Short Term Goals For New 85's

Spinks argues that a shift to shorter term goals may be endangering WoW's retention time.  What exactly are the short term goals for a new level 85 (such as myself)?

• Finish Cataclysm Quest Zones: Depending on how you leveled, you probably have one or more Cataclysm zones worth of quests available.  If you haven't done Twilight Highlands (and possibly Uldum), there are probably gear upgrades to be had.  You might be able to snag rep rewards (and therefore additional gear), along with cash.  You might also have the chance to snag tradeskill materials - in particular, enchanters will find a fair number of quest rewards to disenchant. 
  
  (Personal Status: My main has about 90% of Hyjal and Twilight Highlands left to do, along with all of Deepholm.  It's worth noting that Deepholm has a questline that's an absolute requirement for access to one of the reputations.)
  
  
• Work on Professions: You can typically expect to level your professions to either 475 or 500 for access to all your self-only perks.  Depending on your profession, you may produce gear that you can use during this process.  This is another place where Enchanters win, since they get to equip extremely minor upgrades and then disenchant them later for materials. 
  
  (Personal Status: 476 Tailoring, need 500 for Embroidery, 486 Enchanting, need 500 for disenchanting max level loot.) 
  
  
• Daily Quests?  Surprisingly, there are relatively limited PVE dailies in Cataclysm.  There are some in Deepholm, some in Twilight Highlands, and all of two in Uldum.  (Hyjal will get new dailies in patch 4.1.)  There are also some profession dailies, but the rest of the bunch are specific to Tol Barad.
  
  
• PVP: Speaking of TB, you might not be snagging an epic per win anymore, but it's still there and should still be good for some honor.  More on this topic when I get around to it. 
  
  
• Dungeons: Love em or hate em, but it's definitely worth running each instance at least once for guaranteed quest reward loot.  You get more Justice Points for accepting the random luck of the draw, but you might prefer to run specific dungeons in search of certain gear.  (Also, two of the five random options for level 85's are lower level dungeons that drop inferior loot and, once patch 4.0.6 arrives, markedly worse JP.) 
  
  (Personal Status: Have yet to run the three level 85 dungeons.  My average ilvl is 320, so I've got a bit to go before I can unlock heroics.) 
  

Overall, the list looks a little bit shorter than the comparable list did in Wrath.  Then again, it doesn't look disproportionately so when you consider the smaller number of zones, especially if most players are going to roll up an alt sometime to check out the new leveling content.  

Should we be playing just for loot?
I get where Spinks is coming from on the gear reset - if we assume that we're going to get a gear wipe sometime around April (plus or minus a few months), that might impact your willingness to grind out all the best stuff.  Also, because of automated currency downgrades, individual players can hit a point prior to the patch where it is no longer worth doing random dailies because they will not be able to obtain sufficient numbers of the top tier currency before the patch resets it.  For those of us who are planning to spend Feburary 24th through March 30th (or possibly longer) in Telara, it probably makes sense to bank JP and honor to cash in when we get back to Azeroth.

That said, I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, even for Blizzard in the long term.  If you're having fun playing, it doesn't matter whether you're still going to be using the same gear in a few months.  If the only reason you're playing is to upgrade the arbitrary numbers on your character sheet, then yes, you've got less incentive to stick around.  If that's the case, though, I would argue that you're probably not having that much fun.  From Blizzard's perspective, it's not worth dragging one last $15 fee out of you if it means that you're hating the game by the time you finally quit and you end up staying away for months or years.  In that case, everyone might be just a little better off in the long run if you take a break and come back when there's new stuff to do.

Uldum Complete, Level 85

I finally hit level 85 on my Mage this evening, clearing out the quests of Uldum.  Personally, I enjoyed the zone for the pretty scenery and a decent level of challenge - I had to actually use cooldowns to survive encounters, especially if I got multiple mobs unexpectedly.  I'm actually somewhat looking forward to tackling the Twilight Highlands if it keeps the content at the level of Uldum. 

(For those keeping score, I did Hyjal and plan to do Deepholm on my Warrior, while the mage did Vashj'ir, Uldum, and some of the early quests in each zone.  I also got a lot of exp from some dungeon runs, archeology, and the daily cooking quest.) 

Armadillo, Green

Contents May Shift In Testing

Rift may end up claiming the record for most bloggers who are not playing the beta events because they have already pre-ordered.  I don't know if there's an official list, but I've definitely read this sentiment a few times since the betas launched.  (Syp's contribution was the easiest to find.) 

For me personally, not playing the betas is mostly due to being relatively busy.  We're sitting about three weeks out from the game's "head start" launch, at which point we'll be allowed to actually keep our characters. 

The main thing that I would be doing if I did clear out time for Rift right now would be test driving possible builds.  Then again, it is still a beta, and things could change before launch.  For example, I heard some complaints on the Rift Reporter podcast about mana regen issues, and how they've been improving during the ongoing testing.  I don't want to miss out on a potentially fun class because it wasn't quite finished yet when I got around to trying it. 

The game is getting down to its last few beta builds, and hopefully things are starting to settle down.  In particular, we're all better off if the way that characters work can be settled before launch, rather than afterwards.  It's just an interesting artifact of Trion's decision to run short beta events rather than the traditional 24/7 beta; each build/event is made to seem like a major milestone in its own right, which may magnify the impression that big changes are still coming down the pike. 

Difficulty Versus Subscriber Retention

When it comes to MMO design decisions, the customer is not always right.  The challenge for the developer is that the "correct" decision sometimes makes it literally impossible for large portions of the market to play your game, no matter how well you do everything else. 

From Raid or Die to EZ-Zerg
The thing about WoW's ongoing dispute over 5-man dungeon difficulty is that we've been here before.  The year was 2007, and Blizzard had finally released the game's first expansion.  After years of complaints that the endgame was "raid or die", Blizzard's response was to offer smaller raids.  The cap was reduced from 40 players to 25, and TBC also offered both the 10-man Karazhan raid and the raid-like experience of heroic 5-man dungeons. 

Though these changes made some of the logistics simpler (and some, like trying to run two 10-man Karazhan lockouts in a 25-man guild, more difficult), the lower numbers left each player accountable for a greater portion of their group's performance.  Those of us who were below average in our old 40-man guilds no longer met the difficulty bar for this new, "more accessible" content.  In my old guild, about a third broke away to form a new raiding guild, a third disbanded and scattered to other guilds, and a third of us quit the game.

No one outside Irvine knows exactly what happened to WoW's retention numbers in the wake of TBC.  What we can see is how Blizzard reacted to those numbers with future development.  As I commented way back in 2008, my guess is that Blizzard did not like the trend they saw. 

Blizzard did not add another top tier raid to the game for 10 months after patch 2.1.  In the interim, they added gear inflation in the 10-man ZA and, as Sunwell arrived, with the first iteration of high end raid loot for heroic dungeon tokens.  Then Wrath arrived with zergable heroics (yes, even in the month the expansion launched) and raids so easy that even a PUG could complete them.  Then Blizzard made the already easy content even easier by rolling out the dungeon finder and bribing Icecrown raiders to run random dungeons once a day. 

It certainly appears from Blizzard's actions that they saw easier content as a way to draw more players into the endgame.

Ripping off the cast before healing the wound?
Making the game so easy was almost certainly the wrong call, and bringing the difficulty back up is most likely the right one (especially since the dungeons will only get easier as players overgear them).  The problem is, as Eric at Elder Game suggests, that it's hard to hurt your retention numbers by making the game easier.  By contrast, making the game harder because that's how things "should" be fails to address the core problem that got us to the Wrath era in the first place. 

Many players are not looking for the current level of difficulty in their PUG content.  Personally, I like the current dungeon difficulty, but the longer queue times (three times what we had in Wrath) are drastically limiting my ability to actually run dungeons.  With a 15-20 minute queue and a 20 minute dungeon zerg, I could run a Wrath heroic whenever I wanted - I was actually spending the majority of my WoW time in groups.  With a queue time of 45 minutes to an hour, and then about as long (or longer if things go poorly) to actually complete the instance, five-man content is a much larger commitment, which I can fit in maybe once a week. 

Things aren't as bad as they were back in 2007; with the dungeon finder, at least I can actually get an instance group when I do have several hours to burn, where this was nigh impossible for a lone DPS in much of the TBC era.  Even so, nothing in Blizzard's history since 2007 suggests that they're in the business of keeping players away from content though high difficulty.  Perhaps gear inflation will solve this problem for them whenever they get around to releasing patch 4.1.  Otherwise, it's going to be very interesting to see what gets changed. 

(As long as we're digging in my 2008 archives, I suppose we can expect some patch 4.1 news around the February 24th Rift Headstart, since that's how Blizzard treated Warhammer.)