How the Social Web Could Transform World of Warcraft

I've been thinking about this one for a few days now, but it seems that Will Wright and the team working on Spore have apparently been thinking about this as well. Their team is focused on RSS and sharing content. I'm looking at something slightly different.

In any case, magazines and consumers alike have long complained that there's been no real innovation in the arena of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), largely because World of Warcraft has been so crushingly successful and no one else has been able to do anything different with any success. I'd point to EVE Online as something quite different, but all the attention seems to be focused on fantasy-style gaming.

I play WoW. A lot. I know its repetitiveness all too well. I know the reputation and faction grind. I know the PvP honor/arena points grind. I'm none too happy with the fact that at level 1 you need to kill 8 pigs and at level 68 you still need to kill 8 pigs — only bigger and tougher pigs this time.

Looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King, the next WoW expansion, we'll be treated to innovations such as new hairstyles, new dances, inscriptions (which actually seem kind of cool from a gameplay perspective), as well as the first "hero" class of the game, the Death Knight. The Death Knight is a hero class seemingly only because all Death Knights start out at level 55, rather than level 1. You may have to complete a fairly difficult quest chain to be able to unlock access to a Death Knight, but that's the basic difference. Death Knights have talents and abilities like other classes, and Blizzard has to ensure that everyone doesn't switch to an overpowered hero class by balancing out what the Death Knight class can do with what all the other classes can do. So they're not going to be all that different from other classes that are already in the game.

But is that real innovation?

What if, instead, we took a step back and asked what a "hero" is and how that could be applied to WoW in a very different way. Here's the wikipedia entry for "Hero":

So a hero is judged by others as such.

What if the "wisdom of the crowd," in Web 2.0 parlance, determined who was a hero in WoW?

In this scenario, an individual player would be able to achieve "hero" status or make the leap from regular to hero class by means of the social context of the game. This isn't rep grinding with a faction, waiting for items to drop or mobs to kill that incrementally bring your faction up over time. This is tracking how you play the game, how others perceive how you play the game, and your "rating" (for lack of a better word than one that already exists in WoW parlance) on this scale rises and falls accordingly.

You could be a great player, very skilled at your class, and others could rate you positively, increasing your hero ranking. You could be a total dink who rolls on plate items when you're a cloth-wearing caster, and others would rate you negatively, decreasing your hero ranking. You could be a master tailor, making items at a discount (or for free) for everyone around you, giving to the community as a whole, helping the community as a whole be more powerful and successful in the game. You'd probably get rated quite positively, making your hero rating go up. You wouldn't have to just kill things to make your hero rating go up. You could be a good (or very, very bad, if they wanted to implement a villain class) person, and over time, by winning the admiration of your community, become a hero.

I don't play City of Heroes, but I believe that the game doesn't rank your heroism (or villany) in any social (eg; among all players) context. In a game like Fable: The Lost Chapters, you play solo and your choice for "good" or "Evil" is fairly linear, again not determined by your context.

Blizzard would, of course, have to take in to account a number of factors in determining a rating:

• Griefing: it's omnipresent. People are dinks. So, if a particular user rates everyone negatively all the time, their rating carries less weight than someone who rates people both positively and negatively, or, if everything is negative all the time, is ignored.
• Friend and guild-boosting: If you only rate the same person over and over, that rating carries less weight over time. If you only rate people within your guild, that rating carries less weight over time. (Though this may be problematic as there are lots of people who don't play with others outside of their guild.)
• Balance casual with hard core players: This one's tough. If someone's online all the time and helping people out all the time, then they're going to become a hero much faster than someone who plays 4-6 hours a week. Blizz could take in to account the amount of time someone plays in a week and factor that in to the ranking system. (eg; if someone's on 4 hours a week but gets consistently positive and high ratings, that could carry as much weight as someone who's on for 40 hours a week and gets consistently positive and high ratings.)

The point is: the more you interact with and do for others, the more influence you have in the game. And that influence can, and should, be rewarded with the hero class, commensurate abilities, and status.

Some people may not like this because it relies too heavily on the social aspects of WoW. But WoW is, fundamentally, a social game. You interact in a world with others. In order to succeed in the most basic of narratives in the game, the leveling process, you're going to need some assistance sooner or later from someone. The game should tap in to that social nature deeply and build rewards not based on an endless repetition of action, but on the quality and effect of your interaction with the world.

That, I think, would be different.