Leaving World of Warcraft

Cameron Sorden poses the question: why would a player leave WoW? Why leave a game which absorbed and enchanted you for years? I left six months ago, and for me the answer boiled down to two words: “guild drama”. It’s an interesting phrase: it acknowledges the passion people bring to the game, while trivializing those emotions as mere entertainment.

For a while, I too viewed guild conflict as soap opera: amusing but inconsequential. (The YouTube serial The Guild has it pretty close to right, down to the erratic behavior of gnome warlocks.) But as in-game attachments grew stronger, it dawned on me that real feelings were at play. Online friendships are real friendships, and online romances result in cross-country plane flights, babies, and marriages lost and found.

That’s the upside. The downside is that people get hurt. I began to see patterns of trust and betrayal play themselves out over and over again. The main tank who departs for greener pastures, after getting the best gear their guild could provide; the cabal who defect, taking the guild bank with them; the stratagem of eliminating unwanted members by dissolving the guild and reforming without the hapless refugees. Greed for gear, the competitive instinct, and “epeen” repeatedly trump friendship and loyalty.

Is this a feature of WoW, or an inevitable feature of the MMO experience? I think a case can be made that the structure of the WoW endgame rewards bad behavior, as progression replaces fun as the main goal. To see new content, a guild must advance. For a guild to advance, every member must progress in gear. To progress in gear, they must raid regularly. WoW mechanics require spending hours outside of raids farming for repair gold, consumables, and upgrades. The time demands become exorbitant, but any player who doesn’t keep up holds back the collective. Worse, as Blizzard’s dungeon design has evolved, there is less and less chance for a raid to survive a single error by a tired, careless, or undergeared player. This places increasing pressure on the “strong” players to repudiate the “weak,” regardless of human factors.

I’m not optimistic that any of the new MMOs currently looking for a slice of the WoW pie will provide any improvement. The success of WoW’s formula makes major changes unlikely. I suspect that gamer culture and expectations, and the conventions of game design, are now so entrenched that the patterns will reproduce themselves regardless of the relatively minor modifications to mechanics the new games offer.

I understand why people leave WoW — it’s not the utopia that Cameron paints — but neither do I foresee much salvation from its competitors. However, hope springs eternal, and I am ready to try a new MMO; Age of Conan is looking very juicy right now. At least there is the prospect of a few happy months of questing and friendship before the endgame dynamics kick in and turn the warrior princes into frogs.