The WOW exodus

 "Do you hear the people sing-"

So full cards on the table; I haven't played an MMO for nigh on 3 years now and back when I did that MMO was not World of Warcraft. As it just so happens that was my days of playing the Elder Scrolls Onlin, which crucially is not a subscription based MMO and thus many out there wouldn't even consider that a real MMO background. So what I'm trying to say is that I am no great authority on the world of Massively Multiplayer Online games, nor the definition of what constitutes an online ecosystem to be 'massive'. (Always hated the MMO acronym) As such the comings and goings of WOW have been nothing but background noise to me throughout the years, I've peaked a few of their world grade cinematic trailers from time-to-time, but without any context it's pretty much just a fireworks show, and I find fireworks shows deathly boring. (Don't tell Yoimiya I said that.) But if you've been around this blog any length of time at all you'll be fully aware of my addict-like obsession with a 'story'; thus the tale of the WOW exodus has sparked my attention such to the point I want to talk about it today.

But firstly I feel it's important to say, this is the second Blizzard story this week that I've covered without going into their recent allegations, because honestly I don't even want to talk about all that stuff anyway. It's hardly related to gaming for one, and for two it just makes me feel icky to think about. Besides, it's not necessarily related to the exodus, although I think there's a case to be made that it certainly exacerbated the issue. Not to take the thunder out of the winds of the FF team, nor to exonerate the WOW team of any and all misdeeds, but this has been an absolutely awful few months for Blizzard and it's impossible to divorce any of their wrong-doings from one another at this point. Be that as it may, that's exactly what I'm going to do even if I have to purposefully and pointedly adopt a reductive view of the situation in order to do. We all understand? General agreement reached? Good. Now for the story.

What if I told you that WOW is not the last hope of the MMO world? What if I was to enigmatically turn my little green puppet head to the unknowable stars and mumble "No. There is another..." Because whilst all of these years the subscription MMO of the world was World of Warcraft, another game slowly stirred in the wings, born from a franchise even more beloved than Warcraft. I speak, of course, of the Final Fantasy MMO: Final Fantasy Ni- oh wait not that one. Final Fantasy XIV! (The one they bought out whilst the Kingdom Hearts guy was screwing around with his Versus Thirteen game for 8 years.) There was a MMO which started off as a disappointment to the series name, but then was treated to a total conversion treatment and came out the belle of the ball; like the protagonist of an early 2000's high school movie. In an alternate universe one might call this the 'Anthem 2.0 manoeuvre', but that universe it not this one... for obvious reasons.

In the proceeding years FFXIV has been getting more and more popular as an alternative to WOW, all the while the general lack of competition in the MMO space has slowly drained the player pool thus bringing the gap between these games closer and closer. In retrospect I hear that a lot of WOW players had been decently unsatisfied with the direction of their personality-defining hobby for a while now since the integrity of the game had given way to general team laziness, anaemic updates that seemed to take longer and longer to come out, and, surprise surprise, microtransactions. Oh the microtransactions. I never knew this at the time, but Blizzard have been slowly perfecting their craft as the 'time saver' kings, finding ways to turn literally every single possible thing one can achieve in the game into a service purchasable with real money. Collectibles, gear, levels, progress; give the horned man in the executive suit his blood money and Daddy Blizzard will pretty much play the game for you. So you can get back to... not playing the game, I guess.

Seriously though, when we're talking about MMO's the monetisation model is so important to get right it might as well be considered part of the gameplay balancing. (Well, in the case of WOW it should be, at least.) It's just like the problem approaching Star Citizen whenever that game is actually realised; if you turn everything that could be an achievement into a marketplace item then you rob the satisfaction of the player actually achieving something, and if there's nothing to achieve then why should you play the game? Yes, experiencing something new will get you through the door, but sticking around for months and staying to dropping those subscription bucks; that only happens when your community has viable goals to shoot for. Of course, that is by no means the only problem with WOW of today, (at least not how the haters tell it) but from what I hear it's a big one. But what about this Exodus I'm talking about?

Well, in the early days of July a popular WOW streamer called Asmongold unintentionally proved once again why influencer marketing is some of the most powerful in the entire entertainment industry, when he switched his MMO of choice to Final Fantasy XIV citing dissatisfaction with Blizzard and the direction of WOW. With his departure came a ludicrous amount of attention and coverage which, predictably, encouraged many to follow suit to the point where, for the first time in their careers, Final Fantasy XIV actually overtook WOW in online attention. Now we can't lay this all at the feet of Asmongold, (as much as supposed internal leak documents are trying to do) but it's clear that if so many people were willing to jump ships so expediently, they must have been pushed to the gangplank already. What followed was a Burning Crusade of sorts as fans burnt out of WOW, cancelled their subscriptions and spent the next half day trying to buy FFXIV because that's how long it takes and the FF team really need to rework that. (Oh, that half-hearted reference is about the extent of my WOW knowledge expended by-the-by; don't expect anything else)

Now of course this doesn't mean that World of Warcraft is going to explode overnight due to lack of users, the game can probably run perfectly fine with a fraction of the margins that it has, but this does represent something of a watershed moment for the 17 year old game. Because with Blizzard how it is now, the way they exist and the people they have working for them, they probably won't be coming back from this moment to retake the MMO crown. Now when you think about that, it's incredibly flattering to old school WOW to think that they were on top for over a decade, and a little bit sad to see the landscape of the genre change so much since. Like watching a venerated golden-scaled dragon loss it's last hit point and tumble from the skin, except nowhere near as dramatic as that; where did I even get that visual from? Which isn't to say FFXIV is the new top-dog now, New Worlds is on the way and despite the fact I think that game looks like flaming hot garbage there are a sizable number of MMO starved players out there and new comers to the genre entirely who are willing to give it a shot. Could this be a renaissance for the MMO genre we're looking at, maybe one with a crown shared amidst a handful of titles? Never say never, I'd say.

But what does this mean for Blizzard going forward? World of Warcraft was one of their biggest points of self pride for the company, being a game that every MMO fan in the universe was stuck with no matter how much they wanted out, and now the spell is broken and thus so is the '1# MMO' mug on the team's desk. Well with any luck this might be a moment of sell reflection for the company where they see the ways in which they changed from the 'player first' initiative they were founded on and try to rectify that wound, but that's not going to happen. Games companies have this point where they grow so big that the heart becomes clotted and diseased, or simply is cut out entirely. Passion falls to the wayside as those that actually 'play' games are discarded for those that only 'make' them. It's a big difference, and one that can be felt by anyone who plays these games only to feel that the soul behind decisions is not made by someone who wants the game to be better. Do you think an actual player of an MMO would want every single achievement they made to be invalidated with 'time saver purchases'? Do you think they would want to throw in timegates stopping you from playing more than 4 dungeons a day? (I used to have a friend who thought it would be a great idea to throw in a day-long cooldown after character death. We're not friends anymore.) The player-makers have moved on, some from the industry entirely and others to smaller ventures where they're in control, and that which remains are mere doppelgangers; wearing the skin of those that we respected, but sharing none of the inner substance. So WOW isn't coming back, Blizzard isn't getting better, Bioware aren't redeeming themselves, Bethesda has me distinctly worried, CDPR need to pull up their bootstraps and Ubisoft can talk considering the allegations they've been through recently. (That last point wasn't necessarily related, but if I'm not going to write a blog about it I need to vent my frustrations some way)