The War over WarCraft

By Vermouth

I was recently chatting with a friend about micro-transactions as a model for game development. I had the idea to look up the real world value of gold which I’d spent on some particular items in WoW. It came back expectedly high when converted at gold farmer rates, but the real shocker was to come. I took a good look at a section of accounts for sale and clicked on the first one to examine the available accounts. For $250 US dollars a rogue was available. The kicker is that it wasn’t a particularity well geared rogue. I scrolled down a bit, browsing until I found a hunter which was geared in the range that I was also geared in. I saw the price of $750; and thought to myself if I ever wanted to quit playing. The funny thing is I’m probably the fourth or fifth best geared priest in our guild which isn’t one of the super elite guilds on my server. This whole event drove home to me the remarkable gap between the World of Warcraft players who raid and everybody else.

Let me give you a bit of background. The day I dinged sixty I joined Desk Chair Lamp, a horde raiding guild on Bloodscalp. After a few months of making every raid, I’m geared as you might expect me to be. I’ve got Halo of Transcendence, True Faith Vestments, 5 pieces of prophecy, Hide of the Wild, and my precious Benediction. All of this makes me about the 5th best priest in my guild circle. I don’t play so much with people outside of that circle so I sort of forget that we all have pretty exceptional gear. As such, when I take a look at people selling accounts with (what I would consider) mediocre geared characters, I’m sort of perplexed by this. Could it be that people think this is great gear?

Truth is this gets at a gap that seems to be widening in World of Warcraft between the players that raid and the players that don’t. The primary reasons for this I suppose depends on who you ask, but it really comes down to one thing. Raiding takes up a lot of time; generally about 5 hours a night are given to raiding on any night when I’m involved. While this is a lot of fun for me I couldn’t argue that that doesn’t impede people from playing in raids, simply because they just can’t devote that much time to the game. This wouldn’t necessarily be such a issue but for the gear thing. One of the reasons people will pay for a well geared character even more than they’ll pay for an averagely equipped “toon”; is that gear confers an advantage in PvP. Or so I’m told, as it really doesn’t for a healer. My gear really only works for one thing - keeping people alive.

So how does a company bridge this gap? Well frankly it’s hard to say. For one thing you continue to support people who like to do smaller group content and PvP. Blizzard has done some of this with Dire Maul and the Honor system rewards but frankly it’s clearly still half a step behind even the worst raiding gear. They also more recently introduced some new gear which can be obtained in five-man and ten-man runs. Because of all the special conditions they applied to the Dungeon Set 2, they’re just as big of a pain in the ass to do but they could be done on your free time. Consequently a lot of the people in my guild with high level alts are really pursuing it to deck out there alts with. While on one hand you don’t want to give non-raiders the feeling that they aren’t playing the same game as the raiders, you don’t want to leave the raiders feeling like they’re not being rewarded for their efforts.

In that, they’re doing pretty well as the gap between the gear from raid to raid seems to be scaling up nicely. The BWL Gear is a lot better than the MC gear which is passed rather nicely by the Ahn Qiraj (40 man) gear. The answer I would suggest wouldn’t be particularity popular with the market which would be to simply end PvP. Another possible solution would be to have a series of short dungeons with one nasty boss to learn like Onyxia, instead of having several mammoth dungeons that take months and months to learn and 8 or 9 hours over a few days to clear even once you’ve mastered them. I don’t know that this is a great solution as you’d still need to put a lot of time in to get through several of these in a night (as would likely be the norm), but it would cut down on the time commitment issues if you could find a guild that set itself up for shorter runs a little more often rather than nightly spending 6 hours clearing a dungeon.

Truthfully I don’t think there are any easy answers to this kind of thing, as it really hints at a game that captured attention of both the casual and the hardcore at the same time. And by coexisting on the same world they’re really learning how the other half plays. Because of the Internet and the great tradition of whining about an MMO till you get your way, there is almost a sort of microcosm of the hardcore-casual gamer culture war brewing in Azeroth. One wonders whether this will be just a bump in the road or weather the battle lines are being drawn for the next great struggle within gaming.