Cataschism

World of Warcraft players don't ask for much. We simply want a compelling leveling experience that is fresh and new every time we start a new alt, we want PvP that is thrilling and rewarding, we want to obtain awesome gear after just the right amount of effort and minimal grind, we want any minimal grind to be a pleasant and stimulating experience, we want classes so compelling to play that level 85 is merely an arbitrary waypoint along the glorious path of countless hours logged on and we want endless endgame content that always provides something challenging and is continually available the moment we have vanquished the final boss of the latest raid. And sparkle ponies. We want sparkle ponies.

None of these things are reasonable expectations for any MMO, not even from the undisputed Blizzard king. True, we do have sparkle ponies, but since the release of Cataclysm the signs are increasingly pointing to an MMO that is getting long in the dragon tooth. There has been persistent outcry about the difficulty of Cataclysm heroic dungeons, the lack of new zones to explore and fewer levels to progress through and a general lack of endgame content.

But when you have over 11 million subscribers, there isn't a lot of cause for panic. Blizzard is notoriously difficult to pin down on exact subscribers at any given time, but when any other MMO--subscription based or not--would be a rousing success if it could sustain 1 million players, it's pretty safe to say that Bobby Kotick is sleeping well at night.

So far. There's always more to numbers, and I think there is a greater concern that they indicate an increasing number of players are finding a divide between what they want to play and what World of Warcraft is offering them.

Lies, damn lies and statistics
WoW subscriptions fluxuate by tens of thousands by the fiscal quarter, with dips in numbers correlating with competing games' release dates and players leaving when expansion content has been played through. The numbers spike up again when players return at the release of new expansions or content patches. A short-term chart of these dips and spikes representing fluctuations of thousands would look like the EKG of a manic-depressive meth addict spiking his Red Bull with Diazepam. There is no way to access Blizzard's actual numbers at any given point because the company only releases subscription data when they are required to (earnings reports) or when it sounds nice (a good PR milestone). The official global subscription numbers released by Blizzard since the game's launch look like this, with expansions noted:

World of Warcraft launches November 2004

350,000 copies sold by end of the month

2005 - Jan/Feb - 1 million
2005 - Dec - 5 million

2006 - Sep - 6 million

2007 - Jan - The Burning Crusade expansion launch

2007 - Jul - 9 million

2008 - Jan - 10 million

2008 - Oct - 11 million

2008 - Nov - Wrath of the Lich King expansion launch

2008 - Dec - 11.5 million

2009 - --- - 5 million est.*
2010 - Feb - 11.5 million

2010 - Oct - 12 million

2010 - Dec - Cataclysm expansion launch

2011 - Mar - 11.4 million

* Stat anomaly: In 2009, Blizzard's Chinese distributor was refused license renewal by the Chinese government until certain changes were made to some imagery in the game. There are no official global subscription numbers from Blizzard for that year.

Numbers most game studios would club a Hyjal bear cub for, and the figures are even more impressive when you look at the list of competing games that have had virtually no effect on WoW's numbers over its amazingly long 6-year lifespan. WoW has taken the best shots of pretty much every MMO studio and has endured the attempts of solid games such as Guild Wars, Age of Conan, Warhammer, EVE, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Aion, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings Online and newcomer Rift. It's hard to think of a stronger list of intellectual properties and licenses to go up against. Well. Except for one. More on lightsabers and force chokes in a bit.

But then there's that last number, the one that declines following Cataclysm's release. The impending death of WoW has been exaggerated more than once, but never before has Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime had to state in an earnings call that subscriptions post-Cata launch have decreased faster than any at any other similar timeframe following an expansion. Morhaime also pointed out that players come and go with content release cycles and when they leave to other games for a while (*cough* *cough* Rift), but they eventually return for the sparkle ponies.

He's right that players return, and Rift is far less the WoW killer than any of the others on the list that have been labeled the same. But he would also be right to worry about the unusually rapid post-expansion decline.

Nefarian, the nerf bat tolls for thee
Five more levels across five new zones goes by in the Blink of a mage when you've played World of Warcraft for more than a couple years. Blizzard knew burning through the new Cataclysm content would be a problem, so to solve it they created an entirely different, more frustrating problem.

A lot has been said about the difficulty level for many players in the Cataclysm heroic dungeons, but not enough about the rippling effect that had on the game in general. Wrath of the Lich King trained people to believe that everyone's DPS would always be enough, crowd control would never really be necessary and that healing would always be easily done while simultaneously knitting a Horde-themed scarf while alt-tabbed to Netflix. So what did Blizz do? They ramped up the difficulty of heroics and raid boss encounters in order to slow player progression.

I'll defend the choice to require players to become better and learn their classes more. Crowd control should matter. Target marking should matter. Group coordination and responsibilities should matter. Our small guild welcomed the challenge of the new dungeons and raids, and we were even among the first few on our high-population server to achieve Glory of the Cataclysm Hero. The problem is that Cataclysm brought trash pulls and boss mechanics so tightly tuned that even strong groups had no chance to recover from minor mistakes or unavoidable random events generated by the game. It wasn't the introduction of clever, new boss mechanics; it was an artificial ramping up of difficulty to the point where the tough encounters weren't a stimulating challenge as much as they were an exercise in demoralizing frustration. Of course the inevitable happened: Tanks pulled too much, groups wiped. Healers got blamed. Tanks learned to not pull too much, groups still wiped. Healers got blamed. Healers became frustrated. Healers stopped queueing in the Dungeon Finder. Queue times increased. Players complained. Blizzard defended their design choices for the encounters. Healers began leaving the game. Dungeon Finder queue times became interminable. Non-raiding level 85 players get frustrated. Endgame raiding guilds became short on healers. Endgame raiding guilds start falling apart, consolidating or leaving the game.

And then, concessions on the part of Blizzard. Not the kind where you get watery Coke and overpriced nachos with orange plastic sauce, but the kind where Blizzard instituted a flat buff to anyone using the Dungeon Finder and a radical reduction in difficulty of raid bosses in the 4.2 patch. Now Blizzard may have swung too far the other way; now the four original raids are getting dominated by undergeared groups and the elite guilds are deep into Firelands. One of the players in my Firelands raid was 7/7 with his guild only two weeks into the 4.2 release.

Further problems with 4.2 are disappointing players. The new faction is an exact recycling of dailies and rep grinding that was used for the Argent Tournament in Wrath of the Lich King two years ago. The legendary weapon quest is exactly the same system as was used then as well. The only exception is that there are more top-tier items that can be acquired by rep grinding and crafting, to the point where non-raiding players can have almost the same or better than the players slugging it out with Ragnaros. That's not a problem in itself, but it's one more example of Blizzard designing content that either will not satisfy endgame players, won't matter to them, or won't last long enough to keep them. They have released an endgame patch with negligible endgame content and they have mismanaged the pieces of the game into a situation they will have a hard time playing out of. Morhaime has promised that Blizzard is hard at work accelerating new content development, but I think they have fallen behind in providing enough incentive for a high percentage of their subscribers to keep playing.

World of Warcraft 2: Attack of the Return of the 1-60 Leveling Experience Strikes Back

WoW does what it does better than any other game in the market. It has a great leveling progression and class variety, a solid crafting system to fuel a thriving economy and it has a reasonable learning curve for new players. Cataclysm improved all that by revising class spec trees and revamping almost all of the classic zones on both original continents so that even longtime players could enjoy a new alt or two. The new WoW experience is even more new-player friendly.

And that's the problem. The largest surge in WoW subscriptions occurred over four years ago, and while there's no way to know what percentage of the current population has been recycled with new players versus how many have stayed on since then, it's reasonable to believe that there is a large percentage of the current players at max level and in endgame content. Hence the problem: Cataclysm didn't bring enough cataclysmic stuff to do for the potentially millions of players who have leveled all the alts they want, have pounded through the new dungeons and raids and have become a little bored with the "special RP" in Goldshire.

The revision of the old lands in Cataclysm is very well done and does make the game feel very different than it did years ago when it was launched. For new players and those still wanting to play a few new classes, the new old WoW experience until Outlands is full of new quests and storylines, phased progression and some fun twists on classic dungeons. Unfortunately, it all comes to a sudden halt when you step through the portal to Hellfire Peninsula and The Burning Crusade.

The Kotickification of Azeroth
ActiBlizz CEO Bobby Kotick likes money. Bobby Kotick likes selling sparkle ponies and flamey lions. Bobby Kotick makes shareholders happy. Bobby Kotick wants you to pay more per month to play World of Warcraft.

Bobby Kotick is an idiot.

The trend sweeping across MMOs in recent months has been to adopt some form of free to play or "freemium" subscriptions that offer premium options to players willing to pay a monthly fee. Usually free to play games rely on box sales, paid expansion packs and microtransaction stores where players can purchase in-game items. That's how the studio makes profit and it's worked out so well for Guild Wars and a few others that recently other big-name games such as Dungeons and Dragons Online, Champions Online and Age of Conan started offering a free play model. By all accounts, the free/freemium model increased revenue beyond studio expectations.

Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard wants to offer new features too, such as more mounts (that you can buy in the Blizzard store), more vanity pets (that you can buy in the Blizzard store) and even a way for you to form dungeon groups with friends on other servers and check your guild and auctions--for an additional cost on top of your $15 monthly fee. How many players are willing to pay $18 per month for these marginal benefits? Very few, judging by the outcry when these premium features were announced around the time that 4.2 was getting close. MMO gamers have more options and more free or low-cost games to pursue than ever before, but Blizzard apparently thinks that not only are they still the only game in town, players want to give them more money than they already do to stay in Azeroth. This is the chasm between what Blizzard thinks players want and the actual perceived value that players have, and this is Blizzard's most dangerous misconception.

No other games enjoy the clout or the luxury of millions of subscriptions like WoW does. But no one is beyond decline. It's one thing to design content that is a misstep, because players will forgive you when you change it or offer more that they like. But when players are already growing tired of your game and then on top of that feel their getting taken advantage of, they will go elsewhere. This is a dangerous time for Blizzard to start monetizing itself in the foot, for there are Jedi on the horizon.

These are not the prognostications of doom you're looking for

Star Wars: The Old Republic is not going to kill WoW. Guild Wars 2 is not going to kill WoW. The Secret World is not going to kill WoW. Only Blizzard can kill WoW, and years from now we will still see a healthy player base. The only questions are how badly any design missteps along the way will cost Blizz in subscriptions in the meantime and how much Blizzard will care at that point, because they have their own new properties on the horizon. It would be naive to think Blizzard doesn't watch those subscription numbers and trends more than any player, blogger or industry analyst out there. They know their content release map, they know their expenses and they know when they will throttle back development costs for WoW and shift resources to another, potentially more profitable project. You know, one quietly called Project Titan.

I think the development resource shifting is already beginning to happen. Blizzard has enough revenue and development talent to create and re-create World of Warcraft a dozen times before the next Super Bowl, but why would they? They can revise earlier content in order to keep drawing in new players and stay on a similar endgame content release schedule, because they are still drawing new players regularly and recalling old players in strong numbers, at least temporarily, with each new content patch or expansion. Meanwhile, their new MMO under development, Project Titan, nears release.

Let's say for the sake of random speculative mathmatics that WoW eventually slips to 8 million subscribers. Then Titan releases, and it is absurd to think it won't sell a million boxes within a few months, or even the first month. If Titan is good by Blizzard standards--meaning, a terrific game--it's easy to see it following a similar subscription trajectory that WoW enjoyed. So a couple years in, Titan has reached 8 or 9 million players, maybe even cannibalizing a few million WoW players. If Blizzard thinks WoW has in fact plateaued and is entering a natural decline towards a lower subscription base, the time is right for the next big title to be ready to carry the revenue expectations. It's not unreasonable to expect Titan to pick up where WoW leaves off in a few years; investing in a new game that could reach 10 million-plus on top of WoW, even if WoW slips to 8 million or below, is far more cost effective than watching one property slowly slide downward in numbers while requiring far more development costs to reinvent it in order to keep players who have been around for 4, 5 or 6 years already.

Certainly the numbers could go the other way. Titan could flop and WoW could continue to decline. But this is Blizzard. They simply have too much talent and too much money to make too many mistakes for too much longer. And the rumors I keep hearing are that the top development teams--the ones responsible for much of the Lich King content--have been pulled over to the Titan side of campus.

In the meantime, Blizzard can't rest. The shock of losing 600,000 players shortly after a major expansion is compounded by the fact that it also indicates that for the first time in the history of the game, WoW failed to maintain or increase subscriptions in accordance with its years-old pattern. And a million-plus players will try The Old Republic when it hits, despite reports so far that it's a bland experience bordering on disappointing. Guild Wars 2 looks very promising, and if it can deliver on those promises of true innovation in gameplay and class mechanics it has a chance to deepen the dent TOR will make in Blizzard's monthly take.

Not since the early days of WoW has Blizzard needed to evaluate what they are offering their paying subscribers versus what the players are actually perceiving as value for the money. World of Warcraft isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but there are serious cracks in the surface of Azeroth that are not Deathwing's doing. If Blizzard wants to avoid becoming the victim of their own undoing, refocusing the direction of the game content for high-level players needs to have already begun. If not, they might find themselves dethroned before they have a chance to hand the crown to themselves again with Project Titan. Between now and then, they can only save--or blame--themselves.