Recent events have raised an interesting question: do we have the right to play an ever-changing game the way it was when we bought it
Not long ago Blizzard shut down a fan server which was emulating the original version of World of Warcraft as it existed back in
2006. Now, Blizzard was totally in their rights to do this, and they've got plenty of legit reasons for doing so.
First and foremost, they have to protect their IP. If they just allowed a large fan pirate server to continue running,
it would be a lot harder for them to take legal action to shut down real pirates if they ever needed to.
And you also have to consider that this server supposedly had 150,000 active players,
which is a lot of potential lost revenue and subscription fees.
And running a server like that was almost certainly a violation of the Warcraft EULA in a dozen different ways.
But the situation is a little more complicated than just that
because the server was running a vanilla version of WoW, a version without any of the
expansions or the patches that Blizzard has added over the years. A version that has
essentially been lost a time that can't be legally played anywhere anymore. Which brings up a sticky question,
do you have the right to play a game the way you want to play it? Or, heck,
maybe even do you have the right to play the game you actually bought?
In a world where games can stick around for years, and be patched, and altered countless times,
accreting new mechanics, tweaking old systems, adding UI, and even changing the world or the maps that you play on, this question of what right
the consumer has to play the version of the game they want to rather than the latest one dictated by the developer is an important
one to ask because we've all had that game that we felt was better before some patch or some
expansion changed things around. Or we've all had a game where we wish we could show our friends how it was back in the day.
Back when we were obsessed with it. And the sad thing is, a lot of the time we can't play that game anymore.
It's basically impossible to recapture those old
experiences in the realm of multiplayer games and as consoles embrace auto patching more and more, it's becoming more difficult to preserve
even single player game experiences. And
if it's a game you paid for, there's a pretty good argument to be made for at least being able to keep playing the vanilla
version. After all, that's the version you actually bought. There aren't a lot of places in the world where you face this kind of dilemma.
This possibility of something you purchased
spontaneously changing into something you might not want. I mean, imagine if you went outside one day and your car was patched to be a
totally different colour. Or imagine if you woke up one day to find that George Lucas had somehow patched even our old Star Wars
VHS tapes into special editions where Greedo shoots first. I mean sure, we may only be able to legally buy special editions if we
want Star Wars on DVD now, but that's
fundamentally different than having all of our original copies retroactively altered. At least with the DVD we have a choice to not buy it
if we're happy with the version we already have, but in games if the developer decides that Greedo shoots first,
well, Greedo shoots first for everybody, like it or not. Even though that fundamentally alters the product you originally decided to spend your money on.
But, looking at the developer side of things there's a lot of really, really, good, and valid, reasons for devs to want to keep
everybody on the same patch. First of all, it doesn't fragment your community. If everybody's on the same patch, everybody is able to play together
and everybody on your boards is talking about the same game. It also means that
Community Management and customer service are way
easier to handle you don't have to deal with people coming to you complaining about bugs or exploits that you actually patched out four years
ago. It means you don't have to support an increasing number of
branching versions of the game, or maintain a bunch of different servers for all the different patches. You don't have to worry about people
expecting you to keep working on old versions, patching out all the bugs and exploits, while somehow leaving everything else exactly the same.
Creating and maintaining all of those branches would be a
nightmare scenario for any dev. That's a lot of money in man-hours that could be going to a lot of other important things.
Beyond that, keeping everybody on the same patch helps to keep new players from getting confused as to what the real version of the game
is. And you don't run into the situation of somebody
contacting you because they jumped in to play with their friends, didn't realize that they were playing a different version, and can't figure out why they
can't play together. If you're selling microtransaction goods, it means that you don't have to worry about keeping those goods compatible for every version, or
balancing them for every single patch you've ever done.
And, if you've ever had any sort of security risk, keeping everybody on one version means that as soon as you patch the current version all
of your players are protected.
And there's a lot of monetary incentives to push players toward your newest expansions and your newest content. I mean,
you're investing a lot of money into developing that stuff, and you want your entire playerbase to be able to see it, and hopefully
invest more time or money into your game because of it.
You don't want only whatever fraction of them is playing the latest build to see what you've created.
Leveraging that new content is how you afford to keep paying your team to create this stuff. So there's a whole pile of reasons
why it's easier on devs not to have to support us playing any version of their games we want. In fact,
I'm going to go against my consumer advocate tendencies here and say that if I had to pick between a world where devs have to
support every version of the game
they release, or the scenario where devs always get to drag all of us into the latest build, I would unequivocally choose the latter.
I think it's actually better for everybody overall.
But there may be a middle ground here, at least for the larger games like World of Warcraft. I mean, this WoW server had
800,000 people signed up, and
150,000 people who played actively. If those numbers are correct, that clearly shows a lot of interest in this version of the game. And
given the fact that the server was pretty obscure and somewhat difficult to get set up on, at least more difficult than downloading an installer
from the company site and pressing play,
I would wager that the players Blizzard would lose if they made an official
version with a subscription fee would be offset by all the people who loved vanilla WoW
but have since moved on to other things, and who may have never even heard of this obscure server. Which might make it viable for
Blizzard to embrace it. I mean,
150,000 users isn't World of Warcraft in its heyday money,
but it's nothing to sneeze at. Certainly enough to make it worth keeping a few devs on staff
maintaining and supporting the build. And
some companies already try this. Sony and Daybreak ran
progression servers for EverQuest, where they would lock off [ the expansion content until certain in-game
criteria were met. Now, these weren't true vanilla servers, and thank God for that,
we would lose James for weeks if that happened, but they were trying to answer the same fundamental player desire.
And they seemed successful enough that Daybreak keeps those servers going. Wizards of the Coast has done the same sort of thing with Magic online.
Periodically setting up tournaments where you can play draft or sealed with long retired sets.
Now this sort of thing is easier for some games than others, definitely,
but if this is given a little consideration early on, especially if the game is well-constructed,
there might be a middle ground that profits the developer and lets players play, if not
exactly the way they want to, then at least somewhere closer to the game
they fondly remember. The game they purchased in the first place. See you next week.
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