9 ms·

Ten Years of World of Warcraft

128 points by magoghm 12y ago

powdahound 12y ago
Blizzard recently released a documentary in celebration of the anniversary: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/16668523/world-of-warcraft%C2%AE-looking-for-group-watch-now-11-8-2014 http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/16668523/world-of-warcraft%.... It shows some of their design and development methods as well as the impact that the game has had on many players' lives.
mbesto 12y ago
WoW to me is like the movie Avatar. An age old story (EverQuest == Last of Mohicans) rehashed in a polished (3D/visuals) experience that anyone can enjoy.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - Steko 12y ago
    He's talking about James Cameron's Avatar.
- reality_czech 12y ago
  They're similar in that they're both terrible things that are way too popular, yes. But only one of them is "the Smurfs in space."
agibsonccc 12y ago
Significant part of my childhood. 3.5 years. Did 16 hours a day for warlord in classic. Leading 40 man raids and pvp groups was fun. I like the revamped graphics. No time for games anymore though =/.
- ivanca 12y ago
  There is going to be so much people expending their retirement years playing video games (yeah, I know some already do, but it's still rare)
  - msabalau 12y ago
    At an MIT Game Lab conference, Christopher Weaver, the founder of Bethesda, mentioned that they received a ton of registration cards for Morrowind from elders, and it turned out that seniors with limited physical mobility were using it to have an environment they could virtually navigate.
    - Blackthorn 12y ago
      Is this talk recorded? Morrowind is my favorite video game of all time and I would love to watch this.
incision 12y ago
Wow, it has probably been 15 years since I read something from Raph Koster. So long that I had to think for a bit to recall why that name didn't quite feel right - until Designer Dragon popped into my head. I can't disagree with a single thing said here. I tend to think of WoW as the Buy-N-Large generation ship of gaming. It created an entire word that was in some sense a paradise, but at the exclusion of all the awesome, frustrating, exciting, tedious richness that came before it.
hartror 12y ago
Site is down, anyone got it cached?
- niravshah 12y ago
  Try this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/ten-years-of-world-of-warcraft/&es_sm=119&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- gondo 12y ago
  google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MllOUVYKcW0J:www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/ten-years-of-world-of-warcraft/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MllOUVY...
jonshariat 12y ago
Say what you want about MMO's but its most kids first taste of leadership hard work, and economics.
- PakG1 12y ago
  Met a maid of honour at a friend's wedding. She told me that she dropped out of university because she spent too much time on WoW. When her clan was on some sort of quest, they'd call her up and she'd run out of class to get online. She was one of their captains, and put hours and hours into the game, organizing players, planning things, etc. Never graduated and not doing much else, although she's surviving fine. So the question I have is whether there's any way to take that type of hard work ethic and get people to apply it to something more productive. Heck, I just gave a presentation at a barcamp style thing at a school on how Starcraft is actually a really intellectual game. But one thing I couldn't answer was whether it was possible to take the complex thinking that happens in a high-level Starcraft 2 game and see it blossom in everyday life for everyday tasks. :(
  - mahouse 12y ago
    Life is not only about being productive. You have to entertain yourself as well. (That's not an excuse for not graduating, of course.)
    - saraid216 12y ago
      I feel you're mistaken on all three counts here. 1) She was productive. She just wasn't productive at being a college student. 2) She doesn't sound like she was being entertained. She sounded like she was handling logistics and leadership roles with great competence. To me, what I hear is "job satisfaction", except without pay. That's not entertainment. 3) Needing to entertain yourself is an excuse for not graduating. Probably not a sufficient one, but it's a valid one. Honestly, I think it's more accurate to say she dropped out due to burnout from working effectively two jobs.
      - mahouse 12y ago
cm2012 12y ago
WoW is a totally different experience if you play through it with your SO - would recommend!
grayfox 12y ago
Recently returned to WoW. Agree completely with the closing statement - WoW will be the king until a different medium replaces the current one. The game has given me the feeling that... now that I've grown older, it is the game that I can drop my weekly hours into and gain happy, lasting reward.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  > it is the game that I can drop my weekly hours into and gain happy, lasting reward. What reward do you get from WoW exactly? I used to play 8 years ago and quit because of the fact that the experience wasn't rewarding to me. My time in game was mostly spent doing repetitive tasks. I realised that I wasn't gaining any skill or ability that I would otherwise when playing a strategy or FPS game. The skill ceiling was just way too low.
  - bovermyer 12y ago
    For me, at least, it's not so much the Skill Bar of the Week or Dungeon Achievement of the Month that drew me in. It was the community. And by that I don't mean the infamous Barrens Chat community that hates all life on earth, I mean the guild and subniche communities that like playing together and enjoy some great shenanigans together. To be fair, though, that's the draw of any MMORPG I try.
JosephHatfield 12y ago
Been playing since the Beta, and still haven't found a game to take its place.
shiftpgdn 12y ago
If anyone is curious Raph Koster worked on the original MMO: Ultima Online. If anyone has the authority to speak about MMOs it would be him.
- whyenot 12y ago
  Not to take away from Raph Koster's pioneering work, but CompuServe's Island of Kesmai predates Ultima Online by more than 10 years. The single world was shared by all players on CompuServe who pay $6 an hour to play. Some players wold rack up monthly bills in the hundreds of dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Kesmai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Kesmai
  - Terretta 12y ago
    Also, "TradeWars is often cited as an influence by game developers. Examples include Paul Sage, lead designer of Ultima Online..." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars#Legacy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars#Legacy
  - jghn 12y ago
    Agreed, plus this also forgets games like M59. I would, however, say that UO was the first mainstream MMO and the game which brought the genre into people's minds. I always felt that the largest problem of UO was that it was too successful. IMO if the target audience had been the primary player pool it'd have been a lot better. I remember in the months before the beta release I started seeing it hyped to FPS type players as a place where you could go kill people and I knew it wasn't going to be quite what they intended.
- legohead 12y ago
  He definitely knows his stuff. I played on the original Sojourn MUD and when EverQuest came out I was surprised at how much they straight ripped off Sojourn. Most MMO players haven't even heard of MUDs, much less Sojourn.
adnzzzzZ 12y ago
Here's a video that shares similar sentiments to the ones the author has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64
powdahound 12y ago
A bit off topic, but it'd be interesting to have a guild for the startup/HN crowd. I've been discussing returning to the game with a few tech friends and joining a like-minded group would probably make it a lot more fun.
- scobar 12y ago
  I enjoyed the game so much because of the great people I met and played alongside there. I also think the startup/HN crowd is really great, and I'm sure a guild with that mindset would be very fun and rapidly improve. It would be interesting to be a part of that. However, I believe most in the startup/HN crowd can't afford the time required to be active in the game while also working on whatever drives them. And guild chat would probably be similar to but more limited than HN.
- jhgg 12y ago
  That'd be really fun actually. But I'm still having mixed feelings about how dumbed down the game got over the years. The complexity of it during vanilla + the first two expansions really made the game fun for me. But with the homogenization of stats, and removal of lots of skills, the game just isn't fun for me anymore. Then again, I haven't played Warlords. I stopped playing when patch 6.0.2 came out.
  - dsl 12y ago
    The Blizzcon panel on why they removed/simplified a lot of stuff was great. It is well worth watching if you can find a copy. Basically they had a lot of abilities that weren't fun, and a bunch of stats that made the game suck. Most people were going to Ask Mr Robot to figure out which piece of gear to put on, and Icy Veins to figure out what button to press when. They needed to carve out all the old cruft before they can add the new and exciting back in. I was equally cynical when the shattering happened, but after a few content patches was quite happy with the change.
  - frostmatthew 12y ago
    > But with the homogenization of stats, and removal of lots of skills, the game just isn't fun for me anymore. This is a common gripe but I fail to understand it. I've been playing since BC and I never found it "fun" getting my gear hit-capped, or watching gear drop that wasn't useful for anyone in the raid, or having skills I never used.
craigching 12y ago
I started playing EverQuest (EQ) in about December of 1999. At the time I was completely mesmerised by the experience, it was immersive, it almost felt real. And it sated by desire to live in a fantasy world. I did the EQ thing until the betas of World of Warcraft (WoW) arrived. I had enjoyed my time in EQ, but it was getting tedious to do anything, especially leveling. I was in a good guild (Dragon Army of Tribunal /represent!), but you pretty much had to devote 100% of your time to advance, especially in a raiding guild. Along came WoW. It was a perfect out for me. I no longer wanted to commit myself to serious raiding and rely on a guild to simply level. I wanted an experience that was fun (i.e. non-tedious) that I could advance in (i.e. Quests were much more structured and fun) and I didn't have to rely on a group to advance. Life was good. Until raiding began at the highest levels. Raiding was fun, but in some ways was worse than EQ. You had to have the perfect raid compensation (mostly to accommodate weaker players, but sometimes not) to finish a raid. So guild recruitment became hard core, if you didn't represent a class of need for the current expansion, it could be hard to participate. Luckily, starting over and leveling up wasn't so hard, so if a guild's live was for you, you could change your class pretty easily (compared to EQ). And WoW raiding became the game. You had to level to the max (as fast as you could usually) so you could get into the good raiding guilds, bypassing all the good story line that was there for you. It became the same competition that EQ had become. And it was not fun. I was lucky, my last forays in WoW were with a group of people mostly made up of competent friends from EQ and their friends. We were able to start fresh, ramp up and take on Karazhan in the Burning Crusade while BC was the current expansion. Yes, we weren't the top guild, but raiding Karazhan with a good group of friends was probably my best experience in an MMORPG. That said, though, once my daughter was born, I was done with MMORPGs. They were fun, but too time consuming for the dedicated parent. I have since played here and there on Skyrum, but my duties as a parent take precedence. That all said, though, Raph has a screenshot of Minecraft as the ultimate sandbox. My kids (now 6 and 3) love interacting together through Minecraft. Even the soundtrack is a staple of our lives. I don't know what I intended with this post, but MMORPGs have been a good experience for me and I'm carrying that on, I hope, via Minecraft and a more sandboxed experience. WoW and EQ were fun, but as I've grown and have had kids, something like Minecraft makes much more sense to me.
- HCIdivision17 12y ago
debaserab2 12y ago
WoW flattened MMORPG gameplay into a linear experience that bored me right out of the genre. Ultima Online, on the other hand, was such an expansive and interactive world. You didn't choose your interactions based on personal preference. There was always the threat of another real life player coming to kill you, which created a sort of camaraderie in hunting grounds. You may not know someone, but suddenly he'd come to your rush if a murderer approached, and if you were lucky you both ended up outnumbering the murderer and you'd walk away with his loot. You wouldn't even know the person but you'd end up sharing an intense experience together where the stakes were high (if you died, you lost EVERYTHING). So many friendships were made that way. It was a different experience that was about more than levels and raiding groups and elite loot. It was a true social space where your actions affected other players experiences, for better or worse. To me, this is the soul of the MMO, and exactly what WoW lacks.
- broodbucket 12y ago
  EVE Online has just about everything you just mentioned, and is doing just fine. I prefer the WoW model, and so do the majority based on the numbers, but there is still a lively community for that type of gameplay.
  - NovaS1X 12y ago
    I played WoW for a good 4-6 years. Had a lot of fun but eventually it became easy, grindy, and just lost it' luster. I've been playing EVE since about 2007 now and it's the only thing keeping me playing MMOs let alone video games. Then again EVE isn't really a game it's just a strange branch of real life.
    - RickHull 12y ago
      > Then again EVE isn't really a game it's just a strange branch of real life. True, in that it's very complex, and it does reward an analytical approach, which may or may not accord with one's own real life. Eve is a fantastic hobby, in that it is intellectually demanding, time consuming, skill rewarding, and an emotional investment. I can't recommend it but I'd certainly suggest it for whatever it is that ails ya.

128 points by magoghm 12y ago

Blizzard recently released a documentary in celebration of the anniversary: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/16668523/world-of-warcraft%C2%AE-looking-for-group-watch-now-11-8-2014 http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/16668523/world-of-warcraft%.... It shows some of their design and development methods as well as the impact that the game has had on many players' lives.

mbesto 12y ago

WoW to me is like the movie Avatar. An age old story (EverQuest == Last of Mohicans) rehashed in a polished (3D/visuals) experience that anyone can enjoy.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- Steko 12y ago
  He's talking about James Cameron's Avatar.
reality_czech 12y ago
They're similar in that they're both terrible things that are way too popular, yes. But only one of them is "the Smurfs in space."

agibsonccc 12y ago

Significant part of my childhood. 3.5 years. Did 16 hours a day for warlord in classic. Leading 40 man raids and pvp groups was fun. I like the revamped graphics. No time for games anymore though =/.

ivanca 12y ago
There is going to be so much people expending their retirement years playing video games (yeah, I know some already do, but it's still rare)
- msabalau 12y ago
  At an MIT Game Lab conference, Christopher Weaver, the founder of Bethesda, mentioned that they received a ton of registration cards for Morrowind from elders, and it turned out that seniors with limited physical mobility were using it to have an environment they could virtually navigate.
  - Blackthorn 12y ago
    Is this talk recorded? Morrowind is my favorite video game of all time and I would love to watch this.

incision 12y ago

Wow, it has probably been 15 years since I read something from Raph Koster. So long that I had to think for a bit to recall why that name didn't quite feel right - until Designer Dragon popped into my head. I can't disagree with a single thing said here. I tend to think of WoW as the Buy-N-Large generation ship of gaming. It created an entire word that was in some sense a paradise, but at the exclusion of all the awesome, frustrating, exciting, tedious richness that came before it.

hartror 12y ago

Site is down, anyone got it cached?

niravshah 12y ago
Try this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/ten-years-of-world-of-warcraft/&es_sm=119&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
gondo 12y ago
google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MllOUVYKcW0J:www.raphkoster.com/2014/11/21/ten-years-of-world-of-warcraft/&hl=en&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MllOUVY...

jonshariat 12y ago

Say what you want about MMO's but its most kids first taste of leadership hard work, and economics.

PakG1 12y ago
Met a maid of honour at a friend's wedding. She told me that she dropped out of university because she spent too much time on WoW. When her clan was on some sort of quest, they'd call her up and she'd run out of class to get online. She was one of their captains, and put hours and hours into the game, organizing players, planning things, etc. Never graduated and not doing much else, although she's surviving fine. So the question I have is whether there's any way to take that type of hard work ethic and get people to apply it to something more productive. Heck, I just gave a presentation at a barcamp style thing at a school on how Starcraft is actually a really intellectual game. But one thing I couldn't answer was whether it was possible to take the complex thinking that happens in a high-level Starcraft 2 game and see it blossom in everyday life for everyday tasks. :(
- mahouse 12y ago
  Life is not only about being productive. You have to entertain yourself as well. (That's not an excuse for not graduating, of course.)
  - saraid216 12y ago
    I feel you're mistaken on all three counts here. 1) She was productive. She just wasn't productive at being a college student. 2) She doesn't sound like she was being entertained. She sounded like she was handling logistics and leadership roles with great competence. To me, what I hear is "job satisfaction", except without pay. That's not entertainment. 3) Needing to entertain yourself is an excuse for not graduating. Probably not a sufficient one, but it's a valid one. Honestly, I think it's more accurate to say she dropped out due to burnout from working effectively two jobs.
    - mahouse 12y ago

cm2012 12y ago

WoW is a totally different experience if you play through it with your SO - would recommend!

grayfox 12y ago

Recently returned to WoW. Agree completely with the closing statement - WoW will be the king until a different medium replaces the current one. The game has given me the feeling that... now that I've grown older, it is the game that I can drop my weekly hours into and gain happy, lasting reward.

sjtrny 12y ago
> it is the game that I can drop my weekly hours into and gain happy, lasting reward. What reward do you get from WoW exactly? I used to play 8 years ago and quit because of the fact that the experience wasn't rewarding to me. My time in game was mostly spent doing repetitive tasks. I realised that I wasn't gaining any skill or ability that I would otherwise when playing a strategy or FPS game. The skill ceiling was just way too low.
- bovermyer 12y ago
  For me, at least, it's not so much the Skill Bar of the Week or Dungeon Achievement of the Month that drew me in. It was the community. And by that I don't mean the infamous Barrens Chat community that hates all life on earth, I mean the guild and subniche communities that like playing together and enjoy some great shenanigans together. To be fair, though, that's the draw of any MMORPG I try.

JosephHatfield 12y ago

Been playing since the Beta, and still haven't found a game to take its place.

shiftpgdn 12y ago

If anyone is curious Raph Koster worked on the original MMO: Ultima Online. If anyone has the authority to speak about MMOs it would be him.

whyenot 12y ago
Not to take away from Raph Koster's pioneering work, but CompuServe's Island of Kesmai predates Ultima Online by more than 10 years. The single world was shared by all players on CompuServe who pay $6 an hour to play. Some players wold rack up monthly bills in the hundreds of dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Kesmai http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Kesmai
- Terretta 12y ago
  Also, "TradeWars is often cited as an influence by game developers. Examples include Paul Sage, lead designer of Ultima Online..." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars#Legacy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars#Legacy
- jghn 12y ago
  Agreed, plus this also forgets games like M59. I would, however, say that UO was the first mainstream MMO and the game which brought the genre into people's minds. I always felt that the largest problem of UO was that it was too successful. IMO if the target audience had been the primary player pool it'd have been a lot better. I remember in the months before the beta release I started seeing it hyped to FPS type players as a place where you could go kill people and I knew it wasn't going to be quite what they intended.
legohead 12y ago
He definitely knows his stuff. I played on the original Sojourn MUD and when EverQuest came out I was surprised at how much they straight ripped off Sojourn. Most MMO players haven't even heard of MUDs, much less Sojourn.

adnzzzzZ 12y ago

Here's a video that shares similar sentiments to the ones the author has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64

powdahound 12y ago

A bit off topic, but it'd be interesting to have a guild for the startup/HN crowd. I've been discussing returning to the game with a few tech friends and joining a like-minded group would probably make it a lot more fun.

scobar 12y ago
I enjoyed the game so much because of the great people I met and played alongside there. I also think the startup/HN crowd is really great, and I'm sure a guild with that mindset would be very fun and rapidly improve. It would be interesting to be a part of that. However, I believe most in the startup/HN crowd can't afford the time required to be active in the game while also working on whatever drives them. And guild chat would probably be similar to but more limited than HN.
jhgg 12y ago
That'd be really fun actually. But I'm still having mixed feelings about how dumbed down the game got over the years. The complexity of it during vanilla + the first two expansions really made the game fun for me. But with the homogenization of stats, and removal of lots of skills, the game just isn't fun for me anymore. Then again, I haven't played Warlords. I stopped playing when patch 6.0.2 came out.
- dsl 12y ago
  The Blizzcon panel on why they removed/simplified a lot of stuff was great. It is well worth watching if you can find a copy. Basically they had a lot of abilities that weren't fun, and a bunch of stats that made the game suck. Most people were going to Ask Mr Robot to figure out which piece of gear to put on, and Icy Veins to figure out what button to press when. They needed to carve out all the old cruft before they can add the new and exciting back in. I was equally cynical when the shattering happened, but after a few content patches was quite happy with the change.
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > But with the homogenization of stats, and removal of lots of skills, the game just isn't fun for me anymore. This is a common gripe but I fail to understand it. I've been playing since BC and I never found it "fun" getting my gear hit-capped, or watching gear drop that wasn't useful for anyone in the raid, or having skills I never used.

craigching 12y ago

I started playing EverQuest (EQ) in about December of 1999. At the time I was completely mesmerised by the experience, it was immersive, it almost felt real. And it sated by desire to live in a fantasy world. I did the EQ thing until the betas of World of Warcraft (WoW) arrived. I had enjoyed my time in EQ, but it was getting tedious to do anything, especially leveling. I was in a good guild (Dragon Army of Tribunal /represent!), but you pretty much had to devote 100% of your time to advance, especially in a raiding guild. Along came WoW. It was a perfect out for me. I no longer wanted to commit myself to serious raiding and rely on a guild to simply level. I wanted an experience that was fun (i.e. non-tedious) that I could advance in (i.e. Quests were much more structured and fun) and I didn't have to rely on a group to advance. Life was good. Until raiding began at the highest levels. Raiding was fun, but in some ways was worse than EQ. You had to have the perfect raid compensation (mostly to accommodate weaker players, but sometimes not) to finish a raid. So guild recruitment became hard core, if you didn't represent a class of need for the current expansion, it could be hard to participate. Luckily, starting over and leveling up wasn't so hard, so if a guild's live was for you, you could change your class pretty easily (compared to EQ). And WoW raiding became the game. You had to level to the max (as fast as you could usually) so you could get into the good raiding guilds, bypassing all the good story line that was there for you. It became the same competition that EQ had become. And it was not fun. I was lucky, my last forays in WoW were with a group of people mostly made up of competent friends from EQ and their friends. We were able to start fresh, ramp up and take on Karazhan in the Burning Crusade while BC was the current expansion. Yes, we weren't the top guild, but raiding Karazhan with a good group of friends was probably my best experience in an MMORPG. That said, though, once my daughter was born, I was done with MMORPGs. They were fun, but too time consuming for the dedicated parent. I have since played here and there on Skyrum, but my duties as a parent take precedence. That all said, though, Raph has a screenshot of Minecraft as the ultimate sandbox. My kids (now 6 and 3) love interacting together through Minecraft. Even the soundtrack is a staple of our lives. I don't know what I intended with this post, but MMORPGs have been a good experience for me and I'm carrying that on, I hope, via Minecraft and a more sandboxed experience. WoW and EQ were fun, but as I've grown and have had kids, something like Minecraft makes much more sense to me.

HCIdivision17 12y ago

debaserab2 12y ago

WoW flattened MMORPG gameplay into a linear experience that bored me right out of the genre. Ultima Online, on the other hand, was such an expansive and interactive world. You didn't choose your interactions based on personal preference. There was always the threat of another real life player coming to kill you, which created a sort of camaraderie in hunting grounds. You may not know someone, but suddenly he'd come to your rush if a murderer approached, and if you were lucky you both ended up outnumbering the murderer and you'd walk away with his loot. You wouldn't even know the person but you'd end up sharing an intense experience together where the stakes were high (if you died, you lost EVERYTHING). So many friendships were made that way. It was a different experience that was about more than levels and raiding groups and elite loot. It was a true social space where your actions affected other players experiences, for better or worse. To me, this is the soul of the MMO, and exactly what WoW lacks.

broodbucket 12y ago
EVE Online has just about everything you just mentioned, and is doing just fine. I prefer the WoW model, and so do the majority based on the numbers, but there is still a lively community for that type of gameplay.
- NovaS1X 12y ago
  I played WoW for a good 4-6 years. Had a lot of fun but eventually it became easy, grindy, and just lost it' luster. I've been playing EVE since about 2007 now and it's the only thing keeping me playing MMOs let alone video games. Then again EVE isn't really a game it's just a strange branch of real life.
  - RickHull 12y ago
    > Then again EVE isn't really a game it's just a strange branch of real life. True, in that it's very complex, and it does reward an analytical approach, which may or may not accord with one's own real life. Eve is a fantastic hobby, in that it is intellectually demanding, time consuming, skill rewarding, and an emotional investment. I can't recommend it but I'd certainly suggest it for whatever it is that ails ya.