Make it flexible!

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I discuss the announcement of social gameplay changes in the upcoming expansion pack for World of Warcraft. The developers will focus on gameplay that makes it more simple and also more meaningful to play with friend.

Blizzard Entertainment’s own convention „Blizzcon“ took place last weekend in Anaheim. During these two days, Blizzard announced the next addon for World of Warcraft (WoW) and shared a lot of new information and updates about all their other games. Furthermore, Blizzcon also featured the world championship in StarCraft 2 and other tournaments.

The next WoW addon will implement several new features to the game and also make some long desired improvements to the gameplay. WoW will finally receive a housing feature, allowing its players to build a whole garrison and recruit followers. Players then can give these followers some work orders or send them on a mission to return with some loot. Additionally, WoW will finally receive some improvements concerning inventory space and the stats of items will change according to the current role specialization of the player, making it more flexible to change roles.

Apart from new features and improvements, the developers will also focus on the social gameplay. They want to make playing with friends more meaningful. In todays version of the game, it makes almost no difference for players, if they’re in a random group or queueing with friends for an instance. Apart from the communication aspect, the gameplay makes no difference between both approaches of clearing an instance. However, in the next expansion „Warlords of Draenor“ (WoD) players will receive a buff granting a higher amount of a game currency reward on completion of an instance. According to the developers, this feature should also reward social gameplay from the gameplay perspective and encourage players to form groups with friends instead of using the dungeon finder and playing with random players.

Furthermore, raids, a key feature of the endgame in WoW, will also recieve a similiar treatment. In the next addon, almost every raid difficulty will be flexible in the amount of players per raid group. Currently most raid difficulty levels require either 10 or 25 players. However, the latest content patch implemented also the flex-difficulty allowing raid groups to scale from 10 to 25 players. This scalable content will by applied to all of the different difficulties in WoD. Only the highest difficulty level will require 20 players as a fixed amount.

Giving players scalable content should help raid groups to play with their friends. If more than 10 players signed on for a raid, all of them can participate. No one has to be benched anymore, because there’re only 10 spots available. On the other hand 25 player groups will still be allowed to go on a raid even if there’s missing one member. Currently a raid with only 24 players online won’t be able to raid. This improvement should make it more easy for groups to actual play the game instead of managing players. Additionally, this feature adresses the issue that WoW loses players and groups are struggling with member losses.

The aforementioned „hardcore“ difficulty level however is a little bit problematic for current „hardcore“ raids. Today, „hardcore“ raid groups focus either on 10 or 25 player raids and thus have the appropriate amount of players. However, with the upcoming expansion, 25 player raids have to say farewell to some of their core players and 10 player raids have to mass recruit new players to be able to raid in the highest difficulty of the game. This is a bit contradictory because „hardcore“ raid groups do also have a close friendship among their members and now they’re facing such a change in the group size.

With WoD Blizzard tries to focus again on the social gameplay. The announced improvements make it more easy for existing groups to play with friends and recruit new players. However, „hardcore“ raiders have to face a hard change towards their group composition, which is a bit hard to understand from the social gameplay perspective. On the other hand, it’s easier to balance the difficulty of the content and provide a good challenge for every „hardcore“ raider, if every group has 20 players.
Although the flexible amount of players is an improvement for most groups, it can also be seen as a measure to adapt to the constant loss of active players over the last year. Additionally, making it more easy and meaningful to play with friends can also be seen as a method to gain new subscribers again: active players should be encouraged to ask their friends to resubscribe to WoW or even become a new WoW player.