Browser Games Forum 2008

I was visiting the BGF 2008 last weekend and boy, I was in for a surprise. The conference started 2 years ago and was merely a hobbyist show. Browser games (or BG for short) were considered not being real games, they were undervalued by game developers and publishers alike until recently.

This time some big news overshadowed the conference. Not only did Bigpoint, one of the biggest BG publishers, sold their majority for 100 Million US$ to NBC Universal, but also Gameforge, the other "biggie" announced a planned turnover of 100 million euro ... per year.

The result: many investors and high class business angels flocked the show floor to find the next big thing. BG's did seem to have grown up, but it was confirmed later on in the individual sessions. Let me summarize some of them.

BigPoint

Heiko Hubertz,founder and Ceo of BigPoint showed some market data which showed impressive numbers and business models. They are a lot more open about numbers now since the sale, as it seems they now can proof that the BG market is serious and growing fast. Reaching over 40 million players and doing millions of Euros revenue with micropayments seemed far away a couple of years ago. Heiko pointed out that the market seem get saturated so that budgets of games rise and games need to be found to distinguish yourself.

Travian GmbH

One of the starters of the BG market started off with a big “nono”. Siegfried Müller, founder and Ceo of Travian GmbH showed details how their first attempt to work with a publisher failed and listed some facts how the legal case was going because of this. And they showed names as well, not something you want to do unless you are a player --- which they are, but still not something I would do.

Travian is their main game which has been launched impressively into 48 countries in 40 different languages (!). Their company has grown to 70 people, all without any investors or banks. This shows how organically a BG company can grow with their customers. Travian is running on 850 Linux servers in various hosting locations and is one of the rare products also launched in China and Asia. They didn’t tell any revenue though but I know it’s up to several millions per year.

If you check one of their Travian sites you can see the number of players and click through each of the 40 countries to add them up. Calculate 3-7% paying users and you might get an impression of their monthly revenue.

Nexxter

Tung Nguyen from Nexxter showed some examples from China were the market grew over night to extradimensional proportions. Within 2 years the market for BG’s grew to millions of players and revenue. The market seem to copycat the German model and the opinion about the German companies are high due to this. The market data he showed was sure impressive. Entering the market however is still difficult and just a few publishers managed to do so.

Cipsoft GmbH

Not really a BG publisher but they run the oldest client based MMO from germany: over 12 years in operation their Tibia RPG is still running healthy and well and generating over 6 million Euros revenue per year with 135.000 users per day. They have a mix of subscription and micropayment model and it seems to work for them: they boast over 40 employees and are preparing their next game launch.Their mobile version of the game is also working quite well and seems to be the first real mmo on mobile devices.

Team Europe

Just a recent announced company to have several Web 2.0 companies underneath, among them BG’s. It wouldn’t interest me a bit but the founders are some of the high end web 2.0 investors on the German market, having exited half a dozen times successfully and are invested in over 50 internet companies. They play with the idea to get the reach to the customer by combining several internet companies under one roof.

Lukasz Gadowski showed the audience how to found, finance, grow and exit an internet company. The talk was very investor specific and might be too much for young BG student teams, but nevertheless showed very well the investor perspective behind their plans.

Smaller Ventures

There were a lot of very small teams on the conference. I talked to a couple and was very impressed. One student has a game out there with over 100.000 players, but only in Germany. He is living from his venture and wasn’t really planning to internationalize it although a lot more money would be there. He is having fun with his community and game, "why wasting it for going big".

Another team has an online soccer BG in Germany with more than 100.000 regular customers and do plan to go international, but don’t want to loose their focus on their home community.

Check this: two examples of very small teams having reached millions of players and boasting 100k online, playing customers. Now extrapolate this to the big players in Germany and you might have over 100 games just being operated in Germany, some of them international, but most of them profitable.

The big players once announced that Germany has a 60% market share in Browsergames … Worldwide! I do believe them because just adding up the numbers and comparing to other countries does show this.

However: other countries don’t sleep. I noted a lot of new BG’s in the eastern states, Benelux and other countries as BG’s allow one thing: to publish worldwide without the need of a publisher. Did you notice that the big top game publishers seem to ignore that market?

There were talks from BG operators from UK, Korea, USA and Russia. Basically they said all the same: Large market, huge growth, but they are all in awe of the German publishers.

So there it is. One gaming market in the hands of Germany and no one knows it. It reminded me what I was saying to the German development community 4 years ago: The single player market will be niche in a few years, you need to go online.

How many of those developers showed up on the BGF conference? Less than 4 …

So I am looking forward to the BGF 2009, I be tit will be a lot larger, with a lot of new big players out there, and the investors and business angels will flock around the rising stars and talking real money.

How Game Interface Comforts can destroy MMO's

Community is about communication, that’s obvious right? Richard Bartle in his book "Designing Online Worlds" clearly defines the stages of communities and one of them stands out: community of interest. The members share a common interest and hook up together.

In a MMO it is important that players get connected real soon as they meet people and start friendships. This will be the major reason why they stick to the game later on. If you fail designing your game to support this people will leave with less resistance compared to players who already met friends.

Now lets see what starting players communicate most: questions either about the game mechanics or the game content. The first is quickly resolved when they learned the game and its functions, the second however never stops unless they played through the game's content.

Players ask where a mob is, how a quest is being solved or simply if people want to help them for particular content. Other players will gladly help or players with the same quests team up as they share the same interest. And quickly bonds are forged and friends are met. To design your game to enhance meeting people is key to build up a strong bonded community so people won't leave the game behind easily.

Now game designers think in game mechanics, not in community mechanics. That’s the first mistake they do and unfortunately the negative feedback is coming very late to correct it.

Wrong game mechanics get immediate feedback and correction is mostly easy. Community building mistakes are much harder to read and to analyze.

 

Lets look at an example. Warhammer Online (WAR) has the tome of knowledge and an intelligent map. Both will tell you where to go for each quest and what to do exactly. In fact the map marks the areas of quests you accepted and also tells you which quest to finish in that region. That eliminates most of the community connecting questions people will ask. That is the number one reason why the chat is so silent in WAR besides the chat interface design.

The consequence: people will not find online friends as easily as in other games. In other words the user interface comforts is limiting the community growth of the game.

Note that World of Warcraft does not support any kind of that feature but there are add ons who do that. But their use is entirely optional and you need to install an Add On to make it work, a major obstacle for starting players. As soon as those players have advanced knowledge they are fit to use it, but at that point they met enough people online to have connected and stay.

So listen designers: carefully consider your game design what it does to community growth and stickiness, not only in term of game mechanics.

Gstar Coverage

I can't read Korean but their coverage of the GStar KGC Konference is up for most talks, among them mine:

Teuts Talk on ThisisGame

Some of the slides are pictured too

Future Interfaces

Minority report sparked the new generation of touch interfaces, based on research art various US universities and research sites. The prototypes usually were slow, even the windows tablet Bill Gates showed wasn't really up to the performance. This new one however showed how far they progressed so that they are close for us to experience:

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Gstar Seoul - Korea

I am being invited to the GStar show in Seoul next week to talk about the European MMO market and its differences to the Asian. I nearly canceled it but was too intrigued to travel to the future of online gaming. The Korean market seems years ahead of us and their experiments in online games, social networks and online advertising are too interesting for me to pass.

Imagine: Korea has over 3500 development companies doing online games. I guess that’s more than all games development companies combined in USA and Europe. Their problem is market saturation and they need expansion space.

Until today they haven’t learned how to enter foreign markets, as we haven’t learned to enter the Asian markets. Now what would happen if they learn how to do successful games in their market and ours? With their experience, development power and money they would swamp and conquer the online market here. Blizzard beware, there is a huge attack incoming!

I try to get as many impression as I can and share them with you. If you know any specific game you heard about but isn’t well known here let me know and I check it out over there.

PC Gaming is Dead - NOT -

Console sales are up, console game sales are up, they will brake world records this christmas as over 90% of them are sold during this period. From history I know that in the last 2 years of a console life cycle the hardware will sell as many units as they sold in the first 3 years. 

Thats worrying a lof of PC games developers who didn't get their foot in the console door as the unitsales of console games are millions instead of hundres of thousands as on the PC.

But do not worry. For one console games are a bitch to develop, its very expensive. Thats the key to PC games: dvelopment is much easier and flexible, but of course the PC platform sucks as its a moving platform compared to the stable hardware of consoles.

But don't fret, the discussion that PC games are dead is repeating itself every 5-6 years when the console lifecycle is at its height. It never happened though and it won't change as far as my 20 years experience goes. And I heard this discussion 3 times already.

First: the console will show its age end of 2009 and too much software on the shelf will limit sales of the multi million dollar budget games. Additionally the hit games of 2005-2008 will be on the shelf for half the price hurting sales of new developments. And as the platform doesn't change the games are still in perfect shape to be sold.

At that time the PC will be more advanced than the console generation and offers more power to experiment with game content. The consoles will be pretty much limited at that point.

Additionally the new console generation will be anounced to developers and publishers and to be the first on the platform at launch they have to start 2 years ahead ... that means 2009. As the investment in those launch titles is very high the key teams will abandon the current generation of the consoles or move the development to "cheap" locations, lessening the quality. During that time the risk of publishing a new multi million dollar game is so high that experienced publishers will stick to sequels. As we know sequels never sell better than the original on the same platform. All this together will drop the console market to its knees and will put the kiss of death on them as soon as the new generation launches.

What happens to the PC meanwhile? We will see new games, genres, and indy development taking place which makes the PC ideal for a lot fo game types. When the console shelf space is flooded with budget software and sequels the PC shows where the impulses comes from.

So the PC never dies. The trap you can enter is if you do what everyone else does. No one is interested in a RTS when you can't beat Blizzard or EA's frenchises. If you can't don't do it. Online is key and a lot of niches are still open. Think different, look at the large picture of the games market, not on genres and games which are already on the shelf. Think counter intuitive. If you currently see a large wave of good shooters don't develop them. Look at what is missing on the shelfs but sold in the past 5 years. Thats key to your product strategy.

For more information check out the talk I did years ago on the industry life cycle on www.teut.net

Game Settings that don't sell

I have been teaching a lot of students recently and one topic came up again which I think should be common knowledge, but unfortunately it isn't: Which themes or settings in games do not sell? Which settings do sell well?

I am a big fan of "CNN" compatible  settings, in other words all settings people are used to from watching big TV are fine for games usually, but remember that popularity varies from continent to continent. As settings are very broad it is easier to tell developers which do NOT sell. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule...

If you have access to sales data reaching back for years you can verify this easily:

Underwater doesn't sell

It is a common misconception that underwater sells. It usually doesn't with the exception of submarine simulations, and even the simulation genre is pretty dead (Flight sims aside). It is a sexy setting, feels like space sims but with more interesting possibilities. But somehow people do not feel well underwater. It is a surounding not many of us are comfortable or experienced with. If we dive we usually have our eyes closed or the view range is limited. We mostly know underwater from TV documentaries.

Not feeling comfortable is key here to the setting. People simply like their natural habitat more than underwater. So my recommendation is if you plan to place your game underwater: don't.

Wild West doesn't sell

The classic western theme either from hollywood or the european vision of it doesn't work. I don't know exactly why but somehow it seems the wild west is a part of american history the americans tend to forget as it wasn't very civilized during those times. The romantic view we europeans have due to books or movies is very misleading. Hint for germans: Karl May educated a whole generation about the Wild West which doesn't work for americans.

I think the setting is also pretty old. In my younger times Wild West was cool, as were pirate films. Nowadays a younger generation of  kids like the setting but pretty fast loose interest when Bruce Willis, Batman or Spiderman replaces their picture of heroes. 

Pirate settings did fall into the same category but the recent hits of pirate movies did push sales in this setting a bit. But putting the movie license aside a pure pirate settings is a bad idea if not taken into the correct historical setting.

Sci Fi usually doesn't work

Thats a suprise for many but hard core Sci Fi usually doesn't work. Strangely Sci Fi has many facettes where some of them work quite well. If your setting is close to current living but with a touch of future technology it works very well. If you reach far out into the future the likelyhood that your game works is lessened considerably.

Some years ago Fantasy would have been listed here as well, but Lord of the Rings educated a world what classic fantasy is all about followed by the recent hits of books like Harry Potter or Eragon did their job as  well. Even my mom now knows what an Elf is.

With Sci Fi there hasn't been a major hit recently to educate the masses. Star Wars is long time ago and Clone Wars is aimed at a young audience. But even Star Wars is merely a shakespeare story in another setting, so it works. 

This setting is the only one which you can use if you follow some rules that you aren't too far off from human experience. 

Many readers might not agree with Sci Fi being a bad choice but think about it: why does Call of Duty outsell Unreal or Prey?

One link ....

http://fantasticcontraption.com/

Enough said. Try it.

Teut's Trivia

Teut Weidemann appears in a classic game of the 80's. Can you name it? Win a prize! (and no it's not MUDS, where is he appearing too)

In case you missed it ...

Some weeks ago I was invited to be interviewed by Chaos Radio Express, a podcast, to talk about the game industtry in general. So if you missed it here it is: (german language)

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cre089.html

WAR Patch 1.01 - Fix and Break

If you ever wanted to know how complicated it is to operate a MMO you just touched the surface. Its a huge task to operate the servers, the customers, the billing, and the development.

The development has to service at least 3 versions of the game at once. The current live version might need emergency patches (exploits, crashes). The current patch you are working on is another and is very near the live version. And there is the future large patch you are working on, new features and expansions. Can you imagine how complex it is to merge those versions to make a stable patch? Its tough and to be honest if there wasn't Perforce I wouldn't know how this can be done.

But developing a new version is one side. The other side is worse: Testing is a nightmare. A MMO is a complex game, so if you change fundamental things how do you test the beast? It's nearly impossible to test all sides of a live MMO and it gets worse the older the game gets: complexity is added nearly every month.

So it is natural that bugs slip by, some hidden ones and some obvious ones where you ask yourself: why did they overlook this one?

A blog has some aspects listed of the recent Warhamemr Online Patch 1.01, and if you don't know this blog check it out, its pretty nifty: Keen & Graev's Gaming Blog

Holy Warriors Guild Meeting

Holy Warriors is my World of Warcraft guild. One of our members organized a guild meeting some time ago. I thought not many people would go but as it turned out over 40 people showed up. We definately want to repeat this! We had fun, lots of fun (and drinks ...)

If you look at the mix of members in our guild we have everything: Young, middle aged, short, tall, male, female.

Check some pictures of the meeting in my picasa album: Holy Warrios Guild Meeting

Before we met I had  predicted that a guild meeting usually causes "Guild Drama" and one or more members will quit shortly after it. At first it didn't look that way. Many online friends became real friends, it bonded us together. But shortly after that some people did leave the guild, for various reasons. Strangely enough most of the members who quit did NOT attend the guild meeting. Coincidence?

Shutting down MMO's

Usually MMO's aren't shut down within the first years. I was surprised to see news about Codemasters shutting down one of theirs. Its all due to license problems. But how shortsighted is this to license a MMO for just a short period of time? Some business guy didn't pay attention and mixed up retail games with MMO's.

Note: Ultima Online is still running after 12 years of operation, with profits I might say. Sometimes if a game shows its age (like Meridian did) it might get shut down, but a game only online for two years? (RF Online was launched november 2007)

Western View on MMO Population

There are serveral statements from important people among the MMO creators that a launch of a new MMO doesn't hurt their player base. There is Age of Conan which didn't hurt World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings was unimpressed too. Now Warhammer Online shipped and neither games seem to be impressed or are loosing players, still WAR claims to have 500.000 players only weeks after launch.

Why are people worried about players moving? Because they see their own view playing their favourite MMO and maybe switching with their friends. What they seem to forget is how many MMO's are out there. We see our western created MMO's as the prime of the market, but to be honest they aren't. Measured on population there are MMO's in Asia which are far bigger than World of Warcaft. If you count non fantasy MMO's too the population of Warcraft seem to be small compared against the playerbase of for example Neopets Online.

There are many fantasy MMO's free to play out there too. And every week I am stumbling over more. Many of them are localised versions of Korean MMO's, some aren't. Still there are so many free massive online games out there that you might wonder why they didn't hurt the population of WoW, WAR or AoC. 

The answer is simple: target audience. Casual Gamers vs. Hardcore vs. "Hey I am new here, what is a MMO?". I heard once a statement from Blizzard that many of their WoW gamers claim that WoW is their first game they have played. Thats a big statement and worth considering why WoW attracts those people. Some hints: WoW runs on old machines, its very easy to use and explains everything you need to play it. At level 1 you need 3 buttons and a mouse, thats all. Compare that to the complexity in WAR or AoC.

Anyway, my summary is simple: no new MMO launch will hurt the player base of an existing MMO much. If a playerbase is diminishing look for other reasons.

WAR(hammer) Online, MMO in silence

As some of you know I am a WoW addict. Yes, I admit it. As my main character is level 70 with full T6 epic I got really nothing much to do in the current edition of WoW. You don't know what I am talking about? Then this article might be not for you.

Anyway, after having reached my goals of all important  items for my level 70 priest (healer)  I got interested for a while in my old character, a hunter. After some "twink runs" and other instances he got decent equip. My raid invited him once as we had too many healers and I reached top spots in the damage meter. So he isn't quite as bad as twinks used to be.

So its natural that I needed some small distraction from WoW. One weekend my girlfriend and I got bored from playing WoW  (yes she plays MMO's, what a woman! And yes she looks good :). So I rushed to a local game store before it closed and bought two copies or Warhammer Online (WAR for short) just to test the 30 day free trial.

Yes, WAR is good, but it is very different from WoW. The first thing you'll notice is that its not as deep as WoW. Less details, a lot of shortcuts. For example when you accept a quest your map will show you exactly where to go. You can even click on the quest marking of the map and a tome will open explaining you the quest. Its questing for noobs. In WoW there is always a lot of talk in the chat about "where can I find XYZ" or "Anyone want to help with quest ABC?". The intelligent map in WAR got rid of that. 

Result: Silence. Utter silence. No one talks. Its strange. 

Yes, if you group or raid there is talk but even then less than in WoW. As many things got "noobyfied" in WAR there isn't a lot to talk about, not even boss tactics. Tank and spank, thats it most of the time. No special talents needed, strategies etc.

Silence. Thats strange for a MMO isn't it. Don't get me wrong, WAR is a good game but appeals to a different crowd. If you like a complex MMO with deep story, tons of stuff and tactics to discover and lots of things to do go for WoW. If you love PvP, large scale castle sieges and tons of stuff to kill go for WAR. Its hard to compare these two but luckily WAR isn't competing with WoW.

The major concern I havewith WAR  is questing. Its boring as hell, all quests are identical: go A, kill B, collect C. Yes, in WoW many quests are like that but looking into the expansion Wrath of the Lich King the quality of questing has risen tenfold. Even compared to questing in Burning Crusade the WAR experience is lacking.

Additionally my major concern is that questing isn't necessary at ALL in WAR. You don't need to. Go PvP instead, you get more experience for loosing battlefields than for 3 quests! "But the drops and equipment ..." you say. Well, more PvP means more faction level which grants you access to equipment far superior to all quest items or drops. Believe me, don't quest, go PvP, its faster in levelling too.

So WAR is a PvP levelling experience and it does it well. Go for it if you love PvP and specially open PvP or castle sieges. They rock.

Want an experience like a single player RPG but the added social component and end game raids? Go for WoW.

Blogging on iPhone

I am trying blog software for my iPhone and finally found one which works. This means I can update ms blog when I am on travel which is the only time I can actually write here.
So watch this space for more frequent updates.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Sorry for absence

I am pretty busy lately and couldn't update my blog as often as I liked to. I am not Tobold who can update daily, sometimes more than once per day.

If you are interested what I am up to check my download site teut.net for new downloads of my talks (latest talks are on the bottom, yeah, I might want to make that upside down)

Monopolism: Little Changes - Great Effect

Sometimes little changes in WoW go unnoticed until they hit the crowds. There is no uproar or even bad comments about this small little change: disenchanting items of a certain level now need a certain skill level to do so. So you need skill 225 to disenchant epics.

Whats the deal? First many players had disenchant twinks. They sent all their greens and blues they don't need and aren't soulbound to him to be disenchanted, selling the essences. You only need skill one to do so, in fact you can skill all the way up to 75 by simply disenchanting stuff.

Many power gamers with tons of epic armor sets in their bank are sometimes reskilling an easy to learn skill like herbalism or mining for disenchanting. They clean up their bank, sell the nexus or essences, and reskill to the original. Expensive? Worth it.

Now thats history with the new patch coming in.

What does it mean for gameplay: you need a good enchanter with you on raids, otherwise you loose considerable money for BOP items you don't need. For big raids never a problem, but for random raids? You trust ONE enchanter to keep all the essences and distribute them afterwards? Not me. I can see some bad stories coming up here.

The major point however is this one: the enchanter now controls a monopole. Let me explain: Blacksmiths need ore. So they skill mining and supply themselves, or can buy the supplies from another miner or the auction house, easy.

An Alchemist need herbalism to find the herbs he needs for potions, or someone else does it.

What about Enchanters. They have both in ONE skill. They are the ONLY ones who can make their raw material with the same skill they do the echantments.

This means basically that essences will get VERY expensive as they are the only ones to create them, and control who gets them.

The price will skyrocket. Most essences in the auction house are from disenchant twinks or random raids who sell their essences from their runs. This will be reduced considerably as not all random runs have Enchanters with them. In fact not very many do enchantment anymore as the skill doesn't earn enough money as herbalism or alchemy does. So essences will get rare, prices will skyrocket.

The current price drop in nexus crystals for example is temporary. Its fueled by the Burning Crusade expansion as new enchants are intoduced who no longer need nexus crystals. But see this: when those are being used and supply are short level 60's will need nexus again, and prices will stablize, but at a much higher price than before.

All this could be prevented or made "fair". Let the Enchanter disenchant in the trade window. Of course BLizard never implemented this as it will be abused to its extreme. Thats the primary reason Blizard doesn't allow it. Let me give Blizard a suggestion, free, I won't charge for it :)

Let enchanters create power orbs which have x charges. They can sell those to other players. Orbs have the power to disenchant one item per charge. Orbs can be made with various levels for the item levels in question.

Simple. Effectice, prevents the abuse Blizard fears. But destroys the market value of enchanters.

I made my choice. I am skilling my enchanter now. I want to be part of the monopole. Lets make money with the system ^^

My T1 Item XYZ doesn't drop!

(replace XYZ with any item you are waiting for)

Sereral MC or BWL runs moan about drop rates of certain items. Many classes wait for their T2 legs to drop at Ragnaros or the Priests for their epic quests, or the hunters for theirs. It depends on raid and is totally different for each which items or set items they are waiting for.

Common in these raids are the fixed raidleaders and loot masters, ie. they are usually the same person.

I will leave theory behind this on the side because it would be too technical and boring, but fact is that changing the raidleader and lootmaster BEFORE ANYONE enters the instance will change the loot composition. It has been tested and proven by some guilds. You can't predict loot this way, thats not possible, but you can increase the random factor.

So if you are in one of those raids where certain items never drop simply do this:
Load the person you want to be the loot list initiator (lets call him LLi) first, give him lead and he should give himself the loot master. Give the raidleader an (a) to allow him loading the rest of the raid.

Stay with the loot master until the first boss kill. After that he can give back the lead and loot master to the real raidleader.

Change this person as often as possible. Remember which person seems to drop the best loots and retest. Let him be that LLi for three runs and see if thats consistent.

You don't believe this? Let me give you some examples.

We only have seen the hunter epic quest item (the leaf) in Major Domus chest for a long time. Priests were pretty demoralized by this. So we changed the LLi and the priest epic quest got back to its normal 50/50 chance and all our priests now got their nice epic staff now.

The hunters never ever saw their T1 helmet drop, only ONCE in over 20 MC runs. We changed to another LLi and we got lucky: he pulled out the hunter T1 helmet from Garr. Everytime this one person is the LLi we get a high chance for hunter items (and some other classes, but the rareness of the hunter items was obvious).

We have one mage as LLi. Everytime he is raidlead and loot master we get a much higher percentage on random T1 drops than any run before. We usually found none, one or two. When he is the LLi we find 5-8 on every run. Our guild bank is pretty rich now because it allows us to sell those excess items as most classes now got their non bound T1 items full.

Before you dish this article as "can't be true" please try it yourself. As I said its IMPORTANT that the LLi is loaded first and enters, if possible, the instance first. If you are interested in details why this is happening let me know and I can post an article about the theory behind this.

Burning Crusade - Bad Design?

As mentioned earlier I play Burning Crusade (BC), the expansion of World of Warcraft, since alpha. I play it with mixed feelings, not only because I have to do it all over again when it launches (all my data will be erased), but because I feel it has design flaws.

An expansion should expand the universe it needs to tie into the existing world. It needs to expand on concepts which where successful in the first one. Currently when I play BC I have the feeling of playing 2 games in one, separated, not even joined.

It starts with the fact that you have to enter BC through a Dark Portal. You are being teleported to it. It continues on the world map: while the two contents where visible on the map and a click apart the new one appears as a separate entitiy outside of the old continents.

And my feeling of separation continues with the details. Let me give one example. If you need resources for your skill (enchanting as an example) you need resources found by disenchanting stuff of the level of the enchantment. No biggy here. In BC you do the same, but if you skill over 300 the "old" reagents you needed are forgotten. You expect you might use the high reagents like nexus crystals for at least some enchantments, but you don't. Its like a cut. Over the skill of 300 you need new ones ONLY found in BC.

What about the guilds who saved their valuable nexus for their enchantments they desparately need to beat the instances? They are now placed like in the middle of nowhere. The effects are already being felt in the old world: nexus prices dropped from like 25g+ down to 15g in the past 2 weeks. They won't be needed anymore as the new enchants are of course better.

Lets take a look at mining. You mine ore and smelt them to metal bars. Many skills need those rare metals to build fantastic weapons and armor. So I expected that the most sought after bars "Elementium bar" will be used for some high end items in BC.

But no. You don't need them at all. You only need rare metals found - you guessed it - in BC exclusively. In case you don't know: to smelt elementium bars you have to gather 10 arkane crystals (another item whic BC doesn't need at all) and smelt the elementium ore -which you can only find as an epic drop inside the Black Wing Lair. On top of that you only learn to smelt elementium by mind controlling a gnome inside BWL. My raid guild collected a lot of these to prepare to build the super powerful weapons.

The whole design of the dependencies was awesome in WoW. If you wear such a sword of power you are a hero. You worked for it, a raid guild worked very hard for it.

When BC comes the awesome weapon becomes a worthless toothpick. Your elementium ore becomes worthless, already dropping in price form 500g down to 120g, and no one wants it.

Why did Blizzard do this? Why at least could some rare materials not being used for BC items? Elementium Ore/Bars, nexus and arcane crystals, all worthless soon? The wealth we worked for so hard is now beaten to death by BC. Is that fair? No it isn't.

Of course there are exceptions, and VERY bad ones too. Dreamfoil is the most expensive herb you can find. It is needed by raid guilds for all sorts of potions they need to beat MC, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx. Replacing it by a new one would make sense right?

No, they did break their rule. Some of the high end potions need dreamfoil still, like the Super Healing Potion. Why did they do this just to dreamfoil and not to the other materials I mentioned?

Ask the designers. I don't know, but somehow they want to create a two class community: the ones with BC and the ones without. The separation will be so intense that people might be forced to buy BC just because otherwise WoW wouldn't be a complete game.

From experience of other expansions of MMOG's (like the original Everquest) Blizzard doesn't need to worry about selling the expansion to their customer base: over 80% will buy it anyway, thats the number each MMOG showed when launching expansions. Hell, there is Guildwars, a game only based around making money with expansions as they don't even charge a monthly fee.

What does this mean for us? Throw out your valuable stuff, sell now. Empty your raid guild bank and sell that crap, it will be worthless 3 month after BC shipped. Who needs a +15 resist enchant (needing 2-3 nexus crystals) anyways if there is a better one someone from BC can do to your item?

Of course there might be another behaviour coming in: as the high end material becomes cheap more players can actually afford those enchants or weapons, armor whatever. We will see.

I personally don't like the separation they put into those new skills. In case you want to check your skill and what material it needs check http://www.thottbot.com, click beta and look up your trade skill on the left. Not all recipes has been found yet, but the glimpse you get will tell you what items will loose value, and which don't.

I wished Blizzard would have tied in everything we worked for so hard into BC in a much better way. Why not leaving Elementium (as an example) in there? For a level 70 guild its easy to beat BWL, so farming it there would be easy and fun. My bet is that BWL will be an empty haunted place soon. Bliz can turn off the BWL servers and no one would notice.

Now they simply cut the world in half. Forget what you needed in WoW, you need all new stuff and we will live in the new Outlands for a long time, as only there you will find what you need to enchant, tailor, cook or whatever you do while waiting for the PvP to tick in.