This week at TenTonHammer the community managers at each of our sites are looking at how games handle the end game. Is the repeatable instanced endgame a good way to handle a level capped game? World of Warcraft uses this schema and it is the current killer MMO on the market, does that make it the best method or just the current favorite method. I also take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using it as a system.

Blizzard has mastered this system of end game play in World of Warcraft. They use the system in many forms and layers. They use the system for 5 man end game instances such as Stratholme, Scholomance, Dire Maul, and the Blackrock Spyre instances to gain dungeon tier 1 and 2 armor sets. They also setup another repetitive process in each of the end game small and large raids. In the small raids (Zul’Gurrub and Ruin’s of Ahn’Qiraj) you must run the raids many times to earn reputation and to collect items (idols, scarabs and bijous as examples) that are turned in for items from the quest givers for the area. In large raids they do it by making drop rates for each of the tier 1 and 2 armor sets to be very low so that you must continue to run the instance to collect the whole set. As World of Warcraft continues to expand Blizzard has continued to learn and refine its craft and make end game instance even more repeatable.

You can read the whole editorial here: Play it just one more time.