You Wait All Year For An Expansion And Then Three Come Along At Once

Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon '23, I thought I might have a bit of a potter through the various headline announcements. I did kind of pre-empt myself with my post on Tarisland but since that was written before the actual event I think a revisit is justified.

Of course, when I say "headline announcements" I really mean what they said about World of Warcraft. I have never played any other Blizzard games and I don't even know much about them other than what I've read on various blogs over the years. The thing about Blizzard, though, unlike other major players in the online multiplayer gamespace such as NCSoft or Tencent, is that it's very hard to avoid knowing about their games even if you're not particularly interested in them. I can give a precis of the Diablo franchise or Overwatch or Hearthstone even though I've never played any of them. 

Don't ask me about Heroes of the Storm, though. What even is that?

Blizzard, unlike other developers, penetrates the cultural consciousness to an extent not often enjoyed by gaming companies. It's become evident over the past couple of years, as the Blizzard name has become a byword for deceit and depravity, that a large number of people had far more invested in the reputation of the company than would seem rational or predictable to anyone outside the bubble. For many, it seems, Blizzard wasn't just a company that had made some very successful video games; it was some kind of role-model or exemplar.

I'm not sure I was even aware a lot of people felt that way until the roof began falling in. I knew the games were popular because I kept reading people talking about them but people talk about playing things like The Sims and Civilization all the time, too. There's a fairly small set of games that crop up over and over again, in the same way certain TV shows or movies are reference points for everyone of a certain age. You don't have to have watched them to know something about them. I didn't have to have played Diablo to know what it was but I didn't realize it represented the end product of a myth-making process that extended far past the game itself.

It was only when the seemingly endless stream of dire revelations began to spew out of Blizzard like a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment that I began to appreciate the deep, emotional connection the company maintained with with many of its customers. It did seem a little unsettling, even to someone with an arguably unhealthy tendency towards brand loyalty like myself.

As the pile-up of distressing revelations continued, I learned a few things, some of the more interesting of which were the explanations people gave for their deep connection with the company. As is common in other forms of popular media, growing up with certain activities and entertainments forms an associative bond. The things that surround you as you go through formative life experiences for the first time become inextricably linked with the intense feelings created by those experiences.

I'd like to say that being in my twenties when I first started playing video games inoculated me against anything like that but I was forty when I started playing EverQuest and look how that went. What I definitely would say is that at no time did I ever translate my affection - let's not say obsession - with the game into an idolization of the company that produced it. I mean, I knew SoE was my favorite MMORPG developer for a while but I never thought it went any further than their design choices matching my gameplay preferences. It was a marriage of convenience not a love match.

Back in the 2000s, I remember reading with something approaching incredulity the reports of conventions and fan events dedicated to specific games or publishers, SOE's Fan Faire included. For some reason, even though by then I'd spent the better part of two decades going to comics conventions, where I'd sit in a side room or an auditorium listening to writers, artists and editors repeating well-worn anecdotes from glory years spanning the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies, it seemed bizarre to imagine anyone might want to do the same with video games. 

After all, the people who made those were just technicians and administrators, weren't they? It'd be like going to a convention to meet the people who'd designed and built your refrigerator. (Even as I type, it occurs to me there are probably people who do exactly that...)

Eventually I either came to a more nuanced understanding of the factors involved or became assimilated into the gamer hive-mind. Still not sure which. The concept of video game expos and cons and fan gatherings shifted from "weird and a bit scary, if I'm honest" to "no stranger than traction engine meets or renaissance fairs". Which, I admit, is still weird and a bit scary but in a much more ordinary way.

I still wouldn't want to go to one and I don't even want to sit at home and watch a livestream but I do find myself being drawn towards the comfortable thrill of mild anticipation arising from the possibility of hints of things to come. Which is really about as solid as most of this stuff ever gets, making this year's Blizzcon somewhat unusual in that respect.

We didn't just get to learn the name of the next WoW expansion. We got to hear the names of the next three! It's a brave move that I imagine has more to do with setting a marker than with any fundamental change of practice or principle. 

Given the last couple of years, it looks as though the plan is to establish the new Microsoft-owned company as a solid, dependable and even predictable supplier of quality product, to be delivered in a timely and reliable manner. Announcing a trilogy of themed expansions with an explicit but finite narrative arc makes a clear statement of commitment to the game and its players. 

It says we're going to be here for the foreseeable future so you can feel safe to start making your plans with WoW again. We've got you covered for MMORPG entertainment for the next five years, minimum. No need to start looking around. 

The same sentiment is contained in the commitment to only adding mechanics that will hold value over more than a single expansion cycle and the increase in systems that benefit the whole account rather than a single character. These are moves designed to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem, where players feel too comfortable, committed and embedded to find it easy to pick up and move elsewhere. 

The only thing that's hard to understand about such a change of emphasis is how the hell it took them this long to come up with it. Every other MMORPG developer figured out years ago that you need to get players so enmeshed it's harder to leave than it is to stay. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been fostering a culture around expansions that, coupled with one of the slowest development cycles in the genre, actively mitigates against the kind of loyalty and retention they used to be famous for. 

Everyone knows you can just skip the content droughts or even the bad expansions and come back later. Or not come back at all. It's not like you'll miss anything that matters. Every new expansion is a full reset.

The three expansions themselves sound interesting enough, as far as the information available goes. They revolve around known areas of the existing world, not excursions into unknown realms, which is a solid play towards the installed base and that great mass of lapsed players, many of whom, on reading a news item somewhere, will think to themselves "Oh, I remember having some good times there!" and think about maybe coming back to see what's going on.

None of that is going to work on me because I don't have the necessary nostalgia for such an announcement to trigger in the first place. I like WoW but I don't feel closely connected to it. With the Microsoft buyout in place, however, I have given myself permission to revisit Azeroth, and I would certainly not rule out trying one or more of these expansions at some point. Of course, I'd have to re-install the game first...

The widely-expected confirmation of Cataclysm Classic interests me more. As I've said on several occasions, I know just enough about the areas that were disrupted by the original Cataclysm expansion to be curious to see how they've changed, without the significant emotional attachment to the originals that would make me feel disturbed or angry when I find out what's been done to them. And since I mostly never bothered to investigate any of the post-Cataclysm zones when I had the chance, it would all largely be new content for me.

It's always nice to jump into these things along with everyone else, so there's a not-insignificant chance I might resubscribe for a month or two when CataClassic arrives, presumably sometime next spring. I'm fairly curious about the new "Season of Discovery" that's coming to regular Classic much sooner as well, although I'm not sure the timing works for me to join in right away. 

As I commented on Shintar's WoW blog "Priest Without A Cause", this really does seem like Holly Longdale making her influence known. Sony Online Entertainment began the idea of the rolling nostalgia circus as far back as 2008 but it was under Holly at Daybreak that the operation really took off. 

For years now, it's been the practice at EverQuest and latterly at EQII to fire up new nostalgia servers at least once a year, almost always with slightly different rulesets. Go back far enough and it was generally assumed these servers would stay up, if not permanently, then at least until there weren't enough players left on them to justify their continued existence. In more recent times, there's been a much clearer expectation and understanding that they'll only run for a couple of years or so before being merged into a more recent or a more stable server.

Much of that predates now-familiar online gaming concept of "Seasons", a more elegant solution to the concept of shaking things up to keep people interested than booting up whole new servers every five minutes. The Blizzard way of doing things is marrying up nicely with the Daybreak experience, potentially creating a more flexible model for endless experimentation within a fairly fixed framework. It's presumably just what they wanted when they made Holly an offer she couldn't and didn't refuse.

It is ironic that, in both games, the supposedly most traditional part of the game, the nostalgia-driven servers where time, if it doesn't exactly stand still, certainly travels in a closed loop, is also the place where the companies feel most free to experiment. If you tried these kinds of shenanigans on Live or Retail there'd be uproar. It makes me wonder sometimes who the true traditionalists really are.

All in all, I'd say things are looking good for the immediate future of WoW. Certainly a lot better than it seemed they might a year or two back. The last expansion, Dragonflight, while reportedly no resounding success, was certainly no disaster, either. People seemed generally affable towards it and largely still do which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a win for Blizzard. 

Responses to the announcements at Blizzcon '23 also seem generally favorable. No-one's jumping up and down, waving a flag or claiming the glory days are back, or at least not that I've seen, but the tone of the reporting has largely been optimistic and positive, if occasionally grudgingly so. 

Equally, I don't think many are claiming the myriad problems of the past have all miraculously gone away but there's only so long most people can retain a sense of outrage and frankly there are a lot more serious things to be outraged about right now than what happened at a video company a few years ago. The company changing hands may well not fix all or even most of the underlying problems but at least, until and unless evidence of new or ongoing malpractice surfaces, it'll be convenient for many of us to act as though it has.

Finally, there was one announcement at Blizzcon this year that took my fancy. Warcraft Rumble, the new, free-to-play mobile title, is already up and running. I think I might go take a look. After all, it's not every day Blizzard gives us something for nothing. Well, not anything we might actually want, anyway.

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A note on AI images used in this post.

The header is by DreamShaper XL alpha2  with Prompt and Refiner Weights both at 50. The prompt used was "Firiona Vie from EverQuest as a character in World of Warcraft". I used Uncrop to reformat the image to fit the space and it mostly added some foliage. Firiona has dyed her hair for some reason and seems to have grown a second belly-button somehow but otherwise it kind of works.

The second image uses the same source and settings. The prompt was "a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment World of Warcraft". I tried it without the WoW suffix but either way it just gives a volcano. I was kind of hoping for some personifcations of abstract ideas but no such luck.

Fire On The Mountain

Everyone else is out there, venturing into the lands of the dead and here am I, plodding through pre-Shadowlands WoW. Not even the cool, new Chromie-time WoW, either. Just plain old no-one likes me I'm the worst expansion ever Cataclysm.

Only I do kind of like it. I finished the whole of the zone storyline in Eastern and Western Plaguelands and thought it was pretty good. That popped me over the limit for most of the expansion but there were a handful of zones that went another five levels so I picked one of those and on I went.

Which is how I ended up spending the last couple of days in Mount Hyjal. WoWHead calls it "the zone most players quest in when starting Cataclysm zones". Yeah, I wouldn't have used the word "zone" twice in one sentence there. Also, a little confused as to how they'd have started in Mt. Hyjal when Cataclysm was new. There was no level-scaling back then, right? Wouldn't it have been high-level? 

Who knows? Ancient history. Whatever. Add it to the pile of things I don't understand about how WoW works. It's a big pile.

I had vaguely heard of Mount Hyjal before but I had no idea where or what it was. I do now, having spent something like ten hours there, and I can't say it's anywhere I'm keen to see again, once I get the hell out. Half of it's on fire and the rest is so undifferentiated and bland you can only imagine being on fire would be an improvement.

The zone storyline is equally uninspired and derivative. It has none of the personality or, indeed, personalities that made the Plaguelands such a pleasure. It's all druids and nature and elemental forces and demons and blah blah blah. How many times are we going to do this dance? Seriously?

I'm tough but I'm fair.

 

That sounds like I hated it. I didn't. It's perfectly fine, in the usage I was decrying the other day. The narrative at least makes sense although the structure is a little unstable. As far as I can tell you can be at the end while still not having done all of the middle but I don't think it matters all that much. 

Also, could we get a moratorium on NPCs giving dire warnings about urgency when in practice you can take all the time you want and it's going to make no difference whatsoever. I mean, I really dislike quests and events with timers but if you say the clock's ticking and it's not it feels even worse.

And anyway, how bad can things be if we're taking time out to save bunnies? About the only memorable NPC in the whole timeline is the self-aware, passive-aggressive, emotionally manipulative, centaur, Mylune. She literally hugs bunnies and makes doe eyes at you if you don't want to join in.

She has a couple of quests, one of which involves catching hyperactive, terrified rabbits and squirrels in a box, the other rescuing injured baby deer. Someone was very clearly having altogether too much fun when they wrote Mylune's lines,a  few of which made me laugh out loud. Fun at whose expense, though? That's the question.

I don't want to question your priorities, but...

I'm guessing Mylune, whose first appearance this is, was a bit of a favorite at the time, either with players or developers, because I see she turns up again in every succeeding expansion. Maybe she's in Shadowlands, too, although I guess she'd have to be dead, which might not quite fit the mood.

Other than that, I couldn't tell you the name of another NPC, even though it's only been a day or two. There was an archdruid who got burned to a crisp. I remember him. He looked like a bear. Well, he looked like a charred black lump but that was after. And there was big turtle who talked in free verse. Other than that I'm blanking.

Oh, wait, there was that snarky guy on the hook! He was fun. They should have given him more screen-time. And the mortal-turned-demon who played us in the most predictable scam ever. He was... well, okay, he was straight from central casting but at least I can remember him. 

Tell me how you really feel, Kristoff.

If the plot wasn't up to much the mechanics did their best to make up for it. There was a fair bit of turning into things which, as has been discussed here before, is something I generally disapprove of but I have to say WoW probably does it better than most. If I'm going to have to turn into a giant owl and fly around blowing a whistle or climb up trees and throw bear cubs into a net I'd rather do it with one simple button to press and the UI doing all the heavy lifting.

I forget exactly what level my vulpera hunter was when she arrived in Mount Hyjal. Thirty-four? Thirty-five? With just one final part of the zone storyline left to complete she's now thirty-nine. I'm hoping to limp her on to forty before we leave but I'm not sure there's quite enough questing left in the tank. 

Still, it's pretty good going. The mobs stopped scaling at thirty five but I can't say I've noticed much of a difference. They don't seem to die any faster than they did a few levels ago. The quest rewards are still mostly upgrades although that's often because of the random roll mechanic. It seems to fire more often than you'd expect, bumping close to half of everything I get by a quality level. Sometimes two.

Wait, so you're saying all that stuff you got me to do that was supposed to help the cause was just to break your bonds and set you free? Wow! I never saw that coming...

 

Xp, though, that's very much beginning to fall behind. Even thought there are other 30-35 zones in Cataclysm, I won't be trying to stretch this experiment any further. I haven't decided yet whether to move to another expansion or go back and have Chromie re-fit the Cataclysmic world to my requirements. 

I'm tempted to move on, partly because I can see doing all of the Cataclysm zones on different characters, but also for the money. The biggest practical difference I've noticed between levelling in older expansions as opposed to newer ones is the amount of gold I make. 

By the time my shaman hit fifty she had around six thousand gold and that was after spending a couple of thousand along the way. She made pretty much all of it in Battle for Azeroth's Vol'Dun, which is, ironically, the vulpera's homeland. By contrast, as she nears forty, the vulpera hunter has barely a thousand gold to her name. I'm thinking maybe it's time for her to go visit the folks for a while or at least do some adventuring closer to home.

I'm feeling kinda woozy. Y'don't think it could be these flowerzzzz....

 

One thing's for sure: in WoW Retail this time around, I've rediscovered my love of levelling for it's own sake. I'm having a great time bringing these characters up through the ranks but I have no clue what to do with any of them when they hit fifty. They're pretty much going straight onto the bench to sit things out while the next up takes a turn. Which is exactly how I played mmorpgs for years.

The exception is the dwarf hunter. He has a garrison to run. He comes out once or twice a day to set missions and check everything's running smoothly. I can already see why this was a feature loved by some and hated by many (or was that the other way around?). Even in its eviscerated state it's demanding. When it was current content it must have bordered on the oppressive.

The main reason I'm sticlking with it is I hear you can make bags. It seems you need to be a tailor to do it. So far I've worked out how to farm the fur and make the cloth. That much I managed by trial and error but I suspect the next stage will require research. 

I'm off to do that now. Expect more redundant news on outdated content no-one cares about any more - as it happens!

BFA Fever : WoW

I thought about calling this post "If All Your Friends Jumped Off Another Bridge...".  It's been a long time since I last played World of Warcraft but today I patched up and logged in again, all because every blogger in blogdom is doing the same.

And why? Expansion!

Never mind that I got Legion for my birthday two years ago, registered the code and promptly forgot about it. Never mind that I never even set foot on The Broken Isles let alone leveled up there. Never mind that I never even saw an Artifact Weapon or a Demon Hunter...

Actually, why stop there? All I ever saw of Warlords of Draenor was a handful of starter quests and maybe two percent of the first zone. Never even got a glimpse of my Garrison. Mists of Pandaria? I have a level four panda somewhere, I think.

I did see a few of the changes wrought by the Cataclysm, mostly because a good deal of that much-maligned expansion falls within the remit of the F2P Starter Edition. Oddly, Cataclysm is the content that most interests me because I can remember the original zones reasonably well and seeing how they've changed piques my curiosity. Also, low level play...

It's usually relatively simple to return to WoW. Not as easy as coming back to GW2, which is virtually seamless, but not too annoying. This time was no different although there were a few hiccups.

First there was a Battlenet update of some kind  That took mere seconds. After that came a huge patch for WoW itself - over 13GB. The launcher claimed the game was "playable" almost immediately but I waited for Optimal before hitting Play. That took me straight into one of Blizzard's epic cinematics.

Even with my minimal knowledge of WoW Lore I could sort of follow some of it although I have no idea of the names of any of the featured players. It was quite impressive to watch although 90% of it was just sound effects and explosions.

It occurred to me after a while that these cinematics are what two five-year olds see in their heads when they smash their plastic action figures together and shout at each other. The parts where someone yells "For the Horde!" and "For the Alliance!" really bring that home.

Once the excitement died down it was on to a list of servers. Quite a few of them were Offline including, naturally, the one on which most of my characters sleep. Rather than wait for whatever was going on to be fixed I logged on someone on a server that was working.

That's how it's meant to look.

It turned out to be a Level 1 Dwarf I'd never played (clearly, what with him being Level 1 and all...). The game treated me to another cinematic, this time just a fly-by using existing assets with a voiceover, something about some political intrigue in Ironforge. I'm guessing it had something to do with the new Dwarven racial option, the Dark Iron mob, who were enemies last I remember but who seem to have been brought into the fold at least somewhat.

I had no wish to play yet another dwarf so all I did with this one was use him to get my Add Ons working. Not that I use many. The only one flagged as out of date was the GW2 UI mod, without which I can no longer imagine playing WoW at all. (Okay, I guess I'd acclimatize if I had to but it really is so much better...).

There was already an updated version available (and indeed a beta of a still-newer version). I installed it manually and it didn't work so I fired up Twitch, which acquired the old Curse auto-updater for Add-Ons that everyone used to use. I am getting more use out of Twitch than Steam these days...

That worked flawlessly, almost instantly. I dropped the dwarf and checked to see if my regular server was back up. It wasn't but at least now there was a pop-up saying Blizzard was doing something about it.

He's small but he packs a punch! And so do I.

I still wanted to have a run around, get back in the Azeroth groove, so I swapped to my old Free to Play account. I made it before the current version of F2P, the one that lets you play any character up to level 20. 

Remarkably I was able to find the old log-in details. Before I could reacquaint myself with my old friends I had to reassure Blizzard I wasn't being  hacked by replying to an email; before I could do that, I had to reassure my email provider I was who I said I was. These things happen when you go a few years between log-ins. I'm just happy any of it still works.

Finally I was able to log in my good old Goblin Warlock. She's a great character. I took her all through the extremely detailed and enjoyable Goblin starter zones and blogged about it way back when. 2013 in fact. Five years ago. Blimey, Charlie!

For some reason she was in the Tauren homeland of Mulgore, which is one of the most attractive parts of Azeroth. If you're going to get abandoned anywhere it's a better option than most. At level 14 I don't imagine many of the recent changes have affected her much but I did notice she only had one spell on her hot bar.

"What kind of creature bore you? Was it some kind of bat?" NSFW link to source.

It takes quite awhile to kill something with just the default attack and you don't get a huge amount of xp for doing it, either. Once I'd put all her spells back, time-to-kill improved although xp remained charmingly sparse.

I seem to remember there was a time when leveling in the teens was so ridiculously fast it made the whole thing feel pointless. This time, even when I started doing some quests, the pace felt reasonable. Still brisk enough at maybe forty-five minutes to finish level 14 but not so speedy I felt disconnected.

I'm not sure if the basic spells have changed. I was using Demonology and summoning imps with a meteor, having my Felguard (?) to tank and throwing in some kind of demonic wolf now and then as well. It was fun. Reminded me somewhat of being a Minion Master Necromancer in GW2.

There was some to and fro on the weird batwinged griffins the Horde use as air taxis. It always surprises me how much time in WoW is spent just sitting on things watching the scenery. That does feel old-fashioned. 

I carried on until the Warlock dinged and then I called it a day. I'm back, kind of. When my regular server recovers I'll have to decide whether or not to re-sub. I probaly will for August, if for no other reason than it'll give me something to post about for Blaugust.

All The Burning Bridges: GW2

Jeromai has a deeply disturbing speculative post concerning the upcoming Big Announcement that ArenaNet have planned for Pax South at the end of the month. The gist is this: what if the whole of the first three years of GW2 were just the bait for the biggest bait&switch in the history of MMOs?

It all comes out of the recent video teaser entitled "Point of No Return", an apparently innocuous little squib that I watched when it came out and then immediately forgot. Others, however, saw more in it than I did. Some found their thoughts drifting back to Tyrias's past; to The Searing.

The Searing was - I guess is, since you can go and experience it right now by logging into the original Guild Wars and playing through the Origins campaign from the beginning - the previous holder of the oscar for "Biggest Bait&Switch In An MMORPG". I remember it vividly from my original playthrough back in 2005. It remains one of the most impressive and disturbing uses of the MMO form for what you could loosely call an artistic purpose.

Steering clear of the lore and avoiding detailed spoilers (although even knowing 'something happens' is itself a spoiler), Guild Wars begins by allowing you to make a character and letting you believe you're playing a particular kind of MMO in a particular kind of setting before smashing the whole thing up with a big hammer and making you start over again from scratch. This video catches the tone quite nicely although you can only get the emotional impact by playing through the game itself.

At the time it happened I hated it. I really hated it. I loved pre-Searing Ascalon from the moment I stepped out onto those golden, autumnal grasslands. I loved the petty problems and the little quests. I was ready for weeks, months of the same. Then I got to about level five and all of that was snatched away. I was hopping mad.

Still, I'd only been playing for a few hours and my character was only level five. I got over it pretty quickly, especially when what came next turned out to be quite compelling. By the time I'd reached the conclusion of the Origins storyline and was able to look back from the dizzy heights of level 20, over the month or so the journey had lasted, I was already taking a much more sanguine view of the whole approach. Yes, it was shocking but it was a real coup of storytelling and a highly impressive use of the limited narrative tools available to an MMO designer at the time. +1 ANet.

Now here we are all these years later. There's a dragon stirring and we know from the examples of Orr and The Far Shiverpeaks that, when dragons wake, everything changes. Orr is a wasteland, drowned and razed, filled with undead following Zhaitan's rise. The formidable, if inscrutable, Kodan, supposedly immortal, creators of city-sized ships hewn from ice, live as refugees, driven south by the awakening of Jormag. No-one knows what's happening down in The Crystal Desert, where Kralkatorrik fell after the abortive battle with Destiny's Edge because no-one has been able to go there or return ever since.

Mordremoth, the latest dragon to stir from its slumber, turns out to have been sleeping right below us. Given the examples of recent history how can we expect to carry on as normal now Scarlet has woken him up? Here we have motive, we have opportunity and we have form. Hence the speculation.

 ArenaNet have done this before, after all, and it worked. It's almost becoming their Modus Operandi: there's not only The Searing to consider but the long, slow death of Lion's Arch. A region; a city; why not the whole known world?

That's the in-game logic with a salting of house style. There's more to it though. ArenaNet have been adamant since launch that GW2 will not have boxed expansions. They leave the tiniest wriggle room but emotionally the tone has always been "Not on our watch". Instead we've been served the thrashings and churnings of The Living Story plus intermittent Feature Packs that purport to offer (yet evidently do not), the free equivalent of a standalone, purchased add-on.

NCSoft reports show earnings declining, while trade reports confidently outline the expected action to remedy that problem - the release of planned expansions. Meanwhile ANet was spared in NCSoft's latest round of cost-cutting and there's known to be a large development team working on...something.

For a while I've been wondering how ANet might find a way to square the circle of having to release an expansion for financial reasons while still being able to claim, for reasons of personal prestige, that no expansion was released. This could be the answer. Instead of adding a whole new region or continent replace an existing one. That way Tyria hasn't been "expanded"; it's been "changed".

Well, it would be a bold move, that's for sure. A hubristic, arrogant, "Look at me Mummy!" attention-seeking move, yes, but undeniably a bold one. What it wouldn't be, of course, is original. Wasn't there another MMO that tried something really quite similar not so long ago? Stap me if there wasn't a dragon behind that one, too.

Dominant though WoW has been in the genre, this particular piece of Blizzard wisdom would be an odd model to emulate. I don't think Cataclysm is generally reckoned to be WoW's finest hour. Wasn't that the period when the game really began to bleed subscriptions? Why, yes it was.

After nearly three years observing the outcomes of whatever passes for decision-making at ANet Towers, though, I really wouldn't put anything past the current regime. The tastes or interests of players seem to bear little or no relevance in the lurches in direction the game spasmodically suffers. Neither does anyone seem especially interested in maximizing revenue streams.

Rather, they seem to revel in making changes a lot of players don't like while attempting to sell them things they don't want. It's true that MMO players are a notoriously curmudgeonly audience, willing to ascribe the worst motives to everyone but themselves, but even in that light GW2's relationship with its audience has been...difficult. For me, most everything that happens seems to be best understood as a series of internal power-plays and positionings, which, to be fair, is probably how companies with hundreds of career-minded individuals all focused on a single product usually tend to operate.

Even so, even with the most self-obsessed, solipsistic of world-views, sealed in the hermetic bubble of management meetings and focus groups, surely tearing down the world and starting again from scratch couldn't seem like a good idea to anyone.

Could it?