Player Consequences: Slow and Steady

Everyone seems to be talking about Wrath of the Lich King at the moment. It's busting sales records at the stores and seems to have attracted attention away from the other MMOs released this year. However, I'm sure most of Blizzard's competitors aren't that worried. After all World of Warcraft may be a monster, but it's one that only comes out to eat once every two years. Mythic was just unlucky enough that the schedule for Warhammer's release coincided with the monster coming up for dinner. Still even if Warhammer released further away from Wrath of the Lich King I have to wonder if the results would be any different. World of Warcraft seems to have the unusual ability to maintain a high subscription based even with a slow development cycle for its expansions. The subscription numbers do dip in between releases, but the game never really seems to lose its momentum.

I expect this can be partially explained by Blizzard's habit of holding back content from its expansions and then releasing it in later patches. This helps stretch out the expansion content over a wider time period and gives the development team a chance to work on brand new content. However, even this trick can't account for why World of Warcraft keeps its numbers in the face of multiple new MMO releases.

The accepted MMO practice has long been to crank out at least one expansion a year to keep your subscription base from getting bored and trying a new game. Yet World of Warcraft has maintained its 800 lb. gorilla status while taking twice as long to churn out expansions.

Then again producing expansions one after the other isn't always the best practice for a MMO to follow. The

original EverQuest fell into this trap early on and suffered from a wide range of problems. The number one being that SOE wasn't giving casual players enough time to catch up to the more hardcore players before releasing the next expansion. Having a lot of high-end content only viewed by one percent of your players isn't exactly a sign of good game design. This is especially true if your expansions only add content onto the end game. Why buy a new expansion if you are still not done with the old one? You can tell Blizzard has recently taken steps to avoid falling into the same trap, with their re-use of Naxxramas and nerfing of the old Burning Crusade raids.

Sticking to a slower expansion schedule does more than just allow everyone to see high-end content. It also has a tendency to slow the rate of mudflation in a MMO. Games based on item acquisition have always had a problem with mudflation making older items practically worthless. However, developers have a hard time selling an expansion unless they add in better items. As developers continue to add expansions to a MMO, the power difference between a veteran and a newbie becomes ridiculous. Eventually, this starts hurting player retention and the game starts losing its subscribers at a more rapid rate. Developers know it's easier to control mudflation through content patches, but most games are dependent on the revenue that expansions bring in.

It seems that only games with a very large subscription base can get away with a slower expansion schedule. I think this is because once a game has millions of people paying a subscription fee; it becomes more important to maintain their business then churn out expansions. The risk of introducing a design flaw and negatively affecting the subscription base is just too high. A small ten percent dip in World of Warcraft's North American/European subscriptions would cost Blizzard around seven million dollars in one month! Could you imagine if they really messed up and they suffered a thirty or forty percent drop in their subscriptions! When you are dealing with those kinds of numbers, I'm not surprised that they stick to a slow and steady philosophy. Lucky for us this results in the high quality content we've all grown to love.

Gabriel Runfeldt has been following MMOs ever since he stumbled onto an EverQuest addiction by accident. He eventually managed to fight it off but caught a case of armchair designer syndrome in the process. Now once a week you can catch his mad ravings here at Player Consequences. You can even contact him with any questions at gabriel.runfeldt AT weblogsinc.com