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Tobold recently mused about the sustainability of World of Warcraft (WoW), inasmuch as its continued growth or, at minimum, maintenance, of its player base. Like others before him, Tobold is quick to note that Blizzard’s oversight in regards to their WoW expansions it the lack of new material. In fact, we’ve said time and time again that aspects like the PvP system are bandaged into a game whose foundation was never about PvP. In other words, most WoW patches and expansions are little more than bandages applied to bandages, but the underlying cause of the problem is never accurately addressed.

For example, WoW is fundamentally an item hunt based around the raiding experience. In other words, the best gear came from raiding, which gave raiders a huge advantage in PvP. What did Blizzard do? They created PvP-only gear that could only be acquired by playing the PvP game. This gear allowed players to sustain damage for longer, do more burst damage, but was ultimately a poor gear choice for raiding, on account of the fact that the gear was not ideal for sustained damage. When Blizzard added the resilience stat to gear, they sealed the coffin on interchanging gear, because resilience was generally useless in a raiding environment.

Things seemed okay for awhile, but as the raiding portion of the game was the only element receiving a lot of new content and focus, there was still better gear out there for raiders, and with the token system, Blizzard decided to allow raiders to buy PvP items as well, effectively giving them another one-up on those focusing purely on the PvP element of the game.

What does this have to do with WoW’s sustainability? Blizzard has almost come full-circle on their changes, and PvP is as much a grind nowadays as it ever was, because Blizzard didn’t apply any permanent fixes to WoW, but merely satiated players for the short term. WoW is, however, still a PvE game at heart, with developers abandoning old raid dungeons for new PvE material. There’s little change to group dynamics, however, and synergy between classes is relatively static since there aren’t any new classes to play with. While the upcoming Death Knight is the one exception, it shouldn’t take Blizzard four years to release that kind of content, when the game still has numerous, unaddressed problems.

Tobold is right in questioning why the major patches have been so long between releases, particularly given the resources at Blizzard’s disposal. The fact is, though, Blizzard doesn’t need to release this kind of content, nor does it need to make drastic design changes, because there really hasn’t been a solid competitor to WoW. It’s only now that WoW’s novelty has worn off, and people are looking forward to a game that’s evolved beyond what WoW offers, and that’s easily visible in the hype behind Age of Conan (AoC). Nevermind that AoC’s reviews haven’t been fantastic. The fact that AoC is approaching a player-base of one-million is proof enough that people are willing to find a replacement for WoW, even if AoC is only a temporary focus of attention. And, lest people claim that one-million is nothing compared to WoW’s market, consider that WoW’s western audience accounts for merely five-million subscribers, making AoC’s player-base almost 20% of WoW’s. That’s not bad for a game with relatively poor reviews out-of-the-gate.

No fear for Blizzard, however, because why shake up their cash cow when they can simply implement the changes that WoW should see in another game? Be that game World of Warcraft 2, World of Starcraft, or an MMOG based on some other IP, Blizzard isn’t dumb. If anything, they’re smart financially, and saving design evolution for their next MMOG means they’ll have a game that caters to the legacy crowd of MMOGs as well as to the many who want to move on.

So what does that mean for WoW’s lifespan? Given the development time for any successful MMOG these days, we can expect to see WoW live on for at least another three years, which means three more expansions before WoW either goes dark, or begins seriously merging servers to prevent a ridiculous population drop. That three years, of course, doesn’t take into consideration any spontaneous MMOG successes, because while games like Warhammer will undoubtedly take a chunk of WoW’s player-base, there could very well be an underdog or two that come out of nowhere.

In closing, Warcraft isn’t sustainable in the sense that it will live on to fulfill Tobold’s optimistic suggestion of 10 expansions, a level 160 level cap, et al. Like the games that came before it, WoW will die out, and all one’s hours of playing and character progression will amount to a number of fond memories, some new online friends, but not much else. That’s the name of the game - a game that WoW will continue contributing to for a couple years to come, before it goes the same way as Everquest, Meridian 59, and the slew of MU*s that came before them.

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