10-22-2013, 10:26 PM
Spoiler'd introduction if you only want to read the essay itself.
Put simply, I ask you all: where is the WoW in CotH?
Let’s face it—WoW, traditionally, has been a winning model. More lately, within the last three years or so, players have grown upset with the direction of the lore, talent system, “dumbing down” of the mechanics, and so forth—but before then (WotLK and earlier) it maintained immense popularity, and to this day its worldwide player base is, by anyone’s standards, massive.
Why is this? What drives players to keep playing WoW for years on end? What makes WoW so addictive?
The answer is actually not unique to WoW, although WoW is definitely an exemplar of it: it is the progression, the development of one’s own character. When you start WoW, you are as pathetic and as worthless as the dust on Thrall’s left bootstrap. After leaving your isolated starting area, you migrate on foot to your capital city and are suddenly immersed in an ocean of endgame players. They circle above your head riding on dragons, boasting fancy titles and shiny, glowing gear. And more than anything else you are envious of them—you aspire to one day be accomplished heroes like they are, to ride on your own dragon and brandish a sword as big as your body and to stare down at a n00b peon just like you and feel smug at how far you’ve come. And so you find yourself staring up a long slope, the radiant beacon of fame and excellence glimmering in the distance at its summit—and your aspiration and envy compel you to ascend, gluing you to the grind no matter how monotonous it is.
Thus it is the slope itself, the gradient between insignificant and excellent, that gives your character purpose. Your thirst for the rewards farther up the slope and the satisfaction of looking back down upon what you have transcended all motivate you to keep climbing year after year. This is the defining element of WoW.
But CotH is not a world of slopes; it is a flat world, a world of equals. The administration has consciously endeavored to keep everything level, both in terms of materials—by providing all players with immediate, free, and unlimited access to all gears, pets, mounts, abilities, etc.—and in terms of status—by establishing the ground rule that all characters are intrinsically of equal strength, which is to say that a character created one second ago can, with good luck, defeat a character created one year ago. Thus, while the server is based firmly in WoW’s lore, any semblance of WoW as a game is absent here, since the slope—the defining element of WoW—has been removed.
Their reasoning for doing this is both understandable and respectable: these policies maximize the ability of a new player or character to “jump right into things,” so to speak. No one can ever be denied access to an event, guild, or quest because they are too weak, and by the same token no one can achieve so much power as to be untouchable.
But as the server stands now, it is so perfectly flat that we lose any sense of upwardness—we lose sight of a long-term purpose. Bulldozing the slope to greatness does indeed liberate players from the pain of weakness and of envy, but what does it liberate them unto? They find themselves on an infinite horizontal stretch: looking forward, they see no objectives toward which to orient themselves; looking backward, they see no signs of how far they have come. They roleplay a character until they get bored of it or until it dies too many times, then they retire it and start again with another character—after all, there is no penalty; the new character is, for all intents and purposes, just as powerful as the old one. For contrast, in WoW, the slope makes you invested in your characters—you can choose to start over, but you’ll be back at level 1, at the bottom of the slope, with no money or abilities, the speck of dust on Thrall’s left bootstrap. Not such a simple choice to make!
Eventually, therefore, the CotH system as it stands now fails to retain our interest. We find other things to do in life—other things with more purpose to which we may commit ourselves—and pursue those instead. The population recedes, and the community stagnates.
Earlier in the “Inactivity as of late” thread something similar to this topic was touched upon for a few posts but then quickly passed by. During the brief discussion, @Delta said the following:
My point with this op-ed is to show you all that it is NOT the restrictions that create the illusion of achievement, but rather the absence of restrictions that create the illusion of freedom. The sense of achievement that the slope creates is in fact very real and not illusory at all, as it gives players and their characters their drive and purpose. Removing the slope might appear at first to bestow freedom to all, as no one is forced to make any sort of ascent, but in reality it merely traps us in a different way; without a slope to ascend, we perpetually wander directionless and without commitment. And yes, Delta, while we certainly can pretend we’re climbing a slope through IC storylines, without any sort of concrete mechanics behind it, our “pretend” slope is for all intents and purposes meaningless, as everyone knows that in reality we are all eternal equals. Thus, Delta, I think you have it backwards: the slope that we create for ourselves is the illusory one, whereas the slope WoW creates is tangible and motivating.
So what is the solution, then? Surely the opposite extreme—playing CotH exactly like retail WoW—is not the answer. After all, many people (myself included) come here to CotH to get away from retail WoW. My argument, therefore, is that we must find the middle path, the balance between the unforgiving steepness of retail WoW’s slope and the near-utter absence of CotH’s slope.
I say “near-utter absence” for a reason. I recognize that there are some minor elements of progression in place here right now: peons can become grunts; gruntship lets you play nobles and CMCs; grunts can build trust in the community and become forum helpers (etc.); and so forth. But these alone, clearly, are insufficient. I noticed from the wiki and forum archives that in the past there was a prestige system here that involved lengthy, rigorous training and granted unique weapons/gears/IC powers. I noticed also that there was once a token system that encouraged people to grind gold (gold, at the moment, has practically no purpose in-game other than to buy gear with actual stats…which nobody actually needs since no one actually fights anything outside of emotes and dice rolls). Both of these ideas sound good to me in concept, though obviously in practice they must have grown clunky and unmanageable considering they have since been abolished. Perhaps these systems or something like them could be reintroduced in a more manageable format, building off the wisdom of hindsight.
Point being, I feel we must integrate some form of “climb” or “grind” into CotH to construct an actual, tangible slope for us to ascend. We must create an environment wherein players can focus on roleplaying more than—but not entirely instead of—climbing.
In short, we must put a little more WoW back into CotH.
Spoiler:
At first I was considering posting this in the ongoing "Inactivity as of late" thread, but eventually I found myself typing out something too long and too divergent from the nature of the current discussion there, which at the moment seems to be centered on problems in the community: the ineptitude of various DMs and GMs, the exclusiveness of cliques and guilds, the ossification of the lore following WotLK, and so forth. While all these undoubtedly contribute to the so-called "stagnation" of CotH that has apparently occurred as of late, in my view the greater problem here lies elsewhere.
First, please allow me to introduce myself, as to date there appears to be some confusion in-game as to who I am on the forums and vice versa. I am Werewolf, but many of you will recognize me better by the name of my main character in-game: Aloredra, the crazy Old God-worshipping night elf. I joined CotH just over one month ago. I am a peon who will be applying for gruntship as soon as I complete and submit Aloredra's profile. In fact, I joined CotH so recently that this current level of activity which you are all calling a "stagnation" is, to me, simply normal—that is to say, I’ve only known this server one way, and that’s the way it is now. As such, my outlook on CotH is fundamentally a little different than many of you veterans’ outlooks: I don’t know CotH’s history, so I might be saying things that you guys have already tried and hashed out in years past—but at the same time, my view is untainted by your history; I am unbiased insofar that I have no previous experiences here on which to bias myself. I have literally nothing upon which to look back, and so my vision is fixated strictly forward. Please keep all this in mind as you read this op-ed.
First, please allow me to introduce myself, as to date there appears to be some confusion in-game as to who I am on the forums and vice versa. I am Werewolf, but many of you will recognize me better by the name of my main character in-game: Aloredra, the crazy Old God-worshipping night elf. I joined CotH just over one month ago. I am a peon who will be applying for gruntship as soon as I complete and submit Aloredra's profile. In fact, I joined CotH so recently that this current level of activity which you are all calling a "stagnation" is, to me, simply normal—that is to say, I’ve only known this server one way, and that’s the way it is now. As such, my outlook on CotH is fundamentally a little different than many of you veterans’ outlooks: I don’t know CotH’s history, so I might be saying things that you guys have already tried and hashed out in years past—but at the same time, my view is untainted by your history; I am unbiased insofar that I have no previous experiences here on which to bias myself. I have literally nothing upon which to look back, and so my vision is fixated strictly forward. Please keep all this in mind as you read this op-ed.
Put simply, I ask you all: where is the WoW in CotH?
Let’s face it—WoW, traditionally, has been a winning model. More lately, within the last three years or so, players have grown upset with the direction of the lore, talent system, “dumbing down” of the mechanics, and so forth—but before then (WotLK and earlier) it maintained immense popularity, and to this day its worldwide player base is, by anyone’s standards, massive.
Why is this? What drives players to keep playing WoW for years on end? What makes WoW so addictive?
The answer is actually not unique to WoW, although WoW is definitely an exemplar of it: it is the progression, the development of one’s own character. When you start WoW, you are as pathetic and as worthless as the dust on Thrall’s left bootstrap. After leaving your isolated starting area, you migrate on foot to your capital city and are suddenly immersed in an ocean of endgame players. They circle above your head riding on dragons, boasting fancy titles and shiny, glowing gear. And more than anything else you are envious of them—you aspire to one day be accomplished heroes like they are, to ride on your own dragon and brandish a sword as big as your body and to stare down at a n00b peon just like you and feel smug at how far you’ve come. And so you find yourself staring up a long slope, the radiant beacon of fame and excellence glimmering in the distance at its summit—and your aspiration and envy compel you to ascend, gluing you to the grind no matter how monotonous it is.
Thus it is the slope itself, the gradient between insignificant and excellent, that gives your character purpose. Your thirst for the rewards farther up the slope and the satisfaction of looking back down upon what you have transcended all motivate you to keep climbing year after year. This is the defining element of WoW.
But CotH is not a world of slopes; it is a flat world, a world of equals. The administration has consciously endeavored to keep everything level, both in terms of materials—by providing all players with immediate, free, and unlimited access to all gears, pets, mounts, abilities, etc.—and in terms of status—by establishing the ground rule that all characters are intrinsically of equal strength, which is to say that a character created one second ago can, with good luck, defeat a character created one year ago. Thus, while the server is based firmly in WoW’s lore, any semblance of WoW as a game is absent here, since the slope—the defining element of WoW—has been removed.
Their reasoning for doing this is both understandable and respectable: these policies maximize the ability of a new player or character to “jump right into things,” so to speak. No one can ever be denied access to an event, guild, or quest because they are too weak, and by the same token no one can achieve so much power as to be untouchable.
But as the server stands now, it is so perfectly flat that we lose any sense of upwardness—we lose sight of a long-term purpose. Bulldozing the slope to greatness does indeed liberate players from the pain of weakness and of envy, but what does it liberate them unto? They find themselves on an infinite horizontal stretch: looking forward, they see no objectives toward which to orient themselves; looking backward, they see no signs of how far they have come. They roleplay a character until they get bored of it or until it dies too many times, then they retire it and start again with another character—after all, there is no penalty; the new character is, for all intents and purposes, just as powerful as the old one. For contrast, in WoW, the slope makes you invested in your characters—you can choose to start over, but you’ll be back at level 1, at the bottom of the slope, with no money or abilities, the speck of dust on Thrall’s left bootstrap. Not such a simple choice to make!
Eventually, therefore, the CotH system as it stands now fails to retain our interest. We find other things to do in life—other things with more purpose to which we may commit ourselves—and pursue those instead. The population recedes, and the community stagnates.
Earlier in the “Inactivity as of late” thread something similar to this topic was touched upon for a few posts but then quickly passed by. During the brief discussion, @Delta said the following:
(10-21-2013, 05:42 PM)Delta Wrote: [ -> ]Restrictions to create the illusion of a sense of achievement do not appeal to me at all. There are places where such is the norm, and I'd much sooner not see CotH go down that road. There is nothing stopping you from working towards your own IC goals through personal and public storylines. You don't really need mechanics to limit you, you can do that just fine yourself if that's the sort of progress you want to make. If you get fun outta that, fantastic! Job well done. No one else is imposed upon, nor must they be.
My point with this op-ed is to show you all that it is NOT the restrictions that create the illusion of achievement, but rather the absence of restrictions that create the illusion of freedom. The sense of achievement that the slope creates is in fact very real and not illusory at all, as it gives players and their characters their drive and purpose. Removing the slope might appear at first to bestow freedom to all, as no one is forced to make any sort of ascent, but in reality it merely traps us in a different way; without a slope to ascend, we perpetually wander directionless and without commitment. And yes, Delta, while we certainly can pretend we’re climbing a slope through IC storylines, without any sort of concrete mechanics behind it, our “pretend” slope is for all intents and purposes meaningless, as everyone knows that in reality we are all eternal equals. Thus, Delta, I think you have it backwards: the slope that we create for ourselves is the illusory one, whereas the slope WoW creates is tangible and motivating.
So what is the solution, then? Surely the opposite extreme—playing CotH exactly like retail WoW—is not the answer. After all, many people (myself included) come here to CotH to get away from retail WoW. My argument, therefore, is that we must find the middle path, the balance between the unforgiving steepness of retail WoW’s slope and the near-utter absence of CotH’s slope.
I say “near-utter absence” for a reason. I recognize that there are some minor elements of progression in place here right now: peons can become grunts; gruntship lets you play nobles and CMCs; grunts can build trust in the community and become forum helpers (etc.); and so forth. But these alone, clearly, are insufficient. I noticed from the wiki and forum archives that in the past there was a prestige system here that involved lengthy, rigorous training and granted unique weapons/gears/IC powers. I noticed also that there was once a token system that encouraged people to grind gold (gold, at the moment, has practically no purpose in-game other than to buy gear with actual stats…which nobody actually needs since no one actually fights anything outside of emotes and dice rolls). Both of these ideas sound good to me in concept, though obviously in practice they must have grown clunky and unmanageable considering they have since been abolished. Perhaps these systems or something like them could be reintroduced in a more manageable format, building off the wisdom of hindsight.
Point being, I feel we must integrate some form of “climb” or “grind” into CotH to construct an actual, tangible slope for us to ascend. We must create an environment wherein players can focus on roleplaying more than—but not entirely instead of—climbing.
In short, we must put a little more WoW back into CotH.