Achievements in WoW patch 3.0 blatantly exploits players

I’ll admit that I was mildly irked at the recent news about WoW patch 3.0. It just felt like nothing more than an attempt to distract WoW players while they wait for Wrath. Tobold thinks of it as a defensive move against WAR. I don’t know if I buy into that 100%, but the fact that many of these features aren’t even fully cooked in the beta certainly support that idea.

Then I read Blizzard is planning on introducing Achievements as part of the 3.0 patch. And I got PISSED OFF. Seriously pissed off. I’m talking “thinking about unsubscribing” pissed off.

My issue is that this whole carrot-on-a-stick incentive program is being introduced with NO OTHER NEW CONTENT. Oh sure, there will be new talents and a new profession – but no new raiding content. No new instances. No new zones. No new monsters. No new quests. No new anything to explore.

In Brent’s now e-famous jumping shark post, he started his discussion with a very valid observation:

“We all have made some serious investments in the MMORPG genre. Those investments are not simply monetary. Many MMO players have devoted their lives, or at least their valuable free time, to these games.”

His article diverges from this topic, but this insight is interesting because it touches upon the ethical nature of MMO design. Jonathan Blow eloquently explained the issue in 2007:

“That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme[.] It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation.

[Players will naturally avoid boring tasks but developers] override that by plugging into their pleasure centers and giving them scheduled rewards[.] We convince them to pay us money and waste their lives in front of our game in this exploitative fashion.” (credits to Scott for link)

Enter Achievements and Feats of Strength. J. Allen Brack from Blizzard was very revealing in this interview in which he describes how the Achievement system will motivate players:

“There will also be a list of things that players will never have considered doing, more of a to-do list; like you log in to the game and go, ‘I don't know what I want to do today, I'm going to pick a random Achievement and go get it’. [We] don't have hidden Achievements, with the exception of very rare Achievements called Feats of Strength that are worth no points.”

Think about that for a moment: A list of things that players will never have considered doing; a to-do list for points. I don’t make this stuff up, folks. This is a very clear admission that Blizzard wants to exploit players with a task list filled with largely meaningless or impossible tasks.

Of course, we knew all this already. This really isn’t a new topic. MMOs have always been of a questionable ethical nature that encourages compulsive behavior. It’s why they are highly addictive and given labels like EverCrack and World of WarCrack.

I long ago made my own peace with this dilemma and the whole concept of Achievements wouldn’t have even been a blip on my radar screen if not for one very important thing: It’s coming in Patch 3.0.

Bundle up the Achievement system within Wrath and it’s just one new gadget amongst a bunch of gadgets. Introduce it at the tail-end of a loooong period of time with little new stuff to explore and well, it damn well borders on evil.

You see, the Achievement system isn’t new content – it’s a task list with some reward system attached. It’s an incentive to run around doing the same crap you have already done for the 1000th time in order to get an Achievement.

I’m sorry but that just pisses me off. Introducing new content which basically amounts to a task list for me to do all the content that I have already done is so blatantly unethical and wrong that I find myself tempted to quit altogether.

Our free time is precious and as Brent pointed out, it gets more precious as we get older. I already know I spend too much of this time participating in boring tasks for my ultimately meaningless carrot. I’ve come to terms with that because, well – I like my carrot. I’ll continue to play MMOs because I like carrots.

But this Achievement thing in 3.0 – well, that just feels like Blizzard is spitting in my mouth. They are basically saying, “we have nothing new to offer you for now, but in the meantime here is a reward system for doing all the stuff that you have likely already done and for some other things you never even considered doing”.

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Warhammer comparison: This isn’t intended to be a WoW vs. WAR entry, but I do feel it’s worth making the comparison to WAR because the Tome of Knowledge is often compared to the new Achievement system.

The first point is that achievements in WAR appeared to be hidden. It didn’t feel like it was a task list because I didn’t even know I had the task. Instead, it just felt like I was rewarded for playing.

Secondly, as I wrote in my previous article, WAR seems purposefully designed to provide rewards for anything you choose to do, so you simply gravitate towards the things you find the most fun rather than the most rewarding.

And lastly, it’s part of the design from the start – it’s not retroactive and it’s not being released with no other content. I would have little to no issue with the Achievement system in WoW if it simply came bundled with Wrath.

How much market share can Mythic steal from Blizzard?

Mark Jacobs at Mythic recently made a crack about not needing to cannibalize WoW subscriptions, or at least all of them. His poem is pretty witty, but it prompted me to think about where Mythic plans to get it’s subscriber base for Warhammer Online.

Blizzard is largely unique in the MMO marketplace in that they became a cultural phenomena that attracted lots of new MMO gamers to the marketplace. In the four years since WoW’s release, the MMO market in the fantasy genre has really matured. While I don’t believe that MMO subscriptions overall have peaked, the rapid growth that WoW experienced is pretty unlikely to keep occurring in the fantasy setting genre.

The result of this is a more mature and established market. All future games (like Warhammer) will largely need to find their success by attracting gamers away from other MMOs. So while Mark might not want ALL of the WoW subscriptions, he certainly seems to need SOME of them in order for Warhammer to be a success.

MMO Subscription Landscape
To answer the question that I posed in the title, we must first survey the existing MMO marketplace. Almost all of the subscription figures in the below chart are provided by mmogdata.voig.com with a few exceptions. Here are some quick caveats:

• The goal of the exercise is to engage in a discussion about the possible Warhammer market share. Therefore, I only selected MMOs which I felt directly compete with Warhammer in the Fantasy genre and use the monthly subscription model.
• Guild Wars has reportedly 4.5 million accounts, but were not included because they don’t use the monthly subscription model.
• Warcraft reportedly has 10 million accounts, but approximately 8 million of these are accounts that are hourly subscriptions in Asia.
• AoC recently released subscription figures at the end of Q2, so those are the figures I used.

Clearly, Blizzard is the dominant player in this market and commands 61% of the current market share. From a historical perspective, Warcraft has four times the number of subscriptions as the nearest competitor ever had at its peak.

Interestingly, the much older MMOs still have relatively strong subscription numbers. Even after all these years, EverQuest still retains 25% of it’s peak subscription base. It is a remarkable and unique trait amongst MMOs that significant numbers of players will continue to play them long after they have become obsolete. The fact that they decline, but don’t completely disappear is a very important characteristic to consider when thinking about the long-term viability of cannibalizing another MMOs market.

Measuring Decline
Amongst the MMOs that have experienced decline, the average % of decline from their peak subscription number is 63%. The MMO which experienced the most decline is Dungeons & Dragons (78%) and the MMO that experienced the least amount of decline is EverQuest 2 (44%).

The fact that DDO and the original EQ still retain 22-25% of their peak subscriptions is an important figure that we can apply to the current World of Warcraft subscription numbers. This core group of “4 Life” players may never unsubscribe. Likewise, we can reasonably assume that such a popular game as WoW would at least behave similarly to EQ2 and would largely not be at risk of ever losing more than 44% of the peak subscription base.

Measuring Opportunity Potential of Warcraft subscribers
The above logic is important because we can project some scenarios about Market Opportunity to the World of Warcraft subscription base. The point here is not to determine how many players will play Warhammer, but to measure the opportunity or potential market size that you could attract.

In the above chart, you will note that I have assigned 22% of the WoW subscriber base as “WoW 4 Life” players who will never unsubscribe. That’s 440,000 accounts and a bigger number than any other current MMO. In fact, it’s almost as large as EverQuest at peak subscription. Any notion that WoW will be “killed” is ludicrous under such circumstances. If you enjoy playing WoW, then have no fear that it will ever go away.

I also indicated 44% as “WAR Target” players who might be willing to switch games. There is no reason to believe that they WILL switch games, only that this is the biggest group of WoW players that Warhammer could reasonably attract. Consider this to be the MAXIMUM market potential that WAR could expect to cannibalize from the WoW subscription base.

The remaining 34% or “WoW For Now” is the group of players that won’t play forever, but also aren’t likely to leave the game anytime soon. From Blizzard’s perspective, they should be thinking about how to eventually transition the “WoW For Now” group to some eventual next-gen MMO. Of more immediate concern are the “WAR Target” players who are the biggest flight risk, but these "For Now" players are also a long-term flight risk Blizzard should be thinking about now.

Measuring Market Opportunity amongst all similar MMOs
I went ahead and applied similar logic to the rivals I felt most likely to lose share in an effort to determine where Mythic can reasonably expect to gain market share. I used 44% as a base number with the exception of DAoC subscriptions (75%).

The total market opportunity is a bit more than 1.3 million subscriptions and Warcraft players consists of 66% of that potential market. Up until this point, I have really only performed an exercise to assess market potential. This 1.3 million figure is a reasonable and logical assessment that provides an approximate estimate of the opportunity potential.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t just the opportunity for Warhammer Online, but any other new MMO that would want to enter the market at this particular time. I’m only talking about it in context of Warhammer because that’s the game looking to enter the market.

So if 1.3 million is the maximum opportunity, how much of it will they capture? A similar figure existed for Age of Conan and they clearly failed to capture anywhere near the total market opportunity. Will Mythic do better? The answer to that question is pure conjecture.

Mythic talks about WAR Preview feedback

Mark Jacobs made a brief post about the top issues coming out of WAR Preview Weekend:

(1) Client Crashes

• I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status
• Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
• A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
• Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
• Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

I had a few of these, but nothing I wouldn’t have expected out of a new game. In fact, I actually thought as far as a beta goes, this wasn’t all that bad. I would EXPECT this to be priority #1, so it’s nice to hear they are working diligently at it.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI

• Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth.
• “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
• “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
• Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
• Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
• Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

This was very noticeable. A number of bloggers have talked about it. I still think it was AI code, likely something to do with the flee/attack state the NPC was supposed intended to be in rather than pathing.

(3) Pet Responsiveness

• With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
• Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
• “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.

See above. It’s partly that pets experienced the same issue that leads me to believe it was AI rather than pathing related.

(4) Global Cooldown Timers

• This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
• Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
• “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
• Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
• The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

Nothing to see here. I didn’t think any of this was a big deal. There were a couple of visual things that were funky with the UI (kinda sorta mentioned above) but more quirky than OMG! OH NOES!

(5) Better animations

• So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
• Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
• “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

All I can say is that I got used to it, but it was noticeable. I think the complaints in this area are valid, if perhaps a bit overblown. Of all the things that I noticed, the most bothersome was this one animation bug where my guy shot this beam from his hand and in some RvR situations, it never went away. It was like I was linked to the other enemy player until either he died or I died.

(6) Texture Blurring

• Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
• We will look at adding a client scalar.

I have no idea what Mark is talking about. No clue. This was not observed by me.

(7) Client Performance

• This is one of those issues
• Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
• This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

There was a “custom” option to adjust video settings that did nothing. I can only presume that he is talking about adding these things into the game to actually allow, well – custom settings. LOL. I figured while in beta that they wanted everyone running things in pretty much the same mode to get as a control test. I still think this was the case.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc

• Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
• Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

Rohan talks about Targeting in WAR and WoW quite a bit today. The default settings in WAR are superior, but the flexibility (particularly with UI customization) in WoW is a lot better thus far. It would be nice to see some better functionality in this regard, although I do think addons will address some of it.

(9) Renown rank gear

• Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

Heartless_ had this complaint. I honestly didn’t know that this might have been a reason I was getting pwned by some people until Monday.