You Wait All Year For An Expansion And Then Three Come Along At Once

Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon '23, I thought I might have a bit of a potter through the various headline announcements. I did kind of pre-empt myself with my post on Tarisland but since that was written before the actual event I think a revisit is justified.

Of course, when I say "headline announcements" I really mean what they said about World of Warcraft. I have never played any other Blizzard games and I don't even know much about them other than what I've read on various blogs over the years. The thing about Blizzard, though, unlike other major players in the online multiplayer gamespace such as NCSoft or Tencent, is that it's very hard to avoid knowing about their games even if you're not particularly interested in them. I can give a precis of the Diablo franchise or Overwatch or Hearthstone even though I've never played any of them. 

Don't ask me about Heroes of the Storm, though. What even is that?

Blizzard, unlike other developers, penetrates the cultural consciousness to an extent not often enjoyed by gaming companies. It's become evident over the past couple of years, as the Blizzard name has become a byword for deceit and depravity, that a large number of people had far more invested in the reputation of the company than would seem rational or predictable to anyone outside the bubble. For many, it seems, Blizzard wasn't just a company that had made some very successful video games; it was some kind of role-model or exemplar.

I'm not sure I was even aware a lot of people felt that way until the roof began falling in. I knew the games were popular because I kept reading people talking about them but people talk about playing things like The Sims and Civilization all the time, too. There's a fairly small set of games that crop up over and over again, in the same way certain TV shows or movies are reference points for everyone of a certain age. You don't have to have watched them to know something about them. I didn't have to have played Diablo to know what it was but I didn't realize it represented the end product of a myth-making process that extended far past the game itself.

It was only when the seemingly endless stream of dire revelations began to spew out of Blizzard like a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment that I began to appreciate the deep, emotional connection the company maintained with with many of its customers. It did seem a little unsettling, even to someone with an arguably unhealthy tendency towards brand loyalty like myself.

As the pile-up of distressing revelations continued, I learned a few things, some of the more interesting of which were the explanations people gave for their deep connection with the company. As is common in other forms of popular media, growing up with certain activities and entertainments forms an associative bond. The things that surround you as you go through formative life experiences for the first time become inextricably linked with the intense feelings created by those experiences.

I'd like to say that being in my twenties when I first started playing video games inoculated me against anything like that but I was forty when I started playing EverQuest and look how that went. What I definitely would say is that at no time did I ever translate my affection - let's not say obsession - with the game into an idolization of the company that produced it. I mean, I knew SoE was my favorite MMORPG developer for a while but I never thought it went any further than their design choices matching my gameplay preferences. It was a marriage of convenience not a love match.

Back in the 2000s, I remember reading with something approaching incredulity the reports of conventions and fan events dedicated to specific games or publishers, SOE's Fan Faire included. For some reason, even though by then I'd spent the better part of two decades going to comics conventions, where I'd sit in a side room or an auditorium listening to writers, artists and editors repeating well-worn anecdotes from glory years spanning the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies, it seemed bizarre to imagine anyone might want to do the same with video games. 

After all, the people who made those were just technicians and administrators, weren't they? It'd be like going to a convention to meet the people who'd designed and built your refrigerator. (Even as I type, it occurs to me there are probably people who do exactly that...)

Eventually I either came to a more nuanced understanding of the factors involved or became assimilated into the gamer hive-mind. Still not sure which. The concept of video game expos and cons and fan gatherings shifted from "weird and a bit scary, if I'm honest" to "no stranger than traction engine meets or renaissance fairs". Which, I admit, is still weird and a bit scary but in a much more ordinary way.

I still wouldn't want to go to one and I don't even want to sit at home and watch a livestream but I do find myself being drawn towards the comfortable thrill of mild anticipation arising from the possibility of hints of things to come. Which is really about as solid as most of this stuff ever gets, making this year's Blizzcon somewhat unusual in that respect.

We didn't just get to learn the name of the next WoW expansion. We got to hear the names of the next three! It's a brave move that I imagine has more to do with setting a marker than with any fundamental change of practice or principle. 

Given the last couple of years, it looks as though the plan is to establish the new Microsoft-owned company as a solid, dependable and even predictable supplier of quality product, to be delivered in a timely and reliable manner. Announcing a trilogy of themed expansions with an explicit but finite narrative arc makes a clear statement of commitment to the game and its players. 

It says we're going to be here for the foreseeable future so you can feel safe to start making your plans with WoW again. We've got you covered for MMORPG entertainment for the next five years, minimum. No need to start looking around. 

The same sentiment is contained in the commitment to only adding mechanics that will hold value over more than a single expansion cycle and the increase in systems that benefit the whole account rather than a single character. These are moves designed to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem, where players feel too comfortable, committed and embedded to find it easy to pick up and move elsewhere. 

The only thing that's hard to understand about such a change of emphasis is how the hell it took them this long to come up with it. Every other MMORPG developer figured out years ago that you need to get players so enmeshed it's harder to leave than it is to stay. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been fostering a culture around expansions that, coupled with one of the slowest development cycles in the genre, actively mitigates against the kind of loyalty and retention they used to be famous for. 

Everyone knows you can just skip the content droughts or even the bad expansions and come back later. Or not come back at all. It's not like you'll miss anything that matters. Every new expansion is a full reset.

The three expansions themselves sound interesting enough, as far as the information available goes. They revolve around known areas of the existing world, not excursions into unknown realms, which is a solid play towards the installed base and that great mass of lapsed players, many of whom, on reading a news item somewhere, will think to themselves "Oh, I remember having some good times there!" and think about maybe coming back to see what's going on.

None of that is going to work on me because I don't have the necessary nostalgia for such an announcement to trigger in the first place. I like WoW but I don't feel closely connected to it. With the Microsoft buyout in place, however, I have given myself permission to revisit Azeroth, and I would certainly not rule out trying one or more of these expansions at some point. Of course, I'd have to re-install the game first...

The widely-expected confirmation of Cataclysm Classic interests me more. As I've said on several occasions, I know just enough about the areas that were disrupted by the original Cataclysm expansion to be curious to see how they've changed, without the significant emotional attachment to the originals that would make me feel disturbed or angry when I find out what's been done to them. And since I mostly never bothered to investigate any of the post-Cataclysm zones when I had the chance, it would all largely be new content for me.

It's always nice to jump into these things along with everyone else, so there's a not-insignificant chance I might resubscribe for a month or two when CataClassic arrives, presumably sometime next spring. I'm fairly curious about the new "Season of Discovery" that's coming to regular Classic much sooner as well, although I'm not sure the timing works for me to join in right away. 

As I commented on Shintar's WoW blog "Priest Without A Cause", this really does seem like Holly Longdale making her influence known. Sony Online Entertainment began the idea of the rolling nostalgia circus as far back as 2008 but it was under Holly at Daybreak that the operation really took off. 

For years now, it's been the practice at EverQuest and latterly at EQII to fire up new nostalgia servers at least once a year, almost always with slightly different rulesets. Go back far enough and it was generally assumed these servers would stay up, if not permanently, then at least until there weren't enough players left on them to justify their continued existence. In more recent times, there's been a much clearer expectation and understanding that they'll only run for a couple of years or so before being merged into a more recent or a more stable server.

Much of that predates now-familiar online gaming concept of "Seasons", a more elegant solution to the concept of shaking things up to keep people interested than booting up whole new servers every five minutes. The Blizzard way of doing things is marrying up nicely with the Daybreak experience, potentially creating a more flexible model for endless experimentation within a fairly fixed framework. It's presumably just what they wanted when they made Holly an offer she couldn't and didn't refuse.

It is ironic that, in both games, the supposedly most traditional part of the game, the nostalgia-driven servers where time, if it doesn't exactly stand still, certainly travels in a closed loop, is also the place where the companies feel most free to experiment. If you tried these kinds of shenanigans on Live or Retail there'd be uproar. It makes me wonder sometimes who the true traditionalists really are.

All in all, I'd say things are looking good for the immediate future of WoW. Certainly a lot better than it seemed they might a year or two back. The last expansion, Dragonflight, while reportedly no resounding success, was certainly no disaster, either. People seemed generally affable towards it and largely still do which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a win for Blizzard. 

Responses to the announcements at Blizzcon '23 also seem generally favorable. No-one's jumping up and down, waving a flag or claiming the glory days are back, or at least not that I've seen, but the tone of the reporting has largely been optimistic and positive, if occasionally grudgingly so. 

Equally, I don't think many are claiming the myriad problems of the past have all miraculously gone away but there's only so long most people can retain a sense of outrage and frankly there are a lot more serious things to be outraged about right now than what happened at a video company a few years ago. The company changing hands may well not fix all or even most of the underlying problems but at least, until and unless evidence of new or ongoing malpractice surfaces, it'll be convenient for many of us to act as though it has.

Finally, there was one announcement at Blizzcon this year that took my fancy. Warcraft Rumble, the new, free-to-play mobile title, is already up and running. I think I might go take a look. After all, it's not every day Blizzard gives us something for nothing. Well, not anything we might actually want, anyway.

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A note on AI images used in this post.

The header is by DreamShaper XL alpha2  with Prompt and Refiner Weights both at 50. The prompt used was "Firiona Vie from EverQuest as a character in World of Warcraft". I used Uncrop to reformat the image to fit the space and it mostly added some foliage. Firiona has dyed her hair for some reason and seems to have grown a second belly-button somehow but otherwise it kind of works.

The second image uses the same source and settings. The prompt was "a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment World of Warcraft". I tried it without the WoW suffix but either way it just gives a volcano. I was kind of hoping for some personifcations of abstract ideas but no such luck.

I Still Have Faith That What Was Mine Can Still Be Mine

I was in two minds whether to say anything here about the J. Allan Brack Official Blizzard Apology but given that I've already posted two lengthy comments (at Hardcore Casual and TAGN, linked below, towards the end) I guess I might as well. I'll probably regret it but there we go...

Throughout all the hullabaloo of the past few weeks I've found it relatively hard to become as incensed as I somehow feel I should be. Reading some of the post-apology analysis, some of it heartfelt, some of it clinical, I think I've worked out at least part of the reason why.

It's not because I can't or don't empathize with the substantive issues so much as it's that I have no emotional connection to Blizzard as a company and never have had. It's hard to feel personally betrayed by an entity whose previous actions and supposed principles you barely registered in the first place. Until the recent events I had no idea Blizzard was even supposed to have the corporate standards JAB was apologizing for not upholding. If I'd thought about it at all, which I hadn't, I'd just have figured they were a faceless, amoral corporation like any other.

Then there's also the geographical element. In the part of the world where I live, while China may be seen as a threat by some, it pales into insignificance compared to the threat supposedly represented by Russia, something our media have been driving home for years, now. And not without good reason. After all, it's not Chinese state-sponsored agents contaminating the streets of a city less than fifty miles from where I live with Polonium or the Chinese navy cruising silently beneath the sea just a hundred miles away.

Indeed, I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to suggest that in the country where I live the agenda of Silicon Valley and its megatech giants is widely seen as a more immediate concern than the political machinations of China. Just today I received and put on the shelves of the bookshop where I work no fewer than three new books warning about the dangers of American Big Tech. It's a whole publishing sub-genre, as are books on the Russian threat. Books on the imminent global dangers posed by China are a lot less commercially successful in this particular market.

I realize that it's entirely possible and even necessary to be concerned about multiple threats at the same time but we all have only so much capacity for outrage. Moreover, I suspect that to experience the level of personal discomfort expressed by many bloggers I read have over the Blitzchung incident you would need to feel a level of betrayal that I can't easily imagine ever feeling over the actions of any commercial entity. I've always assumed all of them would do anything they could get away with if it meant an extra dollar.

If the whole affair leaves one lasting lesson I hope it's the mantra I increasingly find myself repeating: "big companies are not our friends". They really, really aren't. And if it wakes a few gamers up to the fact that gaming companies aren't quasi-sentient entities with whom it's appropriate - or even feasible - to share life experiences and develop personal relationships, that will be something, at least.

Rather than bang on about it any more I'll just pull some quotes from a few of the thoughtful and considered responses I've read. I reccommend reading the whole posts from which these paragraphs have been extracted to get a broader picture of the range of responses to that apology.

"I think that it was a… decent apology. Probably not sincere, probably extracted through gritted teeth. But at the very least, it was an indication that Blizzard took a serious hit over this and couldn’t afford to be so arrogant in the face of fan pushback. It will influence the decisions that the studio makes along these lines in the future." Bio Break

"Blizzard President J. Allen Brack... said a lot of words that sounded pretty close to apologizing without actually ever apologizing. It was effectively the corporate version of reflexively saying you are sorry when you don’t quite know what you just did. A real apology includes three components. First admitting that you realize what you did and being able to explain it. Second giving a heartfelt apology that relays an understanding of the harm that was caused. Third an explanation of how you are going to make the changes necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The statement did none of the above..." Tales of the Aggronaut

"J. Allen Brack did open the convention with an apology for their screw-up regarding Hong Kong, and to be fair, he sounded pretty sincere. But waiting until now undermines that sincerity, and so far that apology is not backed up by any action." Superior Realities

"Blizzard, and more importantly, J Allen Brack, have publicly apologized for incorrectly handling the Hong Kong / Blitzchung situation. If we are being 100% honest, this is about as much as Blizzard could have done at the very opening of Blizzcon. To lead off your biggest event with an apology is a big deal." Hardcore Casual

 "You have to parse things carefully to figure out what he was sorry for, and even then it is pretty opaque.... For the most part I liked that Brack got up first thing and spoke about this issue, rather than ignoring it or downplaying it or waiting until after 5pm on a Friday to post it to their site.  And the apology had some good aspects... But the promise to do better didn’t leave me all that reassured as I am still not clear as to how that translates into action going forward." The Ancient Gaming Noob

And finally, a couple of quotes from my own commentary:

"I... think that what Blizzard have done is manage the situation reasonably smartly so as to leave the impression that they’ve changed when in fact they haven’t moved an inch... They are carving out a tricky path going forward, though. It’s all very well keeping your promises vague so you can’t be held to them but that way you risk people trying to hold you to things you never meant to suggest in the first place." Comment at TAGN

"Blizzard knew they had a lockerful of bright, shiny new toys to hand out – but they couldn’t let anyone know that until the Con itself. Hence the lack of pushback in the weeks leading up to Blizzcon – they knew they would be able to dazzle most of their fans and customers with the gleam of the new toys. The apology, particularly the careful use of the trigger word “sorry” (in a heavily nuanced context), seals the deal without actually reversing or countermanding any of the previous actions." Comment at Hardcore Casual

Despite Blizzard's attempt to put a lid on this, I suspect there will be more to come at some point. Having asked that we judge them by their actions there almost has to be.

Bits And Pieces

Just a few things on this overcast and rainy Friday afternoon...

The Five Game Challenge

This has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few days now. I won't link to all the posts I've seen on it, just to the one that introduced me to the idea, this piece at Time To Loot. Naithan has gone further than anyone else I've seen in that he's not only writing about which five games he'd play - he's actually playing them.

He's only undertaking to stick to the five for a month, not the year of the original proposal, but it's a bold move all the same. Or at least it would seem to be, given most peoples' reaction to the concept - sheer horror.

My take is somewhat different. My first thought was "Five? Who needs that many?".

For quite a few years I only really played one game at a time, with a second and very occasionally a third in reserve. For example, I played EverQuest about forty hours a week every week for quite a while, which didn't leave a huge amount of time to play anything else.

That said, I was always very curious to try new MMORPGs as soon as I could get my hands on them, so I did a lot of beta testing. Before World of Warcraft opened the floodgates I also bought most of the new, boxed MMORPGs as they appeared, just to try them out. There weren't that many.

I'm not sure I'd call that "playing", though. In most cases I was investigating and asessing, trying to get an overview, an understanding of the genre. I wasn't really looking for entertainment or fun although it was always nice when I found some. Once I started a blog the invetigative element only increased. I play a lot more games now than I did back then but my main motivation is to get blog posts out of them, not to amuse myself.

If I had to keep to five games I wouldn't. I'd limit myself to just three: EverQuest, EverQuest II and Guild Wars 2. That would keep me plenty busy for twelve months. I might even get to the level cap in EQ, sort out all my prestige houses in EQ2 and maybe even finish the original storyline in GW2. I've only been avoiding it for seven years...

IntPiPoMo 2019

It's that time of year again! Chestnut put the entry form up yesterday. The full details are here but for anyone who doesn't know how it works, the short version is that you try to post fifty pictures during November because a picture is worth a thousand words and people doing NaNoWriMo are trying to write fifty thousand of those, so it's the same!

I know which I'd rather do. I'm all signed up and ready to go.

BlizzCon

Most years this flies right past me. I'm not a Blizzard fan. World of Warcraft is the only Blizzard game I've ever played and compared to many other MMORPGs I haven't even played that one very much.

This year does look pretty hard to dodge, though. Wilhelm has a good preview up in which he suggests that we could see as many as six new titles announced. That would be astonishing.

It seems pretty likely that there will be at least three: Diablo IV, Overwatch 2 and the next WoW expansion. I'm always curious to see where WoW's going next but seeing as I never even played the boxed copy of Legion I got it's a fairly notional kind of curiosity. Diablo, I couldn't care less about.

The one that really interests me is Overwatch 2. As I understand it, Overwatch was the game Blizzard canibalized from the wreckage of Project Titan, their proposed second MMORPG. I know they won't be going back to the abandoned plan but rumor has it the new Overwatch may cleave towards narrative and PvE, which would be something of a step back in the original direction.

Worth following developments there, at least.

Then there's Classic, which I'm still playing although I'm not sure for how much longer. Will Blizzard reveal a plan for managing what's now looking very much like a split in the I.P.? Or will they want to keep all focus on the expansion?

Last but definitely not least, there's the potential disruption of protests by the Boycott Blizzard movement. Has that run out of steam  or is there still enough pent-up, explosive force left to wreck the whole event? And do Blizzard have the wherewithal to handle it if something big kicks off? Experience would certainly suggest otherwise.

Looks like a Blizzcon worth watching, whether you play the games or not.

BlizzCon 2018 At Defcon 1

I'm not currently playing World of Warcraft. Much as I like WoW, I never really do play it, or not with any commitment, other than that six-month burst almost a decade ago. I haven't even been able to find a window in my oh-so-busy schedule to play the Legion expansion I was given for my birthday two years ago.

Doubling down on my lack of involvement, beyond my occasional dabble with WoW, I have never played any other Blizzard game, so I have absolutely no reservoir of nostalgic affection on which to draw. I can't even pretend to the smallest vestige of interest in any of the games in the current stable, not Overwatch or Hearthstone and especially not Diablo, the point and purpose of playing which has always entirely eluded me. The very little I do know about any of them comes from people who do play, whose blogs I follow.

With such a deep well of uninterest I wasn't planning on commenting on anything Blizzard had to say at that in-house celebration of self-love, BlizzCon. I do find these conventions bemusing. Even in the headiest days of EverQuest, when Sony ran the annual Fan Faire (later known as SOELive) I never felt an inclination to attend.

I never noticed the shoulder marking before today. Is that new?

The fact that it happened, mostly, on the other side of the world may have been a factor but chances are I wouldn't have taken the trouble to travel ten miles for a gaming convention. I find limited appeal in standing in a packed hall for long hours while people try to sell me stuff or in sitting on a hard plastic chair while non-professional speakers take hours to explain things I could read in minutes (or more likely seconds) in the comfort of my own home.

Not that I haven't been to plenty of similar events. I spent all of the 1980s and some of the 1990s going to comics conventions. I was close friends with the organizers of some of the biggest of the time and I took my turn stuffing bags, running security and even hosting panels. The novelty wore off fast, though, and it only took a few cons before I swapped the dealers' hall and the panel rooms for spending the whole weekend in the bar.

I'm certainly not knocking the social aspect. Meeting friends in an environment conducive to endless conversation on topics of mutual interest isn't something that needs arguing against, or not by me, anyway. These days I'm pretty sure I couldn't hack a whole long weekend of sleeping on floors, drinking from midday to midnight and generally behaving as though life was performance art but I'm happy to have done my share way back when.

In fact, it's curious what you notice after a long layoff. I'm guessing my druid could always turn into a bling elk but somehow I missed it...

I meant to let the entire 2018 BlizzCon slide. It wasn't really even on my radar. I suppose I'm mildly (very mildly) curious about the Classic WoW experiment but nowhere even close to caring enough to consider paying for a sneak preview. I'll wait for the inevitable blog reports.

Why, then, am I even mentioning it? Because, as usual, its all but impossible for anyone with even the smallest interest in MMORPGs to escape the event horizon of World of Warcraft and, by implication, of its creator company, Blizzard.

I read, with increasing mystification, accounts of the firestorm of outrage surrounding the announcement of a mobile version of Diablo. To a non-afficionado it didn't seem like much of a story. When the first news squib crossed my path a couple of days ago I barely gave it a thought.

I was momentarily attracted to the idea of a new MMO I could play on my tablet but then I realized that a) I don't play any of the excellent mobile options I already have installed (Dragon Nest Mobile, Villagers and Heroes, AdventureQuest3D, Celtic Heroes...) and b) it's Diablo. At that point I would have forgotten about it entirely, only apparently to do that would mean missing the entire part where Blizzard, cackling like evil carnival clowns, smacked the stunned audience around its collective face with a wet mackerel.

And here's another! I swear I can't remember this "travel form" option. I'm going to name it "Elk or Whelk". Maybe that will help me remember to use it.

To gain some kind of context, I tried to imagine a situation where I was expecting, let's say, an official announcement of Guild Wars 3 and what I got instead was notification of a mobile version of GW2 produced for ArenaNet by GameLoft. Okay, I'd be a little disappointed I wasn't getting the big win but I'd also be excited about the consolation prize. It's more of a thing I like. That's always good, isn't it?

The idea that this is some kind of zero sum game, where resources dedicated to a mobile app come from the same pool that supplies a PC game, seems bizarre. This is diversification not assimilation. The entrenched, embattled position taken by one group of gamers when faced with another shouldn't pain me the way it does. It's been the way of things in every special interest group ever, after all. It's still disheartening, though.

Even more disappointing were the comments levelled against leveling. From MassivelyOP's Live Blog summary:

Q: Character progression, especially with leveling, is not satisfying. Wouldn’t a level squish be a good thing?
A: It’s a great question; we are not satisfied with what leveling has turned into. A level squish would be a big ordeal, but we agree something needs to change. It’s not tenable to add more levels at the top.

I like leveling but these days everyone seems to be against it. We're marching towards a world of vertical zones and horizontal progression whereas I, to quote a recent anonymous commenter to this blog, hark back with affection to the days of "...yearly expansions in SOE style with very limited pool of assets and primitive flat zones with mobs randomly scattered around." Well, every six months was better but I'd take yearly and the rest of that sounds just about perfect!

Then there was the weighing in against randomly generated fun:

Q: Why is there so much RNG in the game? (Huge cheering.) Do you have plans to move away from that, where the time we spend is productive? (More huge cheering.)
A: We’ve always tried to navigate these waters; our concern with having things on a vendor is that you could mark the date on the calendar. (This is being claimed as a downside.) 

Where do I even begin? Productive? Productive?? Is this paid work now? Are we on the meter? I had this weird idea I was roleplaying an adventurer not clocking on at the Amazon Warehouse.

In trying to find a good spot to take a screenshot I fell off a waterfall and got swept down this giant whirlpool. I knew something was up when the UI vanished and the black cut-screen borders appeared. Turned out to be some instance related to Demon Hunters, which reminds me; I could make one of those...

Yes, it is a friggin' "downside" if I can "mark the date on the calendar", when my character gets a specific piece of armor or a weapon! These things should come as the spoils of a mighty battle or the entirely surprising, serendipitous outcome of a chance encounter, not the "reward" for saving up fifty box-tops and sending them in!

Whatever happened to "heroic adventure"? Okay, I can get behind the idea of a simulated economy in a virtual world but this is not that! Geez! Token systems suck and what they suck is all the fantasy, wonder and joy out of what was once a playful, imaginative, childlike experience, currently in danger of being reduced to nothing more than yet another adulting exercise in faux-responsibility and bloody "productivity".

The cheering in the room, as reported, is dismally echoed by the jeering and sneering in the comment thread, which itself follows the lead of some of M:OP's staff writers. I really ought stop reading this stuff. I'm getting to the age where I need to think about my blood pressure.

I imagine Demon Hunters are all about the rituals. They certainly use a lot of candles.

It wouldn't matter since, as I said, I don't really play much World of Warcraft. Except that, even in these reduced days of maybe "only" three million subscribers, what happens in WoW often sets the tone for the whole genre. Odd, when you consider the extent to which Blizzard sits back and lets other MMOs act as a test-bed before adapting and implementing whatever they deem to have value, but there you are.

The genre moves inexorably onwards towards places some of us would rather not go but there will always be backwaters - or so I hope. If there are, I plan on wallowing in them.

More positively and optimistically, I continue to enjoy the unnamed new game that on paper shouldn't appeal to me at all. Perhaps Blizzard's influence on MMO development is on the wane, anyway. I'd like to think so. I don't think it's been the ruination of the genre but then again I don't believe it's been its saving, either. We'll see what happens when WoW Classic arrives next Summer.