This 1Up.Com story tries to pass of World of Warcraft as the new golf — a game that some people play in part to hang out and talk shop as much as they do for the game experience itself. The only evidence for this sort of phenomenon is venture capitalist Joi Ito who apparently runs a WoW guild that includes other venture capitalists and assorted technology luminaries.
What is weird is seeing 1Up.Com quoting Joi as saying,
Warcraft is like a really, really well-designed UI for real-time, ad-hoc group collaboration and management of tons of people. The tools are really interesting because they apply to stuff that we’ll be using in the real world.
Yeah, right. The reality is that WoW’s interface is horrible for any sort of serious group work. The guild interface is atrocious — a guild is little more than a glorified private chat channel. A number of third party mods add a decent calendaring/scheduling system for group activities, but even these run up against the fact that Blizzard has done almost nothing to make group management easy or interesting.
For example, consider something as basic as items. Especially once you reach the end game, WoW is an item-focused game. Players spend hours running the same instance over and over in hopes that the item they need for their class-specific epic set will drop. And two players of identical class and level can be wildly different in power based on the items they are wearing.
And yet there is no in-game way for guilds to manage the items that they obtain from these instance raids. An obvious way to do this would be the Auction House, where players can buy and sell items. For example, a nice option would be to give guild members discounts on the selling price of items — so, for example, I could list an item as having a buyout of 20 gold, but any guild members who want it can have that at 50 percent off.
Instead, most serious guilds run a separate auction system on their guild web site — a ponderous, tedious process at best.
Similarly, not only is there no native in-game calendaring system to schedule group raids and other activities, there’s also no sort of in-game guild discussion forum. There is an in-game mail system, but there is no way to send a mail message that goes to all guild members. Even with the chat system it took Blizzard almost a year after WoW’s release to include something as basic as a chat logger.
As groupware, WoW simply sucks. High-level interactions occur in spite of, not because of, the features built into WoW, and many of those interactions occur outside the game at guild web sites.
Source:
Is World of Warcraft the New Golf? Jane Pickard, 1Up.Com, February 8, 2006.