This month’s Monthly Musing is about the replay value of games, and what it is about the games you love that brings you back to play them over and over. It’s not a shock then that so far most people, like Yojimbo, have written very positive posts about why they enjoy replaying their favorite games. Why would these posts be anything other then positive though? I mean why would you ever replay a game if you weren’t going to have a positive experience with it again? The entire idea seems foolish doesn’t it?

Well what if the only way to actually experience a game and progress further in it is to replay it over and over until you no longer have a positive replay experience. A game like this would essentially force you to be addicted to it in order for you to replay it enough times to progress further and experience the entire game. Why would anyone play a game like this though? It doesn’t sound like any fun does it? Well millions and millions of people play a game exactly like this every day, and it’s name is World of Warcraft.





What is “Forced Addiction”?
By now most people have heard about how World of Warcraft (WoW) is an addicting game. You can read countless blogs, editorials, and news stories about how much people play this game and how it has enhanced or ruined their lives. I myself have written an entire series of blogs about how I was completely addicted to WoW for 2 ½ years of my life. This addiction that I and most people experience is “self-induced addiction”, in which a person becomes addicted because of how much they love playing the game. This is not what I want to talk about today. I want to discuss the “forced addiction” the game imposes on its’ player base.

“Forced Addiction” is an addiction imposed on a player in order for that player to actually be able to experience the entire game. In other words in order to actually progress farther in the game you have to play it over and over and over again. This is a very different type of addiction then the “self-induced” addiction you typically here about related to WoW. When most people discuss their addiction to the game they talk about what they love about it that keeps them coming back to it. This forced addiction gets kind of pushed to the side because no one likes to talk about it. They don’t like to admit that to actually experience most of the game that have to constantly play it over and over. This “forced addiction” is very real though, and a majority of WoW players have all experienced it.





How to Experience all of WoW
Now World of Warcraft is a MMORPG and as everyone knows there is no actual ending to these types of games, so you are probably asking yourselves how do you even define “progressing farther to experience the entire game.” Well there are really 3 different parts to the WoW experience. There is the open world itself, the player vs. player arenas, and the instanced dungeons. The open world is where a majority of the game takes place as a person progresses their character from level 1 to the highest level, which right now is level 70. Now this leveling process takes about 40-60 hours, and in that time a person most likely gets to experience the entire open world. After playing for 40-60 hours and reaching the highest level you would think the game would pretty much be over. You would be very wrong. For most players the game is only just beginning at this point.

Once a player reaches level 70 they can begin to experience the other 2 parts of the game, the PVP arenas and the instanced dungeons. The PVP arenas are where players can meet to battle one another in team combat and these are all immediately open to all level 70 players. This leaves the only other part of the game, which is not completely open to everyone, the instanced dungeons. The instanced dungeons are really where the meat of the WoW end game is and when most players discuss progressing in the game they are referring to these dungeons. It’s these same dungeons however that are the cause of the “forced addiction” I have been referring to so far.





How Instanced Dungeons cause “Forced Addiction”
You can pretty much think of the instanced dungeons as levels in a game. You progress through each one over the course of about an hour or two, and along the way you fight multiple mini-bosses until the final boss confrontation at the end of the dungeon. These dungeons can be divided up and grouped into levels of difficulty and skill. The problem is that in order to progress to the higher level dungeons you have to have beaten all of the lower level dungeons and collected the appropriate gear from them. Only when you have collected all the best gear from the lower level dungeons is your character strong enough to attempt the medium level dungeons. Then only once you have beaten and collected all the gear from the medium level dungeons can you attempt the higher level dungeons. This is where the “forced addiction” is introduced.

The problem is that if you simply run through a lower level dungeon there is no guarantee you will receive the appropriate gear from that dungeon. That means you have to play through the dungeon over and over and over again until the gear piece you need drops from one of the bosses. An entire gear set typically consists of 8 pieces; a chest piece, belt, leggings, helmet, boots, gloves, shoulder pads, and wrist piece. You can not progress to the next level of dungeons until you collect all 8 pieces. The problem is that a single dungeon only contains 1 or 2 of these gear pieces in them, so you probably have to play through 5-6 different dungeons in order to be able to get all 8 pieces.

On average you have to run a dungeon 5-10 times to be able to get all the gear pieces from that dungeon, so if you have to run 5-6 dungeons, 5-10 times each, at 2-3 hours a play through, you are talking between 50-180 hours of play time. Typically it falls more toward the 180 hour range, trust me on this. This is just the time required to obtain the 8 gear pieces that make your character strong enough to move on to the next level set of dungeons. Once you get your new gear set you are all excited because you finally get to experience all of these new dungeons and see more of the game itself. Then the grind starts all over as you attempt to get a whole new set of 8 gear pieces to move onto the next level of dungeons.

This is pretty much what the entire “end game” of WoW consists of. You run dungeons over and over again trying to get gear to be able to move on and experience more of the game itself. In other words, the game is forcing you to be addicted to it in order to actually experience all of the game. If you aren’t addicted and you don’t play through the dungeons over and over again, then you will never get to move onto the higher dungeons and see all there is to see in WoW. According to Blizzard only about 15% of the game’s population have ever played through every single dungeon in the game. Do you know how absurd that is that not even a quarter of the people who play the game have been able to experience the entire game after is has been out for 4 years.



You might be addicted to WoW if ...


What makes WoW’s “forced addiction” different then other games'?
Now I want to be very clear that the “forced addiction” I am referring to in WoW is strictly in regards to the gearing up system that’s required to experience the game. I have not even discussed the progression in individual and team skill required to progress in the game. I haven’t done this because every single game ever made, whether it’s a simple platform game, or an in-depth RPG, requires the player to improve his skill to progress further in the game. WoW is no different then any other game in this regard, and hence is not the focus of my “forced addiction” argument. What makes WoW different is the fact in order to progress you have to replay it over and over and over in order to simply obtain the gear required to move onto the higher levels.

I want to use an example to illustrate my point, and in this case I want to use Metroid. In Metroid you have to go from level to level and at the end of each one you have to defeat a boss in order to obtain a new weapon (ex: the Ice Beam) that helps you move onto and defeat the next level and the next boss. Well imagine if the boss only dropped this new weapon 10% of the time, and if he didn’t you had to start the level from scratch and play through it all over again with the hope that when you defeat the boss this time he’ll drop the weapon. With only a 10% rate of dropping the weapon that means for every 10 times you play through the level the boss will only drop it once. Only then can you move onto the next level. Now imagine having to do this for all 6 or 7 levels of the game. Can you imagine how tedious this would be. Well that’s exactly what it’s like to play World of Warcraft.





Finally the Conclusion to this LONG POST
So the point of this month’s Monthly Musing was to talk about the games you love to replay and why you love to replay them, but I went in the opposite direction and instead discussed the darker side of replaying a game. I brought to light the “forced addiction” that World of Warcraft imposes on it’s players. No game in my opinion should ever require you to replay it for tens if not hundreds of hours in order to actually progress and experience the entire game. At some point it stops being fun and it starts becoming an addiction. This is one of the many reasons I quit the game, and why I will never go back.