Customer Service 101: Find Out What Your Customers Want and Give It To Them

There's absolutely no reason why raiding needs to be present in World of Warcraft. Many players enjoy it, but it's purely a preference thing on the part of the developers. Molten Core or Black Wing Lair would have felt just as impressive and epic if you were fighting giant monsters with a group of four good friends as with a group of 39 acquaintances. Consider this, for a moment: What if every raid instance in WoW had been a five-man dungeon? Would it really change anything? You bet, but probably for the better.

For starters, more of the players would have seen more of the content. You could still have the gear progression, the resist work, and the complex battles, except that people who need to move through faster with a smaller group of people would be able to do it. Who hadn't done Stratholme, Scholomance, and Dire Maul half a million times before the Burning Crusade arrived? They were hard, but they were fun. Imagine how much longer it would have extended the "end game" for the 7.3 million people who don't raid if they could have continued their character progression into MC, BWL, and Naxxramas with the gear they gained in those earlier zones, using the same play style they had grown accustomed to. You'd have 80 or 90% of your players seeing all the content that Blizzard spent time and money on instead of just 20% (or less than 1% for the top end).

Next, there would never have been a need for that pesky MUDflation. With all of the content available to the majority of the players who played the game, the power and gear distribution would have been more evenly spread. There still would have been a gap, but it would have been a gap between those who had played further through the instance progression and those who hadn't, instead of a gap between groups of players with dramatically different playstyles (solo/5-man versus raid). Instead of a gear wipe, the Burning Crusade could have been an extension of that progression, giving players at the top something more to do without invalidating the work that Blizzard had already done on all those really cool instances at the end-game. You would have finished the whole story arc for Azeroth in solo or 5-man instances all the way up to Naxxramas, and then used that gear to continue the epic journey of your hero into the Outland zones which would be balanced for your progression.

If raids were 5-man content, you would see a smoother progression of the playerbase throughout all of the game content instead of seeing 7.3 million "casual" players plateauing at maximum level and having to hop over tons of cool content when the new expansion comes out because they didn't or couldn't raid. Under the current structure, new players to the game never see that content at all because it's obsolete.

Did you know that the Burning Crusade destroyed almost half as many zones (for the purposes of meaningful progression) as it brought into the game, and more than doubled the number of raiding instances that only 20% of WoW players even use?

The Moral of the Story

In closing, I want to state again that I don't think raiding is bad. I do believe that game companies should give their players what they want, however. There's an obvious preference in 80% of World of Wacraft's 9 million players for solo and casual play. No one gets hooked on a game for its endgame, after all, and the whole game until then is very casual. So why does Blizzard make a community with a majority of non-raiding players raid, given all the problems it causes? Why do they spend so much time and effort on designing, developing, and tuning zones that only 1-6% of their subscribers ever use?

Raiding isn't a bad concept and it has a place in some games, but it hurts World of Warcraft more than it helps it given the make-up of their community. The raiders might complain at not having it-- some of them might even leave for different games. But the majority of WoW players would have their needs better served if that time and energy were devoted to making entertaining and fun solo and small group content that wasn't wiped out each time a new expansion came along.

You can't ever keep everyone happy, but you should try to do the most good for the largest number of your customers that you can. At the end of the day, it's just good business.

- Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden

[This article was cross-posted from my blog, Random Battle.]

[A number of readers have pointed out an error in the numbers cited-- namely, that WoWJutsu records only North American and EU players while the 9.3 million figure includes Asian subscriptions. However, I don't believe that this weakens the main points presented in the article. For an explanation and discussion of the numbers used, take a look at this forum post.]

If you have comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment in our forum or send it to me at Cameron [at] tentonhammer.com.