Sometimes, I like to play a little game with MOP’s Bree. I say I like to because the game is “Give Bree An Aneurysm,” and I don’t think she actually likes this game. To be fair, I also don’t like this game, but it is predicated upon my seeing something so incredibly dumb that it causes me physical pain, so I might as well share the load, as it were. And in this particular case, it wound up bringing up a post on the official World of Warcraft forums saying that the game had outgrown having a player economy and so we should just get rid of it.
I’m not linking the post itself because I don’t really want the player in question to get dragged for writing something that was no doubt genuinely felt and authentically intended. [Editor’s note: I saw it. Aneurysms were had. -Bree] And if you are a WoW-only player, this seems like the sort of thing that can sound reasonable. In fact, the problems brought up are indeed reasonable, actual problems with the in-game economy that WoW has. My problem isn’t with the diagnosis but with the treatment.
Since I’m opting not to share the post itself (and not quoting it simply because I am aware you all know how Google works), I will summarize the arguments contained therein. Essentially, it comes down to this:
- Gold currently exists to bankroll consumables, which exist to have something to spend gold on, and repair costs.
- Repair costs do not amount to meaningful gameplay in any fashion, and gold is not sufficiently demanded by repairs to change this.
- Crafted gear has varying tiers of quality, but anything lower than the highest tier of quality is functionally irrelevant and might as well be a failed craft.
- Crafting gameplay, despite Dragonflight’s expansion, is simplistic and unengaging at best and confusing at worst.
- Since all gold does is fuel enchantments, gems, and consumables, you pay it to people who also only need it for enchantments, gems, and consumables… but all of your actual resources are earned through other means.
Now, let me be clear about something up front. All of those point? All of the considerations of this gameplay loop and how WoW has managed its player economy over the years? These are correct. Everything from the original thread that I paraphrased above is a correct statement. There’s more you can write about these things, but the fundamental statements are correct.
Where the problem lies is with the conclusions derived from these premises. It’s almost a tired punchline at this point to say that the game seems to regard crafting as more of a legacy asset, and while there was definitely a lot of effort put into the crafting revamp in Dragonflight, it… well, didn’t work. But the solution to that problem doesn’t need to be “let’s just remove crafting as a concept and throw it all out.”
Far from having outgrown having a player economy, WoW has systematically smothered its and left it to rot on the vine. The lack of any meaningful gear options from a crafted source has meant that you usually look to crafting when the expansion is new and you need a boost to get started on raiding; it also disproportionately favors certain crafting professions that make consumables and items you’ll need throughout the expansion, rather than pieces of gear that don’t really scale or retain their value.
The thing is that this is also something that requires a deeper look at the game as a whole. It might seem like it’s something easy to fix, but one of the things that’s easy to overlook is the ways in which reward structures are tied to content. They seem like two completely separate concepts; after all, a given dungeon or raid can drop anything, right? If you want to rearrange one thing, you just change the items?
But that isn’t actually true, and gold provides a good example of it because gold has been subject to a constant stream of inflation that has become more rampant in WoW over time. Since gold is a reward from everything, lots of players have a pretty high amount of gold, and since the only real reliable gold sinks are flight paths (which are increasingly not relevant) and repair costs, gold accumulates. This means that more and more crafters need to ask for higher and higher prices to justify their sales being worthwhile, which in turn makes purchases more difficult for newer players and slows the economy.
Put more simply, if there were more reasons to spend gold on things along the way, prices would be more stable. If crafters were constantly getting new recipes and new gear to make, players could be buying it throughout the expansion, but that would also mean that “catch-up gear” from questing in new zones loses a lot of its luster. After all, why would you spend time questing in this area to get a new pair of boots if you can just buy equal boots on patch day?
It’s hard to be sure whether WoW’s ailing player economy is a result of the designers not wanting to make crafting a viable playstyle or a result of the designers seeing that most of the dedicated crafters have left and thus not wanting to invest. As I have mentioned before, I do not know what secrets are contained within the hearts of the people making design decisions in WoW, and it would be highly dubious of me to claim otherwise. But the way these systems are actually arranged does have an effect on players, and we can see it with our own eyes (especially when comparing it to economies in other MMOs).
But if you play WoW and only WoW, you might be more apt to see all of these elements as vestiges of a game that WoW no longer wants to be. And I’m not claiming that people who see this are somehow wrong; they’re correct. Crafting in the game is no longer what it was when the game launched. Heck, gone are the days when we would get new professions with an expansion; that stopped being a thing after Cataclysm (and it was barely a thing then). You can honestly say that WoW is not a game about crafting.
The trouble is that down that road leads to making the game even worse. Previously in this column I’ve written about how WoW makes you cheer for removed features, and some of those features relate to making the game feel like a world – features either trimmed or simply never implemented make the game feel ever more like a dead mall, and I can’t say that I have a whole lot of hope that The War Within will necessarily fix most of this. Even back in Cataclysm, so much of the world felt functionally dead or irrelevant, locations you never revisit once you level past them.
If you time it right, the game really will give you nothing to do but stand in a capital city until it’s time to go raiding, and that’s been a problem for years as more and more of the game gets sliced away. For all that people erroneously claim that being able to queue for dungeons killed the open world, much more damage is done by this kind of attitude, by seeing a badly maintained element of the game and deciding that you should just get rid of it altogether.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
