11 Innovation Lessons From the Creators of World of Warcraft 243
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
What I learned from WOW (Score:1, Insightful)
All of this thankfully learned from observance and not experience.
Re:Platitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Congratulations on inventing MMOs (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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:Platitudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting people addicted to a game is very impressive. If you've ever tried to design and develop a game you'd know that. Personally I don't want to be addicted to WoW so I'm not going to play it, I'd probably enjoy it, but I get more satisfaction out of more skill based/action games than repetitive RPGs... the social aspects of it are slightly attractive, though the social aspects of real life are preferable
Re:first post (Score:3, Insightful)
Kudos to all you folks who've ground it out longer than 4 months!
-AC
Re:What I learned from WOW (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations on inventing MMOs (Score:3, Insightful)
- The reputation is a big one. In addition to keeping the servers going, you also have things like the patch to Diablo II years after it came out that was so huge as to almost be an expansion pack. Also, Blizzard has arguably never made a bad game. That carries a lot of weight. It also helps that people knew and already liked the Warcraft world.
- Balance. People love to whine, but the truth of the matter is every Blizzard game is scrupulously balanced - I am not sure anyone is better. I have some friends at a rival MMORPG studio (not saying which) who actually make fun of their designers because the game is so badly balanced. This is not good.
- Difficulty. People also love to harp on how easy WoW is, but it's accessibility has a lot to do with why it's so popular. And of course what these people fail to mention is at the high end - raiding or PVP - it's as hard as anything else. This keeps the hardcore players hooked and gives the others someone to look up to while also giving them easy ways to inch closer.
- Graphics. This is more personal opinion, but I think Blizzard must have some of the most talented artistic designers around. I think WoW pushes way less polygons than some of the competition, but it just looks so much more alive, and so much more unique to me.
Blizzard innovates only in minor ways, but they are polished to an extreme. And in the end, I think your average consumer prefers polish over innovation.
Re:11 lessons (Score:5, Insightful)
#13: Profit???
No innovation at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lesson #12 (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard hasn't had big innovative ideas... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Congratulations on inventing MMOs (Score:2, Insightful)
I also agree that Blizzard's success has nothing to do with following certain business principles. Instead, Blizzard's popularity was because it brought MMOs to the masses, and it achieved that because it set the speed of game play correctly.
For single player games, especially console RPGs, you progress in the game at a certain pace. You may earn a level increase every few minutes. You'll go back to town and purchase some new equipment every now and then. But MMORPGs prior to WoW were unacceptably slow. A single player game which progressed at the speed of a pre-WoW MMO would be labeled as a failure. Simply put, it would be very boring.
Unfortunately, other companies got greedy. After playing many other MMOs, I could see that they designed their game around forcing a player to subscribe for a certain length of time to achieve the "endgame" content. If they didn't have enough content for their players, no problem! Simply slow down the pace of leveling or money acquisition. If your game is boring, people will still forced to play it and pay for it, right?
Blizzard was the first company to significantly change the trend. It eliminated the common "camp & grind" game play, and allowed players to gain levels and equipment at a significantly faster pace. This made the game fun, and attracted a ton of subscribers in doing so. As you said, it turns out that having lots of subscribers is preferable to forcing a few die-hard subscribers to pay. In the end greed wasn't good, and a fun game beat the alternatives.
Timing, maybe? (Score:2, Insightful)
- shazow
Blizzard's strengths (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:Timing, maybe? (Score:3, Insightful)
success (Score:3, Insightful)
They talk about innovation.
Nearly every aspect of World Of Warcraft is stolen from other games.
Example: UO. You can find a lot of similarities, from mounts to gray death screen. UO still has features, WoW hasn't. But most importantly: UO takes a lot of innovation from the so called freeshard-scene, and i think, this is also the reason origin never pursued those emulated servers in the first place.
E.g. the speech system which does not allow you to read other's language is something which was developed on UO roleplaying shards (as for I know, but it could have been also in some MUDs) - so it is not new in WoW.
So, why is WoW still better than the other mmogs? well, let's face it: it is because they took all the good things and tinkered it to something better.
So, yes, they are successful. And yes, they can talk about how to get successful, how to keep successful.
However, I rant, because it is not innovation, they should talk about. There is hardly any great innovation in WoW from my perspective.
It's a fun game, trying to suit the majority of players, the company cares for the players, they did some good decisions (e.g. low hardware specs, scriptable client), and of course, don't forget, they had a lot of publicity from previous games (the warcraft series, diablo, starcraft and lost vikings), and those WERE innovative in a great deal.
Still, talking about WoW, I think they really should talk about success, not innovation. Because it was more advertisement, more strategy and more publicity behind the success of WoW, than innovation.
Face it: Most Innovation comes from innovative and creative minds, which are not bound to deadlines or sallaries. Innovation was to include a modding engine in HalfLife, which kept a very bad coded game alive until CounterStrike came out (so innovation lead to innovation). Innovation was to include a Level Editor and Sound Editor in Warcraft2, which made the game popular for custom maps, and in WC3, innovation from the _users_ has lead to a lot of custom maps, like tower defense or dota (because the game was very scriptable and moddable). WoW lacks all those opportunities of customization and blizzard has hunted down any modding scene from the beginning, who tried to do something else, than interface scripts (which are limited in innovative ideas), like emulator software (but that is perfectly understandable! emulators are bad for business!).
Because the userbase can't contribute a lot of new ideas, and because the game itself has very few "new elements" at all, but sums up all the other MMOGs before it, I simply can't accept blizzard as teacher in innovation, regarding WoW.
Franchise != Success (Score:3, Insightful)
Marvel Online got cancelled before ever seeing the light of day despite massive numbers of comic book readers past and present.
Matrix Online had a HUGE franchise that translated in to a game no one cared about.
Disney has a massive fanbase yet Toontown putters along quietly.
Ultima Online followed on the back of a game series that many people would argue was far more beloved than Warcraft - long established as near a dozen of the greatest RPG experiences on the PC. Even there, its numbers were never anything close to WoWs.
I think the IP helps. It certainly got a lot of the initial interest though I'd suggest most people who've since picked it up only heard of the RTS series later. But I'd suggest there's more to it than just milking an IP.
Re:Platitudes (Score:2, Insightful)
Now if you want to banter on the ultimate point of the article, I would say that the point of the article was to get hits from Slashdot, because everything I read in there was a useless diatribe... otherwise known as platitudes.
Internal policies and processes that nobody gives two shits about. The article didn't reveal the reason that Blizzard is a gaming phenomenon, why WoW is the biggest ticket in a crowded MMO genre, or much of anything. It was filled with floating daisies and self-appreciating drivel.
If you wasted your time reading it, like I did, and then came on here to try to make some grandiose statement, thereby wasting my time and yours... mission accomplished. All I wanted to do was cut out the middleman for some other poor, bored, tired soul and let them know the article was not worth reading. Then they can better waste their time on here in the WoW sewing circle.
Re:Platitudes (Score:3, Insightful)
I respectfully disagree with you. I think having time between points is what makes it imersive and fun, the large world does the same. You made the best point I've read here though, subtley... This game is successful because it's good for a long time. When someone says "dude, after you get to level cap it's so boring!" I have had an active account for a high percentage of time since it came out, my highest is a level 59, I have a bunch of other characters, but I just have them so I can play different classes, they mostly fall in the 20's. I just think the atmosphere of the game is great, and the play style is very relaxing. Well work the 15/month... but 15/month isn't very much to me; I could understand if I was much younger I'd think it was a big deal.
Re:What WoW Learned From Everquest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Platitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:11 lessons (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd be surprised how non-obvious it is (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
And just to go through that list (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:5, Insightful)
Pioneers???? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Platitudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they don't. Cocaine is a drug that you injest, and in return it causes physiological changes that make your body dependent on it.
WoW is a game that is fun to play, and the game style is such that time spent playing produces in-game rewards.
Nothing alike. It's a spurious argument. Maybe you played WoW and didn't like it. That's fine.
It's not cocaine, though, just because other people had a good time when you didn't. The comparison is idiotic.
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
Excessive anything does that, and that situation isn't evidence of "WoW addiction", that's evidence that that person simply didn't value those relationships, friends, and jobs in the first place.
WoW has never ended a marriage or kicked someone out of school. It simply provided an excuse to blame for those things which were going to happen anyway. If WoW ended a marriage it's because the marriage was already over. If WoW got you kicked out of school it's because you clearly didn't like school, and were going to leave one way or another.
Don't act like people never got divorced or left a job or classes before WoW was invented. There's no evidence, despite 8 million people who play, that WoW has any effect on the rates of either.
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.
Then clearly you're the one with the problem - you have an addictive personality. And if it weren't crack, or WoW, it'd be daytime TV, or maybe volunteering, or maybe working out, or maybe one of a million other things that people sometimes do to excess.
Drugs are addictive, clinically, because they cause changes in your body that require you to crave more of them. WoW doesn't do that. It's impossible for it to do that. Thus, it can't be "addictive" in any objective sense. It is something that people of a certain personality type get obsessed with, but they can do that about nearly anything.
I think my point stands.
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not addiction, that's dependence. Addiction is a physiological state with a precise clinical definition. It doesn't apply to WoW except by the shysters peddling "game addiction" clinics and the people, like you, who enable them.
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:3, Insightful)
If you didn't like it, then you didn't like it. That's fine. I'm not threatened by the fact that we have different tastes in games.
The only thing I'm defending is Blizzard, and I'm responding to allegations that they're a company of drug peddlers, when in fact they're a company of artists and programmers who put the time in to release a product that people like to play. I'm not saying that's an achievement for which they deserve medals, but it's certainly one for which they deserve to have some of my money.
It's a MMO with permanent training wheels and it's killing what was a fun genre.
You're complaining about grinding but holding up MMO's as a "fun genre"? I don't think there's an MMO out there that's less grindy than WoW, it's a feature of the genre. And I don't know what you think you mean by "real PvP", trust me, those Horde guys are all played by real people.
The only games WoW killed off were the ones that were less fun to play. Simple as that. If they had been more fun, people would have left WoW to play them.
But they didn't. It's a free market. Blizz doesn't have a monopoly on MMO's. They just have the one that the market (including a lot of people who never expected to ever enjoy a video game) has overwhelmingly preferred. It's not a mystery, it's not a trick of brain chemistry, it's just what happens when you get a bunch of people with talent together and demand that they create an exceptional product. Why get so angry about that?
Re:Lesson #12 (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess, if that's your experience, but I don't see how real role-playing is something that could even be done at a computer, or in the context of a virtual game world. It's something to do at the table-top where your actions aren't constrained by what programmers decided to allow you to do, and the world is maintained by the imagination of a human being who can react flexibly to your actions.
So I don't blame WoW for not being something that no computer game could really be. For that role-playing experience I grab the dice and hit the table-top; that's really the only place it can be done.
WoW is NOT perfect. What Blizzard did NOT learn... (Score:1, Insightful)
And here, instead of learning a lesson and make item duping impossible while still keeping a great economy (cool trades, super items that could be switched from character to character, from account to account etc.) they FUXXORED big times and invented silly 'binding' rules for items.
I saw that and I quit disgusted by the game.
Because it is a fact that when you control the server side it is possible to make item duping impossible. Yet they did NOT learn the lesson from Diablo II. Instead of coming with a cool economy they went with a broken one.
Items binding and no perma-death.
A game for noobs... But, granted, they learned how to milk noobs.