Exclusivity and World of Warcraft

There's a debate raging on the World of Warcraft forums right now. Actually, debate is both accurate and generous. It's accurate in that most people involved tend to express their views quite well, and don't resort to using all caps, calling everyone gay, or leaving in a huff after declaring they've won. It's generous because it seems to be a few people against Blizzard, with neither side really willing to admit the validity of the other side's viewpoint. The debate centres on the nerfs to the heroic Dragon Soul raid. If the previous sentence didn't make sense to you, allow me to back up and explain.

World of Warcraft is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, which is a mouthful and thus usually shortened to MMORPG. Basically, it's an RPG you can play with a lot of other people. You don't have to, if you don't want to. In fact, you can reach the highest level and get good gear by yourself. The next step up from that is to group with four other people into a Party and tackle a Dungeon. A dungeon has enemies (called mobs) you wouldn't be able to beat normally. It also has bosses that require cooperation and coordination to kill, but they tend to give you much better loot than you could get by yourself. The next step up from parties are Raids. These are composed of 10 or 25 people, the bosses are very complicated, and you really have to know your class (class is the type of character you play, giving you access to different abilities. Warriors have different abilities than Paladins have different abilities than Mages have different abilities than Hunters and so on and so forth) and have some knowledge of other classes as well to kill those bosses. They are the hardest in the game, and thus drop the best loot (when bosses die, they have gear players can have. What gear shows up is somewhat random, but the gear is called loot, and what shows up is what "drops").

Vanilla WoW is what players call World of Warcraft before or without any expansions. It was released in November 2004. The Burning Crusade was released in January of 2007 and is known as TBC or just BC, and can refer to the time the expansion was released, or its contents. Wrath of the Lich King is known as WotLK or Wrath, and was released in November of 2008. Cataclysm is usually known as Cataclysm, although occasionally shortened to Cata, and was released in December, 2010. Mists of Pandaria is an upcoming expansion with no official release date yet, but speculation pegs it sometime in September. It's being talked about as MoP.

Back in Vanilla WoW, raids consisted of 40 people. Players talk about those halcyon days like thus: "Remember back in Vanilla WoW, how awesome raiding was with 40 people?" Let me tell you right now, raiding with 40 people was not awesome. It was more akin to herding cats. I was part of a guild (a group of like-minded people) that periodically but inconsistently raided. What happened was this: I would log on and join the raid. About an hour later, enough other people had joined the raid that we could actually tackle the enemies. We would make our way to the entrance of Molten Core (called MC, one of the less difficult 40 man raids). There, we would do a lot of preparatory spell work, and then get to work killing trash (mobs that aren't part of boss fights). We'd kill one or two bosses, and then someone's internet would go out, and someone else would have to go to school, and a few other people would have to spend time with their families (gasp!) and so the raid would fall apart well short of the final boss (most raids had 5 to 8 bosses. Some only had one, but there were insane quests to even be able to enter it, so those were out).

Most of the time, we couldn't even get 40 people, so we went to Zul'Gurub (a 20 man raid added later. Raids are added in patches, which is nice, because you can use the gear found in previous raids to take down the even harder bosses in later raids). There, we would kill maybe 4 bosses (out of 8) before we had to call it quits.

The last raid in Vanilla WoW was called Naxxramas. It was fairly big, with lots of bosses, and an incredibly tough end boss. He was the hardest in the game way back then. I never set foot in the place, which put me in the firm majority of other players as well. In fact, less than 1% of players even went in there, and only a tiny fraction of them managed to complete it. So Blizzard (the company that makes WoW) got to wondering why they made such awesome content that nobody saw.

In BC, they introduced 10 and 25 player raids. Each raid would either be for 10 or 25 players. For instance, Karazahn (shortened to Kara) only let 10 players in, whereas Serpentshire Caverns (SSC) was for 25 players. This reduction in raid size was said to be the end of WoW by a sizeable fraction of players, but that was to be expected. WoW players are like Facebook users - any change, no matter how small, will be decried. If you tallied up all the changes that World of Warcraft has made, it's been RUINED FOREVER at least 357 billiontimes (according to the playerbase). And if everyone quit when they said they would (and declared that Blizzard would lose customers due to whatever change they were complaining about), World of Warcraft would have about negative 15 million players right now. As it is, WoW continually gets more awesome. There's a reason it's #1, and that's because the people behind it really know what they're doing.

Anyway, BC also opened up another big change to end game content (the game features that are only available once you hit the highest level available - the 'level cap'): Heroic Dungeons. Each dungeon had two difficulties - one for level appropriate players (say, level 62, or level 65 or level 70 players), and one for well-geared level 70 players. Heroics were quite hard, but not as hard as raids. They were intended to be an intermediate step between dungeons and raids, as well as challenging content for players who didn't have the time or inclination to raid. They also occasionally rewarded purples (gear is rated by color, with purple being the best. Well, orange is technically better than that, but is so rare - like, one in a thousand rare - that most people just aim for purples, called Epics. Blue gear is called Rare and is better than everything but purple. Green is called Uncommon and is the next step down. White is common, and grey is junk).

In Wrath of the Lich King, they changed raids so that each of them could be done by 10 and 25 people. So one day you could take in 10, and the next, 25. The 25-man option had better loot, but 10 man was still nothing to sneeze at.

Later on, they also introduced Hard modes for Raids, which were similar to the Heroic modes for Dungeons. Basically, for people that wanted that extra challenge, or that extra gear, they would try the same difficult bosses, only now they would be even harder. The problem is that they included them for 10 and 25 man raids, which culminated in the Trial of the Crusader.

Trial of the Crusader was a raid introduced in patch 3.2. It started of as a good idea (no trash) that consisted of only bosses. The problem was that it was only in one big room, and had 5 bosses all in a row. And so people would run it in 10 man. And then the next day, they would run it as 25 man. And the next day, run it as 10 man hard mode. And then the next day, as 25 man hard mode. All in the same room, against the same bosses, night after night. People burned out really fast, and the complaining reached epic proportions.

For the next (and last) raid of the expansion, Blizzard put limits on raids, which pretty much amounted to once a week. So you had to choose whether you wanted to do 10 or 25 man, and normal or heroic. And while it might seem strange that a company wouldn't want their customers playing as much as possible, Blizzard's actually pretty good about that. They seem to care about their customers more than other companies (*cough* Pop-cap). After a few months of the raid, Blizzard also introduced a Buff.

Buffs are increases to stats. They can be permanent or temporary. For instance, Paladins have an ability call Blessing of Kings that increases any player's main stats by 5% for one hour. Some increase attack power, some increase armor, some just increase health. A debuff is almost the opposite, but it's only temporary. For instance, bosses might have an ability that reduces player armor by 25% for 30 seconds. A nerf is a permanent decrease to stats or abilities. As an example, say Paladins were doing too much damage relative to other classes. Blizzard would nerf one of their main abilities by two or three percent, bringing them more in line with the rest of the playerbase. They call it a Nerf because it makes you feel like your playing with foam weapons instead of the real thing.

Anyway, for the last raid of WotLK, Blizzard introduced a progressive buff. After a few months, player in the raid would get a 5% increase to health and attack power. A few weeks later, they'd get a 10%. It kept increasing until it hit 30%. This meant that guilds (or even just players) that were stuck on a boss (kept dying to that boss, week after week) could finally get past him and try out further content. Players who still wanted the challenge could turn off the buff. What this meant for players is that a whole bunch of them got to fight (and kill) the main enemy of the expansion (the titular Lich King), which had been Blizzards goal all along.

In Cataclysm, raiding was nearly the same. However, instead of players getting buffed, it was bosses getting nerfed. After a few months, bosses would have 5% less health. Then 10%, and so on. The problem with the players is that the last patch introduced an easier form of raiding, called Looking for Raid, or LFR.

LFR is an automatic grouping tool. Basically, you turn it on, and the game matches you with a bunch of other people to do the raid. If you don't use it, you have to hang around, waiting for someone to ask if anyone wants to join a raid, which can take a while, and people aren't too keen on raiding with strangers for tough content. LFR raiding is much easier than normal raiding, due to there being 24 other strangers in there, and coordination is tough even for people that regularly raid together.

So now there are three tiers of raiding: LFR (the easiest), Normal, and Heroic (or Hard). Deathwing is the last boss in the final raid, called the Dragon Soul, and so Heroic Deathwing is supposed to be the hardest fight in the game.

Back in WotLK, Blizzard put Achievements into the game. You could get achievements for a lot of different things ("hug a bunch of animals"), but most of the prestigious achievements had to do with killing raid bosses, since they were the hardest content in the game. You could also show off your achievements to other players, which is important to players that feel the need to do that type of thing. Yes, we could now virtually strut, and strut we did.

Right now, one of the toughest (and therefore best to show off) achievements in the game is the one you get for killing Heroic Deathwing. The problem that's arising is that the nerfs to the bosses mean that more people are getting it. There's a group of hardcore players saying that the nerfs shouldn't apply to Heroic Dragon Soul, and they have a bit of a point.

The original point of nerfs was to get as many players as possible to see the content. But because LFR is allowing people to play through Dragon Soul (albeit on lowered difficulty and therefore lowered loot), the nerfs don't have to apply. If you want a challenge, try normal. And the nerfs apply there too, because there's still a fair bit of prestige in killing Deathwing, even on normal (by the way, I have only killed Deathwing in LFR. By the time I got into raiding in Cataclysm, my guild had become engrossed in Diablo III. Mind you, I had become engrossed in Skyrim. And SWTOR. And Mass Effect 3). But should the nerfs apply to Heroic Dragon Soul? Blizzard argues yes, because they want as many players as they can to get the happy buzz that comes from beating a particularly trying boss. The hardcore players argue no, because beating Deathwing with the nerfs devalues the achievement, and they could do it without the nerf. Which is probably the nub of the problem.

The players want the prestige of beating Heroic Deathwing without the nerf, and they don't want anyone else to get that prestige. It's like they've joined an exclusive little club "Hey, look at how great a player I am" and don't want anyone else to join. It's in Bizzards best interests to have as many players that want to get into that club without it being so easy as to lose its "exclusive" status.

This problem is not just limited to World of Warcraft, or video games in general. People want to get into exclusive clubs. Why wouldn't you? They're exclusive and special. But as soon as they start letting more people in, they lose the exclusion and prestige. Specialness is inversely proportional to population. The more people, the less special. Ideally, you'd want to get into one and then immediately close the door behind you. The problem with that is that because you're the newcomer, there's no chance of becoming part of the even-more-exclusive club-within-the-club. And there's always a club-within-the-club.

Exclusive clubs are why religions can be so popular. "Look, I'm part of something special. Now keep everyone else out." They can have all sorts of rules to exclude almost anyone, so only the truly special people get in. One of the paradoxical tricks Jesus pulled is that Christianity is both open to everyone, while still maintaining the prestige of exclusiveness. In video game terms, it's a very shiny achievement that makes the bearer part of a very special circle, but everyone has it. It's both free and desirable, which is possibly the most incredible feat Jesus managed.

Of course, this exclusiveness can be twisted by those who know what they're doing. The head of the club can simply say "You're not a real member until ..." and the results can be particularly loathsome. "You're not a real Christian unless you hate gays and vote Republican." (of course, they'd rather that 'real Christians' only be Old White Men.) "You're not a real Muslim unless you strap on this vest."

My way of dealing with exclusivity is both silly and genius. I've made a club so exclusive, I'm the only member. Mind you, it's a bit of a bore, and the head's a real jerk.