Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Lots of interesting reader feedback to my interview with Irena Pereria, on what went wrong with WoW, based on her insights as a former Blizzard designer/developer. Irena’s core argument is that changes to World of Warcraft starting with the Cataclysm expansion degraded the sense of World of Warcraft as a dynamic, living virtual world and hurt its appeal as a virtual community where you wanted to socialize with other players.

On my Facebook feed, Richard Bartle — who literally wrote the book on designing MMOs — stopped by to offer some complementary thoughts:

The deleterious effects of many quality-of-life changes were obvious to most experienced designers as soon as they were discussed, and the effects were exposed by Asheron’s Call 2. It put them in and it failed. Nevertheless, most modern MMOs now put them in as standard (or, for some things like fast travel, sell them). Some such features are unavoidable, though. When WoW didn’t have a LFG mechanism, there were addons available that provided that functionality (albeit not with instant teleportation into an instance). Once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to put it back in again without changing the bottle.

Instead, it’s better to nudge players to play with each other, as they do in countless Minecrafter servers, as Bartle writes:

Self-directed entertainment isn’t just entertainment: it’s fun. If people merely want entertainment, they can passively watch TV or listen to music. If they want fun, they can play games. Minecraft isn’t just entertaining, it’s fun. When an MMO becomes the equivalent of a movie but you have to play a combat mini-game between scenes, the fun is leeched out. The same thing happens when other players become objects rather than subjects: you may as well play a single-player game.

Some reader responses, some concurring, some disagreeing, after the break — though I’d read the original interview first to get the full context:

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