It's not the only way to make a better game, and everyone knows it. World of Warcraft was in decline pre-Wrath when they instituted the Achievement system, which tracks player accomplishments and statistics and allows people to record their progress towards goals if varying difficulty. This marks the first time outside your acquired gear and gold that Warcraft includes content that tracks player progression. It gives every player a little sense of achievement, which helps to blur the difference between 'good days' when significant things happen and the 'ordinary days' when you're just messing around until your raid lockout expires.
Achievements extend into every aspect of the game, guaranteeing that if you have no raid content to do that day and there is some other part of the game you like, you can attempt to increase your accomplishment in that area and earn achievement points. The points aren't actually used for anything, they have no exchange rate and are not a form of currency (yet), but they allow people to see at a glance what they've done and what they haven't, and either remind them that there are things yet to be accomplished or allow them to reminisce about all the great things they've done and how much fun they were to do.
It's a good step in the right direction, because it's building something, even if it's only a list of numbers and accomplishments. But in the playerbase there is an enormous desire to create even more. Player housing has been a feature that has been talked about since the beginning of WoW, and Blizzard themselves have discussed their desire to include it at some point:
Another small but potentially profound concept for "WoW" is player-generated housing. Gamers don't have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of "Animal Crossing," the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. "I think housing can take 'World of Warcraft' to the next level," [Jeff] Kaplan said. "I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to 'World of Warcraft' we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It's something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game." But it's not coming, he said, until it's a "Blizzard-quality feature."Blizzard occasionally brings up the feature as part of a whole package of things that they think could be introduced at some point, but nothing serious has ever been proposed. Blizzard knows that they have a limited amount of resources with which to create content, they know where the demand is to maintain their subscription rates, and things that are less about 'blowing stuff up' end up on the back burner. We still don't know if there will be a dance studio in Wrath either, for example.
Most people agree that a player housing solution for Warcraft would probably be guild housing, and having it instanced and accessible through a portal that everyone shares in major cities would limit the interactive footprint. Some players are not interested in this feature at all and are actually hostile about it, preferring that time be spent on additional raid content instead, but there is a good portion of the playerbase that would like to do player housing - or guild housing - or something, anything that allows you to create cool things instead of destroying them.
How awesome would it be to be able to create custom weapon designs and recipes? It could be implemented through epic questlines and require enormous time investments to accomplish (to limit the amount of player data created), and the personal reward for being able to create content for the game would for many people surpass all the joy obtained from conquering raid content. Some people would be thrilled beyond belief to just be able to manufacture dyes to change the color of their armor. These are not enormous changes, but to see how much reward they would provide people really demonstrates how locked down the World of Warcraft is.
Left to their own devices, everyone eventually ends up at level 80, in the highest tier gear set available, with the best weapons to use, and everyone looks the same because of it. You are the greatest warlock in all of Azeroth! ... and you look exactly like the other half-million L80 warlocks in Azeroth.
One feature that was introduced into City of Heroes recently has enormous potential for the MMO community, and rewards the creative urges of the community. The Architect edition of CoH allows players to build their own scenarios - full dungeon instances with custom mobs, dialogues, events, the whole shebang - and save them for other people to try. If you've ever paged through the fan art section of the Warcraft website you know that people in the community are incredibly creative and passionate about the game and will invest lots of time creating works to share with everyone.
Imagine unleashing this tool - the ability to build your own instances - on the public. People who are crazy about Scarlet Monestary could build their own Scarlet outposts with new bosses and dialogues. People who always wanted a murloc instance could build their own. People who said that Blizzard should include content that was skipped over in the storylines can write it out themselves, complete with dialogue, conflicts, spells, events, and scenery. If this function were made possible the results would be tremendous. It would change the game forever in a way that would immortalize it - people could play their own custom instances inside the game if they ever grew tired of the content Blizzard provided for them. People would play this content long after Blizzard grew tired of doing it themselves, the same way that some people played custom Warcraft 3 maps more than they played the provided game scenarios.
There are a lot of people who play WoW because they played Warcraft 3. For a lot of them WoW is their first and only MMO (I toyed around with CoH and Champions, and I tried Conan for a day, but WoW is really my only MMO so far). One of the best parts of Warcraft 3 was the tools it shipped with that allowed you to build your own scenarios and share them online through Battlenet. And they weren't just maps, they were fully functional scenarios. Anything and everything that Blizzard themselves used in their scenarios was handed over to the public to access if they wanted. Sure most people just created simple tower defense maps or custom terrain maps, but if they really wanted you could pause the game and zoom in on pieces and have a cut scene with dialogue, etc. There was no cap on the creativity. It was encouraged, and it flourished.
That creativity hasn't yet been enabled for World of Warcraft. I can understand why Blizzard is hesitant to enable it, because of the overhead of housing all of the created content and/or the danger of enabling it through filesharing, but if they ate the cost and provided hosting for the developed content, it would send the replay value of the game through the roof. There's even a way to include a gateway to the content in the game that doesn't conflict with the state of the world - through the Caverns of Time, where all parallel worlds are possible.
Content is King they say, and any new MMO that tries to unseat Warcraft knows that one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in competing with WoW is that there is already a huge stack of content in-game ready for players to experience. Creating the same amount of competing content in a new MMO is an expense that most new games don't even try to undertake, they release jsut as much content as they figure they need, then work hard to create more content to entertain people while the first batch is being played. But the success of the City of Heroes Architect model shows that this gap can be rapidly closed by the players themselves, and a good rating and reward system for quality content keeps it fresh and entertaining.
This is the model for future MMO's, I'm almost certain of it - because it rewards the people who want to build just as much as they destroy, and it reduces the expense of adding new content to an established universe. Blizzard has the beans to make it happen, but it remains to be seen if they have the guts. I'd like to see them return to their player-contributed roots and enable this feature for World of Warcraft.
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