craftiness

[_mike]

(am still pretty much in work mode, cobbling together vital but unexciting systems. why am i so bad at organizing collections of files? i don't know, but i know that i am)

I'm basically just reading Terra Nova for Tim Burke these days--his recent invocation of Minecraft against the 'virtual worlds' purists (in comments) was pretty sweet--but I

Comments

[yeloson]

I think there's a lot of technical causes for WoW, but really, it's staying success? Social. It managed to hit the critical threshold to establish itself as THE social network of MMOs, much in the same way Facebook passed up Myspace.

Social network based activities hit these thresholds at which point it only grows bigger, like gravity pulling in more things and increasing upon itself.

The smart reward cycles keep people in long enough to establish social connections, the social connections keep people in long enough to do the longer term cycles, or, more importantly, long enough for Blizzard to hit up another expansion.

This is also true of D&D in the tabletop rpg world: it's a game most people play, therefore, borderline people end up playing it too, and most new players are introduced to D&D as well.

The problem is, these kinds of things also tend to stabilize and are hard to break up. The kinds of things which successfully do so generally offer different experiences that the crowd didn't know they wanted yet (CCGs vs. D&D, iPods vs. PCs, Wii vs. everyone, etc.)

[_mike]

I think that explains why, when it won, it won as big as it did, but doesn't really answer "why WoW?" Though that question could just as easily be "why not the other guys?" and that one pretty much answers itself; the other guys kind of sucked.

The transition to WoW 2--which has to happen, at some point; they made some smart choices that expended its lifespan, but at some point it'll be a 10 year old computer game--will be interesting!