What we’re seeing here is nothing short of desperation, fueled by a misunderstanding as to why players have left the game.

Blizzard has been going out on a full-court press this week to deal with absolutely abysmal news — subscribers are fleeing its flagship game in droves. From the official releases and the unofficial leaks, by all accounts, cancellations are now outnumbering new signups by a staggering rate. We can certainly speculate as to all of the many reasons why players have cancelled their accounts — and comments from Blizzard devs, like Ghostcrawler’s unapologetic post-mortem on Cataclysm or the Activision team’s revival of the Scroll of Desperation (er, Resurrection), certainly give us a sense as to why Blizzard thinks players are leaving. But they have it all wrong.

World of Warcraft is, basically, played out. Seven years is an impressive run for any MMO, much less a fantasy MMO that is based upon a 20-year-old Tolkien-inspired franchise, but players are just tired. The fact that Blizzard devs are lashing out in all sorts of tactical directions demonstrates their utter lack of strategic understanding as to why audiences are becoming disengaged with their product.

Here are why their decisions will fail:

1. You’re in Our World Now.
There was once a time when an immersive world was a compelling reason for gameplay. Travel, however, became tedious the higher level one became — and traveling in an environment is really only fun if you’re experiencing the environment for the first time. Everyone loved traveling in Northrend for the first time — but how many of you are looking forward to going back to freaking Elwynn Forest or Dun Morogh — again! — to collect bullshit pets or play a game of ‘where’s Waldo’? I’m betting not many of you. Furthermore, enticing people out into the world with world encounters doesn’t really work — Rift has shown that even with dynamic, scaling encounters, the experience gets old fast. Don’t even get me started with World PvP – an idea whose genesis was certainly novel, but again, that only makes sense when you have a critical mass of people who are invested in the outcome. PvP, much like any other experience, is an activity-based encounter and not a game in and of itself. Eastern audiences are able to consume high quantities of PvP content because they have a voracious appetite for grinding — but that’s basically all PvP is when you force it upon people: a treadmill.

2. Giving Players Things to Do.
Everyone wants to play a game and feel that they are doing something meaningful. No one will want to log into a game that is simply churning out content that makes them want to bore their eyes out. From the mini games that Blizzard has implemented or has talked about implementing (such as Cataclysm’s Plants vs. Zombies homage), to whole systems that are designed to create games-within-games (like Achievements, the Collect-them-Alls with Pets and Mounts, and the upcoming Pets Combat/Leveling/Talents Systems), Blizzard is showing that they like to waste people’s time. The first time you experience one of these mini-games or side-activities, they are definitely enjoyable. But again, forcing players to consume the same content over and over and over again — as in Zone Dailies or Repetitious Quest Hubs like Firelands — directly contributes to turnover. Finally, even hardcore players started revolting against EverQuest during the Shadows of Luclin and the Planes of Power with some of the ridiculous key quests and flagging operations. Hierarchical time-sinks are tolerable only so long as there’s nothing better to do and everyone else is doing it – but that ship has come and gone, and the moment you force players to do the same thing over and over and over and over again for grind recognition, you’ll lose them.

3. Appeal to a Broad Audience.
Being the Everyman MMO is a sad proposition: you cater to the lowest common denominator, and you can never heighten the gameplay of your players as a whole. Blizzard’s attempts to “speak to everyone,” is going to result in nobody listening to them. Who wants to enter a world that is mediocre across the board, or that cross-pollinates its content (like PvP with PvE) in an effort to create some sort of twisted or misguided synergy? Blizzard built games that were “easy to learn, difficult to master,” and their recent deviation from this tried-and-true formula has resulted in a game that no one is satisfied with playing. With the fiasco that was Cataclysm, they created raids that raiders didn’t want, heroics that were far too punishing at first, quests that felt like endless rehashes of other zones, and an uninspired generic storyline that pretty much everyone loathed. If they want to be the Everyman MMO, they have to acknowledge that they are going to lose the top performers across the board – like they did during the end of Burning Crusade and the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King, when the game peaked – in the interests of appealing to this broad audience. Trying to make WoW a game that equally appeals to hardcore audiences, busy adults with lives, kids with endless time on their hands, PvP enthusiasts, altaholics, and lore fans is going to result in another fantastic piece of shit like Cataclysm – and no one is going to want to play it.

4. Produce More Content.
This is the most laughable of Blizzard’s objectives in Mists of Pandaria, and I am honestly shocked that Activision allowed Ghostcrawler to make this statement. You’re basically engaged in a battle you cannot win: players will always consume content more quickly than you can produce it, and if your metric is to simply have more content out so that players can move on to another experience, the game’s quality will decline rapidly. Blizzard is repeating the terrible mistakes of Sony in its later expansions by promising a lot of unique experiences, only to deliver randomized and repetitious crap. Instead, focus on memorable experiences that players will want to replay (and ensure that they are indeed repayable). SWTOR’s first instance was memorable and compelling, and people played it over and over again because it was such a unique deviation from the old “tried and true” method of dungeon design. I can’t understand why Bioware made all of their future instances so unmemorable by essentially creating carbon copies of every other dungeon that everyone else had played on other games over the past fifteen years. Blizzard’s effort to create more content is going to result in shittier content that fewer people will want to consume and will simply accelerate cancellations.

So, Blizzard, deal with the reality of today’s gamers:

1. Instant Gratification
Players don’t want to wait in queues or compete for content. They want to jump into content right away and feel immersed, challenged, and rewarded by it. Forcing players to undergo travel only exasperates them, especially when there are superior sandbox alternatives for when they want to experience exploration. Sure, players want to see new content and be given a tour of that new content — but they don’t want to be forced to wait to play. And they sure as hell don’t want to be forced to compete to consume content. The record failures of numerous MMO titles should prove why today’s gamer has rejected this approach, and Blizzard looking to EverQuest and Vanguard for inspiration on this is misplaced at its best and utterly arrogant at its worst. As for PvP, Western audiences are interested in challenging and innovative matches, engaging or compelling mechanics, and addictive gameplay that has replay value, not that is mindlessly repetitive.

2. Casual Consumption
Players want content that is fresh, new (to them), polished, and consistent with the continuity of the other content that precedes it. For better or for worse, everyone today is a casual player. Even the hardcore raiders rarely play for more than 20 hours a week — that’s five four-hour sittings! — and you need to give players content that they can consume in a 15-30 minute sitting, or explicitly give them options to pause-and-resume their experience without losing progress. Dungeons and instances are great when they are tuned around this timer mark (and some of the best dungeons actually force performance around this metric). But players don’t want to feel that they are being penalized — or are being denied content — if they can’t experience it on their terms, in their way, and on their schedule. If you create content that is meant to be consumed in 3 hours, be prepared to make it consumable in six separate 30-minute sessions.

3. Specialized and User Generated Content
Players have been veering away from “Everyman” titles for some time now, and turning instead to titles that speak to them – and most players like it all. Sometimes, a player will want to play an amazing player-versus-player match on a first person shooter; other times, a player will want an engrossing story that captivates their imagination and captures their interest; and even other times, that very same player will want a mindless collection game. Instead of trying to cross-pollinate all of their gaming experiences with one another (for example, forcing non-raiders to raid by placing rare tradeskilling recipes or special pets deep in raid instances), focus instead on making self-contained specialized experiences so that when a player decides to consume a specific type of content, they feel rewarded and well-targeted for this experience. Players are more and more looking to define the terms of their gameplay and pursue those conditions for their own rewards, and user generated content is becoming the marketplace in which the ideas, hopes, and dreams of players are being shaped. Consider how systems like Star Trek Online’s “The Foundry,” or EverQuest II’s Dungeon Maker have revitalized failing games by giving players the opportunity to express their creativity and set the stage on which their gaming experience can be honed and crafted. Expect both specialized experiences and user-generated content to be a must-have instead of a nice-to-have in future MMO titles.

4. Timeless Experiences
Back in the days of EverQuest, players tolerated bugs because they didn’t know better, and then World of Warcraft showed them that a really polished game at the top of its art could be made. Players no longer desire polish — they expect it at a bare minimum — and instead, they are looking for the next great experience that is going to rock their world. They don’t want to play the same game that they’ve been playing for the past seven years; they want the latest expansion to make them feel like they are being reintroduced to an old friend for the very first time. Of course, you can’t lose your virginity twice — and efforts to repeat this are ultimately going to disappoint. But you can come close if you strive for memorable experiences that show your systems designers, content producers, and technical developers are innovating and creating new encounters and new games. There’s nothing more disappointing to today’s gamers when they get this sinking feeling that they’ve “played this game before.” And when gaming companies respond with, “Well, there’s only so many ways you can do a dungeon run…” someone else, usually an independent game developer or an upstart shop, shows them just how wrong they are. And innovation is what drives this industry — it’s why an unemployed guy was able to go into his basement and two weeks later come out with Minecraft and make hundreds of millions of dollars for himself — and it’s why dinosaurs like World of Warcraft either have to deliver, or they die.

I’m continually amazed at the deep myopic cluster-fuck going on at Blizzard, and I can only conclude that because the A-Team transitioned out of WoW shortly after Ulduar, the B-Team that is running the show — namely, Tom Chilton and Greg Street and their ilk — have really no clue how to right the ship anymore. And I get the feeling that Blizzard isn’t really interested in putting forth the energy to make a dated, played-out game like World of Warcraft come back alive and compete with brand new titles that are revolutionizing the industry. I think Blizzard is looking to Titan which, by all of the very few leaked accounts, hopes to be just the instantly-gratifying, casually-consuming, specialized and timeless experience that today’s player is looking for. For those who don’t deliver, like the clueless assclowns running WoW these days, they have reassignments and layoffs to look forward to, because players have moved on.

So it’s either adapt and innovate, or game over.

Open Terminal, and execute the following two commands:

1. defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true
2. killall Finder

And behold! All of your Hidden Files are now visible within Finder. This is a handy shell script to keep handy to let you toggle between versions since, sadly, Lion makes it a little bit inconvenient to do this naturally (or well, so I thought — who knows? I take the brute-force way of getting my folders to function how I want). To turn off hidden files, Open Terminal again and execute the inverse of the commands:

1. defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false
2. killall Finder