I think I have mentioned that I still play World of Warcraft a couple of times here. I enjoy being a raid-healer and helping to coordinate team activities.
I also enjoy seeing what they change year-over-year in the game. Every expansion the design team at Blizzard tries to improve on the game’s core systems in interesting ways. They balance these improvements with attempts to fix previous failures. Sometimes you get more improvements, and other times you get more failures.
I think that I am feeling some of the failures for this expansion acutely. In previous expansions they removed the raid tier system. Many of us really liked the tiered armor sets. They attempted to fix this by introducing something called “Domination Sockets”. In my opinion, this is the closest thing I have seen to an actual war crime in game design. I am not going to go into detail about this here.
I am also not going to go into the failures of covenants, especially since they are about to take away the majority of the pain that they inflicted on the player base, the likes of which has not been seen since the Aldor/Scryer system back in The Burning Crusade.
Between that system, the randomness of earning Archivist Rep in Korthia, and the removal of the tiered sets in the first place I do have to wonder if sometime in the past decade “not playing the game” has become an important feature for live teams. It is hard for me to accept that someone could be a well versed player in this game and make the design decisions they are making.
Regardless, most of these things are superficial and will pass by the time another expansion comes around. Release expansion, release patch, offer an apology patch and a pretty mount for six months of subscription monies, repeat. The system works™.
You might get the impression I think the game is limping along. You are very astute. I do think that. I often ask myself “what would I do if I was steering the ship at Blizzard and trying to figure out how to get myself unstuck from this predicament?”
My answer, which is probably a surprise to most of you who know me well, is “something something mobile”.
I was once asked the question “what could you do to make a WoW subscriber from a mobile game player?” I think that Blizzard themselves tried to answer that question by creating Hearthstone. To be honest, I liked the mini-card-game-from-a-fantasy-franchise better when it was called Arcomage.
My own answer for this is that you really cannot make a new WoW customer from a mobile game player. I think the effort there would be akin to trying to make water flow uphill. It is probably not advisable.
There is an interesting twist on this answer. It is hard to create a new WoW subscription customer from a mobile game, but you can probably reacquire a former WoW player through the power of nOsTaLgIa. You only have to look as far as WoW Classic to understand that this is a real thing.
There are enough fancy mounts in the game that you could repurpose into any manner of endless runners, flying games, or tappable tycoon games. The WoW polygonal assemblage of identifiable geometries is massive.
They are already granting mounts inside of WoW for playing hearthstone, and probably granting hearthstone things for playing WoW. They might be running one of these promotions right now.
I do think they are barely scratching the surface of what they ought to be doing. You know. Because metaverse.
There is an unfounded fear that if you go deeper than a mount here, or a card there, you are going to hear the players scream that you are making them buy mobile devices in order to be successful at the game. Anyone who thinks that you are not going to make a WoW player purchase hardware has never tried to zone into a dungeon or raid on a 7200 RPM hard drive.
We are now at the point where omni-channel and cross-platform are common-enough words for game content that it is useless to resist. You will be assimilated.
I am going to put on my armchair-product-owner hat for a moment and tell you How I Would Run Things™.
Resource-ification
Farming for resources in WoW is a painful experience. I pick flowers between raids to fuel my alchemy habit. There are multitudes of auto-following multi-druids that stand between myself and my weekly alchemical raid needs.
There are probably easy ways to calculate a reasonable velocity for gathering resources. It should be easy to grant these as rewards as resources per minute in other products. Should it matter if you are spending an hour on your tablet playing Hearthstone, or an hour chasing druids on autopilot? This feels like the easiest win to me.
World of Ultra-casual-craft
Building on the previous point, you can already play “match three” and “flappy bird” in World of Warcraft. You already have all the publishing and authentication pieces for Hearthstone and the Battle Net App.
Why not release a slate of mini-games for your daily quests as bundled or standalone games?
There are nearly a dozen different games inside of Wow that are easy to put into a mobile experience and generate the same rewards. There are also at least one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand thirsty mobile-game developers out there who would do this as a work-for-hire project in order to stave off the financial demise of their indie company. In fact, a good one third to one half of them would probably be interested in joining the team full time upon successful completion. The cost of doing the project would probably be in the same ballpark as the cost of recruiting that many engineers anyway. Given how many “This is my last day at Blizzard” posts I see regularly on LinkedIn, I am reasonably certain there is plenty of work for fresh new developers to do.
Create Virtuous Cycles
The last thing that is worth looking at is to create virtuous cycles between games. I will confess that this is one of those things that I really feel strongly about.
Going back to the aforementioned broken parts of the current raid expansion, there are a variety of hard-to-acquire currencies that players need in order to be successful.
I am going to use Soul Cinders as an example here. Soul Cinders are largely acquired from Torghast. You can also get reasonably good Soul Cinders from doing two “Weekly Assaults”, and meager drips of them from your Covenant adventure table.
So why is this interesting?
I think that it would be interesting if you had the ability to craft “limited use” hearthstone cards inside of WoW. Not only would it be a good way to add intermittent patterns for players to collect, and an interesting sink for resources, you should go full circle and grant the player WoW Soul Cinders when you use these cards inside of Hearthstone.
This is what I mean by a virtuous cycle. There would be extra points awarded if you increased the complexity to generate recipes in “game 1” to create items in “game 2” and earn resources in “game 3”.
I will confess I thought we would be much closer to this with the launch of Hearthstone, and the subsequent acquisition of King and their mobile game development expertise. I do respect that integrating these things is hard.
I also think that it is high time to see this done. I mean, you know, we all have phones.
I am going to stop myself now before talking about what could happen if you added features that were Social, or Community. I can see a world where people ask their friends and family to play casual mobile resource generating games. I can further see a world where you could even give them some incentive to check out the online game for a length of time comparable to the size of resources they generated as a gift to the WoW player who has been on the receiving end of their largesse.
I would go so far as to say one more thing about this world. It is probably the only world in which you could get water to flow uphill.
Thank you for reading along. This post has been intentionally devoid of referral links and “punch the monkey” flash banners. You might see me return soon to the world of totally-may-shock-you click-bait referral shopping links. With as many kids as I have, I could use your Amazon referral dollars to offset the December beating that my American Express card gets.
Stay tuned for John-Szeder’s-Top-Five-List-Of-Books-He-Has-Not-Yet-Read.
