End-game, World of Warcraft and challenges

Many people enjoy a bit of MMO gaming these days with the perpetual PVE challenge-reward-level_up cycle drawing them in (and keeping them paying) month after month.

One particularly interesting aspect of World of Warcraft (and most likely in Ever Quest before that) is what is known as ‘End-Game’. It is a mode of play for the hardcore players, a small fraction of the total player base, with large groups of these players combining their efforts to get the highest end gear such as armor and weapons. These players will often devote more than 40 hours per week to this task. The resulting rewards, those weapons, armor, spells and other items are just slightly superior to the items regular players get from playing but are incidentally required to beat ever greater challenges and have a certain ‘bling’ effect for that envy effect in the town square.

The time / reward ratio is extremely out of balance in favor of time but that is what keeps people playing for years.

Let’s have a look at one of the former end-game dungeons, a game map designed to be completed by 40 people within a time frame of 6 to 10 hours. High-end groups have done it with less people and considerably quicker.

The map is a set of inter-connected caves with rivers of lava. It is not entirely linear, some areas have to be traversed twice within a limited time frame before monsters respawn and make completing the dungeon either unfeasible or a lengthy and painful experience.

There are 10 bosses (pictured below), each requiring a completely different strategy to be beaten.

Let’s use the second last boss encounter as an example for a challenge hierarchy diagram. It’s the fight against that gray snake in the middle of the picture.

This is the boss encounter, broken down into the sequence of stages, simultaneous challenges within each stage and atomic challenges of key players. This is disregarding intrinsic skills, the most basic action sequences of the players that should be their general skill of handling their character, challenges which they have to overcome and master long before this encounter. The rest do their general group/monster interactions of dealing damage and healing at the points where it sais ‘raid/healers do x’.

The winning strategies are not revealed to the players. The first few raid groups to ever attempt this fight have the hardest time, applying and combining all their previously used strategies until they find what works in the different situations during the encounter. They often communicate this knowledge to the community which will try it and come out with their own strategies based on the first known strategies and sometimes keep those strats as guild internal knowledge. This gives them an edge on other guilds competing at their level of game progression. The first few guild’s strategies that were published give those guilds a record of their achievement in which the community sees value.

So there is an implicit challenge within the game and the community turns it into an explicit challenge. This strengthens the community around the game.

Stress is applied to players in the form of an implicit time limit as they cannot keep an equilibrium of forces with the monsters forever, it is a sprint effort, not endurance.

This is the second last boss encounter of what was the first end-game dungeon in the game so there is a relatively high absolute difficulty as this sort of simultaneous player interaction is difficult to achieve between 40 people.

The encounter is a timing and rhythm challenge for the magical and melee classes, a math problem for healers (they deal with accurate numbers of player health and their own mana (healing power transformed to health on their targets) and a logical puzzle for the entire raid group in finding a strategy that works for them using pattern recognition.