The Best Donuts In The World

The other day, I had a quick exchange about donuts on Twitter with Stephan Frost, who is a producer at Carbine working on WildStar. I met him last February at Arkship, and let me just tell you.. Frost is metal. Anyway, why were we talking about donuts? And what do they have to do with MMOs?! I get there, so please bear with me!

Señor Frost tweeted out a pic of Top Pot Doughnuts to fellow donut aficionado (and WildStar music director extraordinaire) Jeff Kurtenacker. For the uninitiated, Top Pot is a donut shop of legend in Seattle, offering “hand-forged” donuts that quite simply over-deliver on any sort of promise a donut could ever make. A short tweet-versation followed, ending with several people chiming in about how great Top Pot was (or with Ahnrez explaining how Voodoo in Portland is better), and with Frost declaring he would be stuffing his suitcase full of them on the way home from PAX this fall.

Why would anyone carry donuts all the way to southern California from Seattle on a plane when they can easily go to their local grocery store to pick some up? Or pizza. I’m not ashamed to admit I once carried a pizza from Bocce on a plane back to Orlando from Buffalo. I got some looks from people in the security line, that’s for sure.

Want vs. Need vs. Common Sense

People tend to seek out the best craftsmen they can find and/or afford when they really want something of a certain quality or notoriety… or triggers one or more of their senses. For example, why would anyone order cabinets from Italy, when they have many available choices in stock at the local Home Depot? What is it that makes us do this?

The answer is that there’s something special about the product, the service or the craftsman that make consumers go out of their way to acquire them and usually pay a premium for the experience.

So, It got me thinking… can this kind of phenomenon ever really be created in an MMO economy? Could a crafted product ever set itself apart so much that folks would go out for their way to get it and pay a premium for them? Further, with other similar/competing products still perfectly available and viable?

A Way Forward?

Part of the problem is there’s a very narrow way in a virtual world to measure how “good” something is, and for it to have a relative value different from one player to the next. It usually boils down to stats that do something beneficial for us… But in the real world, we have smell, taste, texture, and more. My favorite pizza may taste like absolute garbage to you… but for me, it’s the one I’d go out of my way to acquire and pay extra for the privilege.

Currently, I feel here are too many guardrails in games today, especially surrounding economic systems. There’s often a very calculated progression path through the economy that ends up being nothing more than a time and money sink for most. We can’t really fault designers too much, because they need to account for many different types of players existing in the same space, lest they take a torch to the millions of dollars spend on making the game. Still, I wish there was more experimentation and allowance for emergent economic conditions.

In Conclusion

Can we somehow get to this point in an MMO? The point where things are either objectively or subjectively the “best” for our character, but be ok that these items are not always available or too expensive to have all the time? Can such things exist that we seek them out, and when we find them, hoard them for later because we never know when the next opportunity to procure them will come up? Are we sad when the player or vendor is out of stock on something and we don’t know when they’ll have more available?

I for one sure hope so. This is the pinnacle of merchant gameplay in my opinion, and I truly hope to see the next generation of sandboxy virtual worlds embrace some of these ideals.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Do you have any game experiences where this happened?

Which is better? Clash of Clans or World of Warcraft?

About a year ago, my good friend Katherinne started up a blog called The WoW Is In The Details. It would be dedicated to the often overlooked and amazing details Blizzard has crafted and hidden in all of the nooks and crannies of Azeroth. If you care about such things, you should really follow her blog… and if you think you don’t care about such things, you just might start after spending some time reading it!

Anyway, I still remember logging into my first character (which is still my main) for the first time back in 2004. The intro narrative was not a pre-rendered cinematic, but rather a birds-eye view, flying through the real open game world, showing other real players running around in real-time. The camera came to a rest on my character just outside of Northshire Abbey. And thus, I began my adventure in the World of Warcraft like millions (and millions) of others guys who are playing the strategy game called Clash of Clans on their phones.

Vale of Eternal Blossoms – Thunder King mural – The WoW Is In The Details
As I slaughtered kobolds for their precious candles, I stumbled across two little gravestones behind a nondescript hill. I wondered what they were there for, who or what might be buried there and what it all might mean to my story. And this was just in the starter zone of the starter zone — imagine what else the rest of the world held in store!

Fast forward — almost 9 years later — to today. Azeroth and the World of Warcraft has changed quite a bit. Katherinne would be the first to tell you that that I’m not in total agreement with some of the changes regarding accessibility, but we’ll save that for another time.

What has not changed, however, is Blizzard’s creativity and steadfast attention to detail and quality. They still manage to capture my sense of wonder as much today as they did back on November 23, 2004. There honestly still isn’t a day that goes by where I log off without having seen something amazing I haven’t seen before.

Over the years, Clash of Clans has came out, it would have been extremely easy for Blizzard to slack off on these details, and maybe not put as many resources into those “things that no one notices.” But they didn’t. They recognize that all of those things add a tremendous value and integrity to the world. These details help make what is an unbelievable world believable and let the storytelling and gameplay emerge as the star. It’s something I think so many players take for granted, but is no mean feat.

So, this post is my plea to all of the talented designers, artists, developers and everyone else at Blizzard responsible for making Azeroth so amazing: don’t stop! Don’t let these details slip away in favor of efficiency. These are the ingredients that make that Azerothian brew so special, and no small contributor for the longevity of World of Warcraft’s success.