Subscribe
Several Weeks’ Worth of Links
October 12, 2008 7:35 pm
While it’s old news by now, this article on the lack of social play in Warhammer is very good. Conan had similar issues, as I wrote about earlier this year. While encouraging social play isn’t as crucial in a PvP game with prebuilt sides, it’s still sad to see any MMO deny its fundamental nature.
Speaking of PvP: in the midst of a discussion on PvP itemization in World of Warcraft, some talk on tracking player performance in battlegrounds. I don’t know what Blizzard’s planning, but I hope they haven’t forgotten that a bunch of people have been trying to solve this problem in other contexts.
Getting back to Warhammer, gamerDNA’s been printing some interesting articles based on Xfire data and surveys. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a data mining company pretending to be a social networking company, so we can expect lots of intesting stuff from them in the future. Subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already.
In an oddly similar direction, this NYT article suggests that people are eating better food these days because the NPD says so! Somebody call the Daily Plate and Sparkpeople and Fitday and hell, Weight Watchers Online, and let them know about their exciting new business model.
We Can Fix That with Data / Nefarious! wrote:
[…] Yesterday, I snarked on food diary websites who could make money with their data. […]
Posted on 13-Oct-08 at 10:51 pm | Permalink
Laura wrote:
I have to disagree with the article about WAR community. I think the PQ system, and how pervasive it is, lends itself well to forming better comunity-feeling than WoW can provide. It’s always a treat to end up in a PQ and find a healer or a tank already there, and in the 10 or 15 minutes that it takes to get through the stages you get a sense of having worked together to accomplish something real, especially in the later stages where you can’t solo.
Contrast this against WoW; yes dungeons represent a more firm bond with the people you’ve gone into it with because they take much longer to do. However, while you can log into WAR and do 2 or 3 PQs with different groups in the space of an hour, in WoW you need to devote a large chunk of time to a dungeon group, so people with limited play time due to family responsibilities/etc. simply can’t participate regularly in the group play that helps build WoW community. My experience in WoW is that I’d do one dungeon every few weeks of playtime; in WAR I’m doing up to three or four PQs in a night. Yes, the WAR groups are more transitory, but I’m participating in them far more frequently. Also, due to this frequency, players generally understand how to “play” their class in a group better. I have a number of WoW stories that involve “and then the druid who signed on as a healer turned into a bear” but very few stories that involve “and I don’t think that Disciple of Khaine threw one heal”.
There’s also the fact that if you get a bad group member in WoW, they can ruin several hours of play time for you (Needing the item you want simply because they want to sell it, or whatever)… with the shorter WAR groups you can move on to a more positive experience easily and quickly.
Also, I’m inclined to disagree with the viewpoint of anyone who considers a WoW auction house a “community”. It’s certainly a source of Chuck Norris jokes and gold solicitations, but it never made me feel more connected to the game.
Posted on 04-Nov-08 at 12:34 pm | Permalink