This is just a minipost to point out a distinction that may not be clear in my other writings. I love World of Warcraft. I love the art direction, the animation, the music, the lore and the game itself. It’s not perfect, and I can find many ways to make it better, but when all is said and done, it is a remarkably accessible game that is thoroughly fun to play.
I do not, however, love the business aspects of the game. To my mind, the subscription model is an unnecessary barrier to entry, a limiter on innovation, a constraint on design, and a dishonest representation of the costs of the game. This is a systemic complaint that I have with the MMO genre, and not something specific to WoW, though WoW does have some unique troubles within those broader complaints.
This dichotomy is why I’ve written that I would pay good money for an offline version of WoW. The game is that good. I simply refuse to support a business model that I see as ill-advised froma game design standpoint, and unnecessarily expensive from a gamer’s standpoint.
Test.
Italics
I’m not sure how well WoW would work as a single-player Offline game, unless you had a lot more NPCs roaming around to make the world feel more lived in.
Way back when I first started playing WoW (on my old PC with a daggy old video card and some pathetic amount of Ram) I ventured into Ironforge and because my side of the game hadn’t loaded in all of the players’ data from the server side of the game, Ironforge was empty. Eerily empty. Imagine a place as big as Ironforge, with no people in it.
So to work as a single-player game, WoW would require a lot more NPCs.
What I think would be a nice gesture on Blizzard’s behalf, and which reflects on your other post about “WoW can haz free” would be if a player had subscribed for a certain period of time, such as two years, they get a big price break. I used to buy the 6-month block for $13/month, and it was a good deal because in the last 3 years of playing WoW I hardly bought any other PC games. Oh…that just gives me an idea for a Blog Entry
Anyway, imagine if you’d been a subscriber for 2 years so Blizzard said, “You’ve been a loyal customer, here’s a 50% price break.” And from that point on, instead of paying $13-$15 per month you pay just $6.50 to $7.50 per month.
And maybe after subscribing for 3 years (or 4), Blizzard just waive the monthly fee completely.
“You’ve subsidized our game long enough. Here’s a Free lifetime subscription. Thank you for being a Loyal Customer.”
How cool would that be?
Puzzle Pirates has that, actually. After two years of being a customer, you get an almost 50% discount. Of course, you don’t have to subscribe the whole time, you just need to have had your account and kept it active, but you can do that totally for free.
A long-term customer discount would be a fantastic idea. It’s not like they couldn’t afford it.