As this is my first dev watercooler, I thought some introductions would be in order. I'm the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft, but many of you may already be familiar with my writing and webcomics under the pen-name "Fargo" from years past. To all my new and old friends: Hello! I hope to have the opportunity for more chats like this in between cramming our game full of epic experiences capable of melting your frontal lobes with pure liquefied awesome. (It says that on my business card.)



I'm 85. Now What?
World of Warcraft has a pretty big footprint: we try to create a world that appeals to casual and hardcore players alike. There's a whole body of players -- be they casual or solo gamers or serious gamers with time constraints -- who gravitate toward questing. It's the most accessible part of the game. Quests move you through cool locations, allow you to play through epic stories, and continually reward you without requiring a lot of practice or commitment. Not everyone has the time to raid, and not everyone wants to; for many players, quests are the whole game. A major thrust of the Cataclysm expansion, obviously, was to recreate much of the world to give players a more consistent, satisfying, epic questing experience as they level up.
But there's a problem with level-up questing, and it keeps me up at night. It has an end. When you hit max level, the rewards slow to a trickle. You don't get a comforting Ding! every couple of hours. You stop learning new abilities. From a solo progression standpoint, your character is in many ways ?done,? and you turn your attention to the other parts of the game (like crafting.)
For many players, the end is just the beginning. We've done a lot to provide serious players with ongoing progression in the form of dungeons, raids, and accumulating high-end gear for fighting bosses or PvP. But what about the player who just wants to keep questing?





Keeping the Rewards Coming
In the absence of gaining levels, there are still ways to reward players who want to continue questing or playing through quest-like experiences. Here are some things (there may be more) that might encourage players like this to stick around:

Participation in an epic story
A sense of progress
Discovery of something new or unexpected each day
Earning character customization (including cool mounts!)
Earning fun toys
Making your character more powerful

I didn't list gold as a reward, because even though it's fun to hoard gold, the usual reason you want to do so is for one of the reasons listed above. I also hesitated to add ?making your character more powerful? to the list. Even though it's fun and rewarding, I think it has a limit. It's mostly relevant only if you've got powerful stuff to fight. And if you're not interested in raids, getting powerful just for the sake of power isn't always compelling.
We've grappled with this problem before, and we'll continue to tinker with solutions. The Isle of Quel'Danas provided people with a great sense of progression, at least on a realm-wide level, and it sure felt epic. The Argent Tournament definitely gave players a sense of personal progress, as well as lots of fun toys.
But for patch 4.2, we really wanted to give players something. Something big!





Fight for the Firelands!
The Guardians of Hyjal are getting smart in patch 4.2. They're not just assaulting the Firelands with hardcore raiding guilds? they're attacking that place with everything they've got. That includes you, solo players! We've created a whole zone dedicated to daily questing. There are some 60 new quests in total -- that's about half a zone's worth of quest content. While the raiders are concentrating on taking down the likes of Ragnaros, you'll be securing the rest of his fiery domain.
There's also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses -- over the course of weeks -- across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves. Along the way, major characters are going to get rocked, you'll meet (and destroy) a few new villains, and you'll earn yourself a small heap of nice rewards. The druids are establishing a beachhead in a hostile world, starting with little more than a pile of rocks and ultimately erecting an enormous otherworldly base.
The progression is personal: you won?t see it happen until you make it happen.
We want to keep that sense of progression going, not just over the course of weeks but on a daily basis. As you begin to unlock and upgrade your hub in the Firelands, more quests will become available, and you?ll be able to slowly push your way forward every day. Extensive randomization means your quest flow will be a little different one day to the next. You?ll also have choices to make as to how the battle progresses.
The Firelands daily area hits a lot of the high points on my list above. And, for good measure, players can also earn a lot of gold and player-power enhancing items as well.





Beyond the Firelands?
Problem solved? Far from it -- to be clear, we don?t think the Firelands questing arc is "the answer." But I'll come out and say I think it's pretty sweet. I'd love to hear your feedback -- it's been up and running on the Public Test Realm for a couple of weeks now. Personally, I've fought my way into the Firelands and I'm nearly ready to select my first major upgrade to the quest hub? do I go with the Druids of the Talon or do I recruit the Shadow Wardens? Decisions, decisions! My choice will impact the next couple weeks of questing.
Still, we're building towards something, and we're constantly watching players to see what works and what doesn't. I can't wait to see the Guardians of Hyjal stage their assault on the live servers.
In the meantime, even as we speak, our Top Men and Women (and I want you to imagine that we're wearing lab coats) are scheming up ways to push these ideas even farther in future World of Warcraft updates. Players shouldn't feel like max level is the end of their experience. We want everyone to participate in something epic, no matter what their playstyle.




Dave "Fargo" Kosak is the lead quest designer for World of Warcraft. Each morning by the first light of dawn his forearms are ritually shaved, followed by twenty minutes of cardio on one of those playground spring-horses.



Posted from WoW Vault

 

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Rill_of_WE posted:

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I still distinctly recall when everyone liked GC when he first started posting on the WotLK beta forums. In a year or so it would not surprise me if this poor, nice, fella turns into another GC.

Loved this article regardless. ^_^

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Spookysheep posted:

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Rill_of_WE posted:

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I still distinctly recall when everyone liked GC when he first started posting on the WotLK beta forums. In a year or so it would not surprise me if this poor, nice, fella turns into another GC.

Loved this article regardless. ^_^

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You recall incorrectly.

He got more asinine as time went by, but he was an ass from the start.

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Ferrydust posted:

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Spookysheep posted:

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Rill_of_WE posted:

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I still distinctly recall when everyone liked GC when he first started posting on the WotLK beta forums. In a year or so it would not surprise me if this poor, nice, fella turns into another GC.

Loved this article regardless. ^_^

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You recall incorrectly.

He got more asinine as time went by, but he was an ass from the start.

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I remember people loving GC and cursing Kalgan. At least PVPers at the time.

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Trigeminal posted:

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My biggest complaint with any MMO (WoW included) is what do I do with my gametime once max level is reached. It is part of the reason I have a thousand alts. I've raided in every expansion but once I kill the "last boss" a few times, I get bored with the repetition. I can't bring myself to do arenas competitively. I find them boring. So I'm left with dailies. Once you get the TB mounts, do you keep doing them?

I'm glad they are recognizing the need for content.

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Blisteringballs posted:

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Trigeminal posted:

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My biggest complaint with any MMO (WoW included) is what do I do with my gametime once max level is reached. It is part of the reason I have a thousand alts. I've raided in every expansion but once I kill the "last boss" a few times, I get bored with the repetition. I can't bring myself to do arenas competitively. I find them boring. So I'm left with dailies. Once you get the TB mounts, do you keep doing them?

I'm glad they are recognizing the need for content.

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My biggest complaint with WoW is how the current devs don't understand the nuances of the game and community they're serving. By their actions and words they allowed the situation to spiral out of control, to the point in which they now have a black eye, hundreds of thousands of customers fleeing, and are having to enact constant and erratic changes to try to keep up. 20% nerf across the board for an entire tier of content? They never had to do anything that crazy before. Chainsaw changes versus calculated and measured scalpel cuts. It's a multilayered problem:

The ramped up difficulty and grind caused a rift (no pun intended) in the playerbase. Wrath was successful, largely, because it created a caste of casuals that didn't have to even think about the meticulous details hardcore or elite players obsess about. They could PUG all day and care less about whether not someone had PvP gear on, what an iLevel even was, or visit sites to become content scholars to push their DPS/healing/tanking into the top tier of talent. You put in your twenty minutes to an hour and had fun completing content and getting whatever gear was important to you. Now that things are more difficult and progression slower, "bad" players are pretty much abandoned by good ones (when the more talented players used to effortlessly carry them). The community got segregated in that regard. Casual and bad players feel behind, got frustrated, and finally bored and are leaving. The hardcore raiders probably don't even notice much of a difference, but those inbetween the two camps of extremes got hurt by no longer having an endless source of players for heroics and raids, and also had to give more commitment to organized gaming (which is a no-no in game design if you want players to just keep subscribing while not investing much into the game).

This was all compounded by the sudden change in tone and attitude in regards to developer interaction with the community. They pretty much fostered the environment and by blaming the players for everything they gave the casuals even more of a reason not to bother trying. No light at the end of the tunnel, and all that. Suggesting that content changes are what people wanted and if they didn't they're just bad and can't get coordinated. Etc.

I could go on but I think my huge wall of text made its point. The current devs just didn't see the forest for the trees, refused to listen, and now don't appear able to elegantly correct their design flaws. So now they're even making their hardcore crowd frustrated and unsure how their characters will play next hotfix or question why they're investing so much time and effort.

Boy I really rambled there, sorry.

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Rill_of_WE posted:

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I still distinctly recall when everyone liked GC when he first started posting on the WotLK beta forums. In a year or so it would not surprise me if this poor, nice, fella turns into another GC.

Loved this article regardless. ^_^

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