferrari. Vroom Vroom my ass, Mazda.
9) Money money money money money!
10) Sometimes, you have more money than you can spend. Paper crafts are so much more fun!
11) Nerf warlocks, bitches.

Totally Crapified Article about Egomaniacs

This is a piece about some egomaniacs that want to express that they're simply smarter than so many others in business.

They actually think that their "11 Innovation Lessons" are new, different, and special.

Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really. They are intrinsic to running any service organization.

Read through them, and ask yourself: would a McDonald's Junior Manager know this as an intrinsic part of his job servicing customers?

The short answer is YES, a junior manager at McDonalds would know 10 of 11 of them. The 11th just doesn't apply to McDonalds. Because Big Macs are perfect.

Re:Totally Crapified Article about Egomaniacs

You may think this list is silly, but certain other MMO makers haven't grasped them.

Sony Online Entertainment, in particular, tends to piss off its userbase on a regular basis. They even totally changed (read: trashed) one of their properties [starwarsgalaxies.com] with about two weeks notice a few years ago.

No innovation at all...

.... but blizzard did something even MORE important - they did a damn good job of giving people what they wanted.

not many people give a fuck for super complex game rules (that's why nerds love DnD) they want something that's fun and group based. WoW gives that.

Blizzard hasn't had big innovative ideas...

... just lots of little ones. There's not a lot in WOW that hasn't been done before in other games, either MMOs or other genres, but what Blizz has done is make the innovations of previous games work. Previous MMORPGs have been innaccessible, imbalanced, prone to exploits, buggy and often just downright boring.
WOW has so often overcome these issues to become one of the biggest games of this decade with a lot of well thought out and well designed gameplay.
Take the whole bind on pickup/bind on equip mechanic for items, meaning that some in game items can be bought and sold freely, but others (usually top tier weapons and armour) can only be gained by achieving in game goals. This means that there is still a viable cash economy, but players cannot simply 'buy' their way to the top, they need to go out and complete quests etc.
Wow was not the first game to feature an ingame economy, but what it did was make the economy fun and useful to players whilst at the same time limiting it's potential to be expolited.

Blizzard's strengths

In my opinion, Blizzard did do a few things differently, but I don't see the ones I'm thinking of in the list.

What they did differently was this:

They made a good UI.
Blizzard usually has good UIs, and WoW's is no exception. They've even modified it over time to add some new things to it (such as additional button bars)... things that were being done by AddOns before.

They allow... no, encourage people to make UI Addons
Certain types of Addons have had the ideas behind them incorporated into the main WoW interface, too. Examples of this include the current Raid UI and the multiple button bars.

They don't nickel and dime you to death. See: EQ2, where even new dungeons (AKA "Adventure Packs") cost money.

Keep It Simple Stupid (the KISS principle)
WoW still has the same 9 classes it started with. While the abilities these classes have has changed over time, it's still easier than juggling 20+ classes like most other MMOs. While there will be a 10th class introduced in the next expansion, it will automatically start at a certain level (although Blizzard hasn't yet said which... rumors say 50 or 60) and will only have to be balanced from that level up.

(This would have been a numbered list, but Slashdot is apparently stripping out ol and ul tags now, despite them being on the Allowed HTML list)

They left out a couple of items.

12. Hire lots of good lawyers

13. Use them.

Pioneers????

Blizzard was one of the pioneers in a new category of game - massively multi-player online role-playing games.

Um...I can think of at least 4 MMOs off the top of my head (I'm sure there are way more) that came out WAY before WOW. What place do you have to be in to be considered a pioneer?

UO gets the pioneer badge for MMOs, IMHO.

EQ gets the 3D pioneer badge for MMOs, IMHO.

Shadowbane was probably the first to do massive battles in a working manner. WOW still doesn't have anything like this - and they actively prevent it actually. I do so miss the nightly attacks on Southshore. They use to crash the server - and that's a problem, so blizz did everything they could to basically push people away from world PVP. And they did a very good job of it. Now it exists as mostly people running around griefing a few people. There's no such thing as an epic PVP battle anymore - BGs/Arenas have turned even PVP into a grind. *snoore*.

So yeah, WOW is pretty cool and they definitely got the glue of MMOs down, but pioneers? Not really. They are behind the curve on several items actually (housing, character customization, mentoring) and the PVP is pretty unbalanced. The UI customzation is awesome however and has set a VERY high watermark for other games to reach.

And actually that puts at the heart of what makes WOW tick - gear. Everything in WOW is way too gear dependent - but this is one of the primary ways they keep people coming. They are the masters of the treadmill - if you just raise your faction to here, you can get that one piece of armor/weapon that will help you to do better in the arenas. So you can get some more weapons and armor. For the Arena.

And before you beat me up, I'm a pretty active WOW player with two accounts and 4 70's. The game can be fun, but they have basically perfected the treadmill.

EK

Re:11 lessons

1. Rely on critics
2. Use your own product
3. Make continual improvements
4. Go back to the drawing board
5. Design for different kinds of customers
6. The importance of frequent failures
7. Move quickly, in pieces
8. Statistics bolster experience
9. Demand excellence or you'll get mediocrity
10. Create a new type of product
11. Offer employees something extra

RTFA [nyud.net]

Re:11 lessons

#12: Post generic bullshit slogans off motivational posters as major new insights

#13: Profit???

Lesson #12

Lesson #12: if they get addicted, they'll pay more.

Re:Lesson #12

if they get addicted, they'll pay more.

Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!" No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more at the same time that it gives you less effect.

WoW is a computer game. It's entertainment, and the secret of its success is that it is entertaining to play. I've been playing it since the beta stress test, and paying the subscription fee throughout. I bought the expansion. In fact I've done all this twice, once for me and once for my wife, who I play it with.

Why? Because it's fun. It's worth the money. I like MMO games, and WoW is hands-down superior to the other games I've tried in every way. Better art (instead of generic Bryce landscapes and Poser NPC's), better class balance (instead of "controller" characters who have no power beyond their ability to help a party), a seamless, dynamic, shared world (instead of walled outdoor "rooms" and doors that unexpectedly trigger loading screens.)

There's meat on those bones, that's why I keep coming back. I know it's popular to hate on WoW, here, but 8 million people play the game not because Blizzard invented a way to send crack cocaine over broadband, but because they created a compelling, entertaining, immersive game experience that's rewarding at all levels and to all kinds of people - not, as it's popular to state, just the people who play it 12 hours a day, grinding for the slightest bump in rep or gear.

Blizzard didn't cheat, people. They haven't managed to enthrall 8 million people by some magic spell or trick of brain chemistry. They did it the hard way - by spending the time and effort to create a compelling, entertaining product that is rewarding to play in a way very, very few video games ever are. I guess the idea that they've earned the success and acclaim they enjoy is too much for some people. If you played WoW and you didn't like it, I don't think you're a bad person or something, but you're not "above the influence" either; you're just someone whose interests lie elsewhere. I wish you the best with whatever those interests might be. (If you didn't play it and you still trash it, you're an idiot who does not know whereof they speak.) Understand that, for me and my wife, and 8 million other people, one of our interests is enjoying World of Warcraft. Not because we're addicted; not because Blizzard has us in the throes of some kind of "addiction"; but because they did the hard work of creating something we don't mind paying to play.

Re:Lesson #12

Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!" No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes physiological changes to your brain that cause you to want it more at the same time that it gives you less effect.

WoW and cocaine share many of the same qualities. Granted, WoW is much less expensive, but they both do some of the same things to you when used in excess. Excessive WoW playing can lead to loss of relationships, friends, jobs, and so on, and we've all heard stories detailing such things, sometimes right here on /.

That said, I've done both. Ironically, one of the things I used to keep myself busy after struggling with cocaine addiction was playing WoW, because it consumed a lot of my time and kept me entertained. I did however eventually quit WoW after I had to play it

more at the same time that it [gave me] less effect.

Still, this wasn't the same type of physiological addiction one could attribute to cocaine. Raiding twice or more a week simply yielded less reward, and made the game more like work than play.

Ironically, the thing that Blizzard and drugs have taught me though is that I easily get addicted to things that are bad for me, and they're both experiences that I have learned from. The nice part about WoW though is that abusing it tends not to enable you to accidentally kill yourself.

I felt compelled to post because I had to let you know that I feel, from personal experience, that there is credence to what people say about WoW's addictiveness in relation to things that are physiologically addictive, like cocaine.

I've been clean for almost three years now, and I value my life a lot more than I did back then. It's been two years since I quit WoW, and I similarly value my friendships a lot more than I did back then.

Re:Lesson #12

> Oh, you people crack me the fuck up. "WoW is addictive!"
> No. Cocaine is addictive; it causes [blah blah blah]

BS.

You can get addicted to almost ANYTHING, including a computer, a person, a sound, an emotion... Or, to be specific, to ANY emotion that is associated with doing something, seeing something, thinking of something... See, emotions are also chemicals. Some chemicals get people addicted faster, others - slower.

It's sad how one can get addicted to anger, or to a feeling that he/she's a victim, but I've seen such people. Believe me or not, but you CAN get addicted to a game.

Re:Lesson #12

This type of thing is why, coming from a psychology background, I dislike the entire current conception of addition. Our brains like to offload work and analysis by simply keeping up behaviors that have been previously sustained. Pleasurable behaviors where we consciously associate enjoyment with specific behavior are easier to designate as addictions, but it's really all the same, offloading the work of deciding if we should do something or not by simply setting up automatic responses. Sometimes these responses are so closely worked into normal brain function that ceasing them causes a disruption in expected brain function, in a full spectrum from nearly undetectably minor(A passing question to the self on the way to work of "am I less sharp because I missed my coffee today?") to so much a part of our expected brain chemistry that function without them can take a LONG period of adaption(I WILL KILL SOMEONE if I don't get a cigarette soon). Obviously with examples where we're adding an outside chemical to our brain chemistry it gets a bit more complex vs systems where we're simply behaviorally altering our internal chemistry, but it's all still the same basic system. I strongly believe that this makes the term "addictive" nearly meaningless as it is typically used today.

The REAL 11 lessons of WoW

As others have said, the list in this article is fluffy and useless.

However, I've been following the design of MMORPGs over the past decade, so I will offer a list of things that Blizzard *actually* did well, that together (combined with the strength of their pre-existing brand) are what I believe are responsible for WoW's overwhelming success.

1. Polish, Polish, Polish! -- WoW is probably the most polished MMORPG ever to be released. It makes a huge difference.
2. Smooth Newbie Experience -- this is critical, making it easy for casuals and spouses to get started (or "hooked")
3. Fun, Fun, Fun! -- if it's not Fun, get rid of it. Blizzard ruthlessly excised most of the un-fun stuff from the standard MMORPG design.
4. Don't Ship Until its Done -- several MMORPG disaster launches have shown that you really must wait until its ready
5. Low System Requirements -- 95% of the PCs in peoples livingrooms can run WoW, compared to like 25% for most games. This is no accident.
6. Reward Quests More Than Grind -- WoW was the first MMORPG where questing was the most efficient way to level for most players. This kept them moving around and doing different things, which is way less boring than 30 hours of grinding foozles. This idea is also behind the daily quests, for example.
7. Something For Everybody -- crafting, raiding, casual content, battlegrounds, PvP servers, lots and lots of quests, epic mounts... there is stuff in WoW that appeals to each of the Bartle playertypes.
8. Customizable UI Makes Players Happy -- even Everquest could be customized somewhat, but WoW made it possible to make powerful and useful custom UIs, and made it easy for other players to then use them. There are now a lot of players who will not want to play some new MMORPG unless it has a customizable UI.
9. Infrastructure Is Important & Hard -- they knew this from battle.net too. Again, they underestimated some things--like bandwidth--in the first year, but it eventually got sorted out.
10. Manage Community Expectations/Customer Service is Important & Hard -- they already knew this from battle.net, of course. The WoW forums are a cesspool, but that is unavoidable for a game of that size. In all other respects they've done a pretty good job.
11. Keep Cheaters, Botters and Farmers Out -- they watched Diablo I get absolutely destroyed by cheaters, and Diablo II had its share of setbacks here. Currently they can't stop Glider, but at least they're trying.