In this thread, some people challenged my assertion that WoW has long-term staying power:

Remember WoW is a nice game, any game when it comes out the starting grind and game experience is usually fun and fresh because it is new. Once the player has reached the top level one time repeating that on multiple characters doesn’t stay fresh it becomes an annoyance.

Certainly, that’s the way it’s been in the past, but if it must ALWAYS be that way in the future of MMOs, our genre is doomed.

I suspect we’ll hear more complaints about the grind in WoW in the future as these issues come to light. When people hit max level quickly they will start alternate characters, and it feels a lot more like a grind when you have to complete 90% of the same quests again, run through and explore the same areas again, hope for the same rare drops again.

And here I disagree.

Raph Koster, in his new book “A Theory Of Fun” (which I’ve only partially read, I must confess up front – full review soon!), posits that ‘fun’ is, essentially, all about pattern optimization. People essentially have fun learning a pattern, and stop having fun once they feel like they’ve mastered it and aren’t getting anything out of repeating it anymore.

Most MMOs are screwed by this because, again, of content shrinking. As you mention, most people will try to make alts, and doing so, will optimize the best path to advance their alts. They will realize that to do so will require killing a lot of the most efficient things to kill (i.e. killing Lizardmen for 10 levels). As such, you end up ‘grinding’ more because mentally, you know that this is the optimal way to advance your character. As designers, we convince ourselves that playing a Sorcerer will be so different than playing an Assassin that the pattern-optimization game will be fresh and exciting no matter what. But we’re wrong – there’s no way to make killing 10 levels of lizardmen feel different for long enough that your average joe doesn’t hit that mental saturation point. So we have to find other ways to prod players out of these unhealthy play patterns.

WoW, on the other hand, breaks you out of little patterns and forces you to appreciate variety. You end up seeing all of the content. And you begin to optimize your quest path – i.e. doing Raph’s pattern optimization on a meta-level of play. “If I get these six quests, and do ‘em in this order, I only have to stop in town once, around the fifth quest, then I’ll pick up those four quests, polish those off, and the last one will have me end up near the next town…” Watching people talk about how they’ve created alts and optimized these paths is interesting in its own way, and it’s also clearly remindful that each of those little nuggets are different challenges, different sets of monsters to fight, which means they’re mixing up their experience on an hour-to-hour basis. Say what you will about how grind-y it feels – it’s a very different sort of experience.

Again, the little things feed into this. City of Heroes, for example, has plenty of quests, but you can only have a handful of quests active at a time, and it makes it hard to optimize on the meta-level. WoW’s limit of 20 quests helps there. SWG’s random content is hard to optimize on a meta-level – WoW’s static quests work better for this mental exercise. EQ2’s quests are mostly multiplayer quests – it’s hard to optimize a path on the meta-level when you depend on finding quality teams to do them.

Will this work? Will WoW manage to lengthen subscription times rather than shorten them, as other recent MMOs seem to have done? I don’t know, it’s too soon to tell. Did they try to do this on purpose? Who knows. But there’s no doubt that there is a powerful paradigm shift here that fundamentally changes how people flow through their playspace. It challenges the grind at the level of the user experience, and gets people to appreciate the totality of the world’s content. And that is a significant change.