Thursday, November 8, 2012

Brawler's Guild and the MMO In-Game Society

The latest big controversy (and wouldn't it be funny if this was engineered just to divert attention away from dailies, LFR, and CRZ?) is the Brawler's Guild. I talked about it a couple days ago (just scroll down,) and my opinions have not really changed. What I think has changed is that I see what Blizzard is trying to do. It's an interesting experiment, but it is one that I am very skeptical will produce the results that they are looking for.

Blizzard is trying to create a sense of an underground.

The ultimate goal of the MMO genre is to have a game world where people really feel that there is stuff going on. Yes, most players focus on the race of getting phat loot so we can fight tougher guys for more phat loot, but at least part of what draws a lot of people to the game (before they know anything about endgame content) is the sense of a world to explore - that feeling of a living world.

One of their stated goals in Mists was to encourage more "out in the world" content - stuff that wasn't there to make you a more effective raider, but was instead to make you feel more like an intrepid adventurer, meeting new people.

Sure, if you want to be the big hero fighting the big bad, that's where Raiding (and to a lesser extent, dungeons) comes in. Historically, if you wanted to do anything at the level cap, you basically had that or PvP. PvPers have their own line of progression and do not have to focus on raiding to excel. The in-world personalities of these types of characters could be quite different - the Raider is a champion who wishes to fight against the biggest supernatural threats to Azeroth. The PvPer is either a loyal Alliance or Horde soldier, trying to get an edge against the other faction wherever they can, or they might just be a gladiator, in it for the riches and the glory. And of course, everyone could be a bit of a blend of these.

Guilds form around these sorts of interests. You might have a guild that is focused on raiding, or one that is focused on PvP (as a non-PvPer, do people actually do rated battlegrounds?)

And the player populace has different demographics defined by these interests. While many do a little (or a lot) of both, the populace is mostly the PvEers and the PvPers, two very large groups.

So, in creating a super-exclusive club that lets a single person (well, one per faction) on each server fight at a time, Blizzard is actually trying to create a small minority. They are trying to create a smaller demographic that cares about something that the rest of the players ignore.

They are trying to create an underground.

It's an interesting goal, but I'm not convinced that it will work out as they hope.

The first thing, and this would have been very strange indeed, but would have probably served the feel of the fight club better, is that they should not have announced it. The Brawler's guild was one of the big, headliner features of the new patch. While I realize not everyone delves into the patch notes every time there's an announcement, it means that a huge portion of the players are now excited to take part in it.

If, on the other hand, this had been something you literally just had to stumble across or hear about by word of mouth, it would reinforce that "underground" feeling far more, and I actually think players would love to discover that there is such a huge hidden feature in the game.

That said - and this may contradict what I just said - there's not really any way to keep a secret on an MMO. Take the hidden Klaxxi dailies, for example. Within days, general chat in the Dread Wastes is awash in people asking "how do I do the hidden daily today?" MMOs are naturally products of the internet era, and in the internet era, there's very little that can be "hidden."

Using the Black Market to limit membership to the Brawler's Guild (man, I hope we can at least go inside to take a look, even if we can't queue up) will keep people out of it, certainly. But as I see it, there are only a few possibilities for what would happen next:

1. After a while, as more people get their invitations, the numbers get out of control and the queues become absurd.

2. A cartel of players tries to keep total control of invites, meaning that only a few players ever get to experience it.

3. The content is too dull for anyone to want to do for more than a week, and so everyone gets to experience it for a while.

That's what's bizarre about this: Number 3, the one in which the content is boring enough to keep people from crowding in there week after week? That's the best option.

Here's the thing: Engineering an underground is not going to work in this genre. You either find yourself dedicating lots of resources (we can't have class quests but we can have this?) to something very few people will see, or you create something that everyone is going to try, and those who find it fun are going to keep doing it.

I would probably be one of them. I always wish I had some cool thing to fight without worrying about queueing up for an instance.

The thing is: you can achieve that underground feel with the use of gameplay and story segregation. Sure, everyone and their moonkin might know about the Brawler's Guild, but you give that place a cool, David Fincher/Chuck Palahniuk vibe, and we'll still feel like it's a cool underground club.

Blizzard is great at atmosphere - look at Darkmoon Isle.

But as it stands, the intended implementation of Brawler's Guild (and probably the way it's going to have to come out, given how far the patch is in its development) is going to just lead to frustration. It's sad to say this about a feature that hasn't even hit live servers yet, but I really look forward to the revamp.

One last thing: Blizzard, I love that you are a company that is in constant communication with its players. 99% of the time, I agree with your reasonings and usually your decisions. But the recent posts in which you have tried to backpedal, saying Brawler's Guild was not intended to be a major feature? Those just ring false. While the lore developments are certainly the focus of the patch, this thing has been billed as being just as big a feature as the Argent Tournament Daily hub or the revamped Darkmoon Faire. This thing has the potential to be awesome - if it didn't, you wouldn't be hearing so many complaints.

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