I managed to find and save this old post I wrote in the beta forums
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The starting point is that WoW is offering a new way to deal with the treadmill. I discussed about this in the past and I won’t repeat here. The fact is that the feeling of “grind” is noticeable a lot less in WoW than any other mmorpg. Why? because WoW is based on a very well thought and planned quest system. Instead of “camping” a spot you are pushed to move throughout the world “to do things”. Doing things feels a lot better than repeating the same action over and over and over. It gives you a better feeling of accomplishment. And the final result is that you are “having fun”. Something new to the genre. And it’s not sarcasm, sadly. My opinion is that WoW offers the best treadmill on the market due to these solutions. We can argue that a good treadmill isn’t a perfect dream but it’s already something different and improved from the general, poor level.

The first error that Blizzard has made on this phase is to introduce the “rest state” rule, which has been discussed extensively *everywhere*. One of the reasons why the system has been planned is, quoting: “To reduce the pressure for every area to be perfectly balanced experiece/balance wise. With rest states and questing, the world should stay more evenly distributed.” Remember it, I’ll return on this point.

I already explained why the “rest state” is wrong and shouldn’t be kept nor tweaked, here.
In this case I’ll focus on something else. I pointed out that the rest system was coming in a game not ready for it. And the concrete proof is here.

The players are starting to complain. The rest system has given even more importance to the quest system, exactly as I expected. There are only a number of places and quests to do at any level and everyone is following more or less the same path, finding various bottlenecks in the game. So the players are starting to complain because the server feels overcrowded. They have to wait to finish a quest because there are already groups waiting in line for it. Something I know quite well since it happens regularly in other mmorpgs.

At this point everyone is asking to cap the population on a server, or even to instance completely all the content. From a side there’s the rest state system that is wrong for various reasons and has been added when the game wasn’t ready for it, from the other side there’s a more complex idea. The first part is just a demonstration that the quest system isn’t strong enough to hold the load. I expected this: the number of quests is limited, the spots where you go to accomplish your duties are also limited. Simply put, there’s not enough content to support the whole treadmill in a game with the ambition of WoW. In particular when it comes to variation (and the well-known concepts of “gameplay”, “grind” and “treadmill” have their soul in the variation).

While many players are reporting the population as an issue, I think that the population is just the consequence of a real problem. The real problem is that Blizzard has put too much load on the quest system when it still wasn’t ready for that. There are many reasons. One is the introduction of the rest state, one is the arrival of many new players in the beta and another is the fact that nearly everyone is playing in the Horde, since the old Alliance characters are “freezed”. All that contributes to break the soul of the treadmill. And the treadmill is also the soul of WoW, till now. When things are broken you notice a lot of problems and the “fun” is affected. Often the players start to rant just about the end of this process, about the last part, so they see that the collection quests are unfun, or that the server population needs to be capped.

But, again, those are just consequences of a bigger problem. The fact that, for a number of reason, the quest system has reached a limit and now claims attention. I already suggested various obvious ways to ease the situation. Multiplying the spots where you can go to accomplish your quests, so that, for example, many goblins camps can help to spread the players, instead of being forced to go in a precise spot where the quest pointed you. Another is to add more variation to each zone, so that they offer content for a wider range of levels, organizing the spots. I noticed that the world feels quite big and repetitive in some zones. You can use the large spaces to offer more POIs (points of interest). When you are designing and implementing a quest you should measure the average time it takes to finish it. In the case of collect quests it means that you need more “space”, so that the players won’t overlap constantly.

What I’m trying to explain is that the sense of “overcrowding” that the players feel isn’t because there are “too many” players, it’s because there’s a problem in the gameplay. And you can solve it only if you address the gameplay itself.

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This rings a bell for me. I see something strange and the footprint of a bigger, deeper problem. Why the players are complaining about too many players on a server, when it’s supposed to be the *strenght* of a massive multiplayer game? Why peoples are asking to go back in a supposed “evolution” from the soul of the mmorpgs to the old Diablo concept where everything is simply instanced? I’m the only one to see that as something interesting? We started from Diablo simply because the idea of a massive, alternative world wasn’t still possible. It was THE dream of every single pen&paper roleplayer. To live in a world that you could only read about in a book. Instead, now the players are asking for a smaller scale. For something where their action are limited. Why?

I have my own opinion about this. EverQuest and Ultima Online created the genre. At the same time they killed it. There’s nothing interesting in the infinite treadmill of EverQuest. It worked to give a form of dependence to a big number of players, but it killed at the same time the spirit of a mmorpg. It killed the soul of a mmorpg. It’s all faked.

Quoting myself:

The general model, which everyone is adopting, is to focus on the character power.
The only thing that changes is that your character gains power.
This is the single element that is dynamic in mmorpgs and the single element around which every game is built (till now).

The fact is that you can go kill a dragon. And the dragon will respawn. The dragon isn’t dinamic. The dragon doesn’t exist. What exists is the ph4t l3wt. What it drops. The experience. Your power. That is what will last. Your dynamical growth as a character. Measured in levels, skills and items. Exactly where all the interest of every single player is aimed.

The players want instanced content because that content doesn’t exist. It doesn’t have a life. It’s faked. It’s plastic, or, in this case, “bits”, numbers. What exists and it’s not faked is the real, dynamical consequence: the power grind.

The truth is that everyone is still playing a single player game. PvE isn’t a part of a mmorpg. PvE is archeology. It’s ballast. If you think the general idea of a mmorpg like a rocket, that aims toward the stars where it will realize its complete potential, you can imagine the PvE as the platform from where the rocket has been launched (EverQuest). Now that platform is STILL attacked to the rocket. The rocket is starting to move and the platform is risking to make the whole thing crash on the ground.

One player asked to make the whole content that Blizzard is offering in WoW, completely instanced. Everyone, me included, pointed to him that there are already many games out or in development that offer that. The fact that WoW could offer a polygonal city instead of a text chat like in Diablo doesn’t change the spirit of the game. The players are asking for “hubs” where they can gather (and show off their toon, because mmorpgs exploit a lot the narcissism of the players). The rest of the game is about elements that don’t need the presence of others. Other players are a problem, because they steal your mob, leech your experience, grief you. And so on. If your aim is to “achieve power” and every other player is an obstacle between you and your aim, it’s *obvious* and consequent that everyone will ask for *less* players, or a completely instanced content.

The problem is that we are still playing single player games. With the difference that here you can brag about “your story” among the population of a whole server. So what’s the role of the population? Firstly to satisfy your loneliness, or narcissistic needs (they are exactly the same). Secondly as a competing environment. And that’s where the catasses attacked the “rest system”. They want to be the best, before everyone else. The “rest system” is an obstacle because it gives advantages to their “enemies”, the other players with less time to spend in this “race”.

That’s your PvE. The perfect way to exploit the weakness of your players and hook them in a dependent relationship. (dependence problems are being discussed here)

It’s something sad, it’s not the soul of the mmorpgs, it’s the starting point that now needs to be left to aim somewhere else. The starting point is bad when it starts to assume the control of your whole game. Making the real aim sink and die. We need to fly but we are sinking in a swamp. And that’s our rocket.

It’s sad that a city in WoW is seen just as an “hub” and it isn’t basically different from the chat you have in Diablo. We are fiddling with concepts that are already dead. Instead of moving on, we move backwards and the players are starting to ask for that. Why? Because the players are aiming right to the center. You offer them a power grind? And they aim to that. The reaction of the players simply uncovers the truth. The truth is that PvE is the concept of a single player game. Your friends are ok, any other player is an obstacle or a problem. And this is wrong on many different levels.

The result is that what is faked is not only the PvE, but the whole game. It’s double-roleplay. You roleplay your character, then you roleplay a mmorpg. Because what is offered is a faked environment even for a game. It’s a sinlge-player/cooperative game that is “roleplaying” and imitating a mmorpg.

What I see is that the whole genre is collapsing on itself. Now we have two parts, PvE and PvP. They aren’t two types of mmorpgs. The second is a mmorpg, the first is just a derivation of old gameplay. PvE is what everyone has played till now, before the idea of online games has born. Pulling the PvE in a mmorpg is having an obvious result: the players don’t like it because the “massive” part of it is simply seen as a problem. And so they ask for a smaller scale. To bring back the PvE where it belongs. As a single player/cooperative game.

Why are we playing a massive game when its massive aspect takes off the fun? Really, why? Why would I ask for a massive PvE game when the content is obviouly more fun if completely instanced? Instanced is equal to faked. But remember that non-instanced PvE content doesn’t make it real (the example of the dragon). The players feel that, so they ask for the content to be brough back where it belongs. Where Diablo is.

I see a question for Blizzard. I have many ideas about all these aspects, but the starting question is one. Do you want to make a single-player game or a mmorpg?

The answer is important. Each choice brings to games that should be designed in a *completely* different way. What I read in the last days made me think about all that and I realized that WoW, till now, isn’t a mmorpg.

Many of the design choices should be taken considering that. The players are demonstrating that WoW isn’t a mmorpg and many of its parts should be tweaked in this direction, if it’s Blizzard’s aim.

Why, really, all the content shouldn’t be instanced if it brings only advantages to the gameplay?