Farewell to Azeroth Posted April 30, 2006 at 9:26 pm
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve given up on the World of Warcraft. At times, I found the game to be a supremely entertaining way to spend time with a small group of friends. But the closer I got to the lofty level 60 plateau, the more I became aware of the discontinuity between the early-to-mid game and the end game and the havoc it played with the game’s established social order. I played witness to a disconcerting exodus of experienced players from our small, tight-knit guild to the sprawling raid and PvP guilds.
Before I go further, let me explain something. At the end game, when there are no more levels to be gained, WoW polarizes along two styles of play: raiding and PvP. Raiding involves taking a large group of the highest-level players to tackle the toughest dungeons filled with the best loot. PvP, or Player vs. Player, takes a competitive, rather than cooperative, angle through organized combat between player characters, but the rewards are comparable to raiding. Most players choose one of these two routes when they hit 60.
The problem with these new modes of play is that they require significantly more resouces to complete successfully. You need a lot of people to put on a successful raid, far more than the number required for the lesser dungeons. Compare the typical raid group at 40 against the traditional five-man groupings for dungeons. Where it might have been easy to throw together an ad-hoc group to attempt a five-man (and it often isn’t), it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult to put together a raid group. While your current guild may be able to quickly man up for a five-man dungeon crawl, it may fall flat when tasked with supplying 40 capable players for a raid. If and when this happens, people inevitably look elsewhere for help and you may suddenly be short even more allies than when you started.
At least, that’s what happened to my guild. People left when the guild couldn’t consistently put up the bodies to fill raid and PvP groups. Logging in at times felt like the in-game equivalent of showing up at work to find that three or four of your buddies had suddenly quit to work at the company across the street. I suppose the game is not dissimilar to real life in that respect. People are constantly coming and going. I had just hoped for a little more stability in my online community.