

Things I Learned from World of Warcraft - JabavuAdams
http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/seven-things-warcraft

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patio11
Seven Things I Learned From WoW (The Business):

1) Put _obsessive_ attention into making the first five minutes of use of your
product awesome. It is the five minutes people are most likely to see. It is
also a gate through which all subsequent use of your product must pass.
(Seriously, folks, if you value conversion optimization, I want you to play
five minutes of WoW and five minutes of any other MMORPG, and take notes on
what happens. WoW will drag you around by the nose. WoW will point you in the
direction of the next thing to do. WoW _will_ show you success in those five
minutes, even if you're terrible at what you're doing. We should all aspire to
making products that nail those first five minutes as much as WoW does.)

2) Do not devote disproportionate developer resources to content/systems which
the majority of the user base will not interact with. (It took them years to
learn this, but they eventually go around to it.)

3) Make it simple. Then, make it simpler. WoW is one of the most complicated
pieces of engineering the world has ever known, but six year olds can pick up
and play it.

4) People will put up with any amount of drudgery if you give them small,
frequent, random rewards for doing so. This is in fact so powerful I'm kind of
scared of doing it.

5) If people are bringing their boyfriends into your product so that they can
spend more time together, that is probably a good sign you have reached mass
market success.

6) Monthly. Billing. Minor discounts for cashflow in advance.

7) High quality visual design can be made rot-proof by using iconic
representations, bright colors, and timeless aesthetics. If you chase the
leading edge of graphical sophistication, on the other hand, three years from
now plan on doing a total graphical rip-out or you'll look dated.

~~~
reitzensteinm
As a game developer, I'd argue that thinking along the lines of #2 is very
dangerous. Great games have a ton of subtle touches and content that only a
small percentage of players will appreciate. The trick is that each player
will notice a completely different set of features/content, and it makes them
really happy when it feels like the developers went out of their way to polish
some little bit of the game.

Think of Super Mario Brothers, one of the best selling games of all time.
There are a stunning amount of hidden areas, tricks etc (even using an
emulator with save+load, and a guide, it's not easy to explore the entire game
world), but this is very closely related to how stunning the game world felt
(especially for the time). An average player may only come across 10-20
secrets in the game, out of hundreds, but each time they'll have that warm
fuzzy feeling where they are thinking, wow, they went to all the trouble to
put this here?

Another good example is No One Lives Forever. They did a TON of funny lines
with the guards talking to each other and notes that were left around (eg a
note to employees saying no fornicating in the evil death ray storage
facility). The chance of picking up on each of those was low, say around 10%,
but since there were hundreds the game world, each player will have 20-30
moments where they were exploring some back room and they found something
cool, which gave the game world immense amounts of character. If they instead
made 20-30 moments and forced the players through them linearly, it would have
felt cheap.

I'd also like to mention that, unlike many forms of software, it IS actually a
requirement that game developers have fun making the games they play, because
otherwise making the game itself fun is pretty much impossible. I don't think
it's a coincidence that the developers of Diablo 2 took the time to put in the
cow level, which most people never see, and spent a huge amount of resources
tweaking leveling up for characters all the way up to level 90+, at the same
time that they made such a fantastic game for the average player. If they made
the game specifically for the average player, I think a lot of that magic that
goes into development would have been lost, and paradoxically the game
wouldn't have been as fun for anyone.

Of course you have to be somewhat rational about where you spend your
development resources, but if you try to make sure that the majority of the
players see the majority of the content, it's so easy to make a sterile game.
And if you are often completely irrational about where you spend your time in
the name of being artistic, it's surprisingly easy to make a game that is
actually fun and gets attention. The difference in sales between the former
and the latter, without a marketing plan B, will be orders of magnitude.

(I agree with the rest of your post)

~~~
patio11
WoW was spending literally tens of millions of dollars on content seen by a
fraction of a percent of its player base. That was unjustifiably bad. That it
continued for quite some time was a problem of the dev team culture and also,
probably, a symptom that they did not have good metrics. (I have been there,
done that, and got the T-shirt. Not to the tune of tens of millions but I've
certainly frittered away man months on things seen by less than .1% of
customers and, even worse, 0% of trial users.)

~~~
reitzensteinm
It does sound like they took it too far (I've not played WoW after losing a
significant percentage of my time as a teenager to Diablo 2).

But I was talking about the general rule. I'd say that the opposite mistake is
much more common amongst game developers, and it's a big reason why so many
crappy games are released.

Certainly 0.1% of customers is too low. But I wouldn't call 1% too low - many
of the best games ever made include lots of 1% content. And I think that's no
coincidence - the mindset that results in developers putting 1% content into a
game also results in a fun core game. 1% content only happens when developers
care a lot about the game.

I should clarify that by 1% content I mean a different 1% of the audience will
see each piece of content.

------
hristov
One thing I learned from playing Diablo 2:

It is a real waste of time.

Having learned this important lesson I never played WoW, thank god.

~~~
Proleps
A lot of people think playing wow is a complete wast of time. But when you ask
them what they do all day, they just watch television.

~~~
rtp
Not practicing what you preach doesn't say much about the truth of what you're
preaching.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
I'm not sure if that applies here. Most people "waste" a certain amount of
their week on downtime, and that's probably healthy for them. Whereas in ages
past that was checkers at the general store or a bard's stories at dinner or
listening to the radio, today it's TV and video games. A person who watches 40
hours of TV a week for fun is in just as much trouble as a guy who plays WoW
or EVE for 40 hours a week.

------
skolor
I'm always a little confused about how much people love to bash WoW, and call
it such a waste of time. Sure, there are people who throw away massive amounts
of time into the game, but there are plenty of other people who play a
reasonable amount.

I spend 2 evenings a week raiding, with 1-2 hours throughout the week (plus
another hour or two on the weekends, when I can) doing other things. Twice a
week, a group of 10 friends get together, log onto WoW and a Ventrilo server,
and mess around for a few hours. I think of it a lot like a bowling/poker
night for some guys, except you're significantly more likely to invite a new,
potentially interesting person to a WoW raid than you are to your weekly game.

Honestly, I find the whole "If it does not have direct monetary value, or
somehow advance my career/list of contacts, it isn't worth doing" stance that
many people take rather disturbing. No, playing WoW doesn't directly benefit
me, but the indirect benefits have been pretty awesome. I've kept in touch
with several old friends I otherwise wouldn't have, met a lot of interesting
people, and it gives me something I can talk about with at least 10% of the
population. And that's all on top of just playing a well designed, pretty fun
game.

------
syncerr
The trouble is that no matter how much accomplishment I've seen in life
(college, wife, job), I still miss playing - a lot.

~~~
zackattack
maybe you should do something else instead of your wife and job.

~~~
roel_v
Or maybe he should do his wife more.

------
bretpiatt
Please read the post before making a comment on what you don't like about the
game. He just used WoW examples to contrast with life lessons.

The #1 lesson is probably the most important to life success, "Don't start
something you don't intend to finish." is another way to word it.

This is even more important to startups -- if you are constantly getting
features half way done and then scrapping them you should spend time figuring
out why.

Yes the "new feature" you thought of today might be better measured side by
side than the one that is half way done, but is it better for the effort
required?

------
JacobAldridge
"Grinding is part of the game ... but grinding is not the game."

Would that I had the wisdom to tell the difference between the grinding I
_have_ to do to move me forward, and the grinding I _keep doing_ because it's
there in front of me as an option.

~~~
DLWormwood
That's what made me give up WoW myself a few months ago, after playing for
about year and getting my sister hooked worse than me. I played rather
leisurely until Blizzard added Achievements. My play style changed drastically
afterwards, especially with regards to holiday events. My desire to get titles
(especially the Loremaster one) really burned me out. Brewfest was the final
straw, since you have to do several annoying grind quests every stinking day
for the two week duration. Really ruined the game for me. (Blizz had to extend
the holiday for a few days even due to glitches that really screwed up the
acquisition curve.)

I pity the players having to deal with the Valentine's Day event coming soon;
that was the second worst, IMHO.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I've never actually played (long story, but essentially my gaming tastes have
been permanently stuck in 1998), so I was referring to the broader lesson in
life. Glad to know the lessons continue to apply specifically and generally.

------
jyothi
The post is not about WoW. It is about his take-away from the game which
applies to everything in daily life and for bigger things.

The list is terrific advice and preaching it through the example of a game is
smart thing as one is hooked on to the reading part. Seems like most people
just had a negative feel for the whole thing as they detest WoW as a waste of
time. In the process they missed the gem of advice.

------
unwind
I found this quote:

"With my newfound time, I had a kid, wrote a couple of movies and directed one
of my own."

intriguing enough to dig up this imdb search: <
<http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0041864/#writer> >. I'm sure the proper list is
actually on Mr August's site too, but ... This might have more trivia. :)

------
anonjon
The biggest thing I learned from world of warcraft:

If you quit wow and spend all of that time that you would have been playing
WoW on other tasks, you can actually accomplish some pretty amazing stuff.

(Get in shape, become a hacker, learn music, get girls... pretty much
anything.)

Grinding levels in WoW takes discipline. Grinding levels in WoW can be a time
investment similar to a second job. You can literally waste YEARS of your life
playing WoW.

If you have the energy and discipline to sit at a computer for 8 hours or
whatever after you've done all of your daily stuff, you could just as easily
be spending that time accomplishing something great or learning.

And you will have tangible rewards that you can take with you everywhere, not
just bits on a server.

~~~
patio11
Bug report: I quit WoW and all I got was bits. Bits in SVN, bits in MySQL,
etc...

