The Queue: Fashion bashin’

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

I have strong feelings about having a forum. I won’t say we’ll never have one, but I will say if we do have one, we need strong moderation. We could take mod volunteers, but having spent most of my life on the internet, I’ve seen that both work well and end in disaster.

One of the larger issues with social media these days is a lack of security/protection for its userbase. Twitter is great, but Twitter has no meaningful methods of dealing with rampant harassment on the platform. That can, and does, happen anywhere and everywhere. Too many people still view the internet as that mythical version of the Wild West where there are no rules, no laws, and you take your security into your own hands with a solid six-shooter. Of course, everyone forgets a lot of people die in that mythical, romanticized version of the Wild West.

I don’t want to launch a Wild West forum where we aren’t capable of adequately moderating and protecting our users — and if we launched such a thing today, with our current staff as its primary moderators, we would not have the mental bandwidth to both produce content for our site and moderate a forum. We could take volunteers, but there’s only so much policing you can do with volunteers — watching them and making sure there’s no funny business happening with the information they’d be able to access would end up being a big task unto itself.

I know we all love this community and we’d like to think nothing would go awry, but a couple decades on the internet has shown harassment can happen anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes the people you’d least expect to be a problem are the worst offenders. Sometimes the people who don’t speak up at all are the ones abusing your userbase. I would rather be prepared to deal with a situation like that before we launch a forum. And when/if we launch a forum and something goes wrong, we’ll be able to deal with it. Or maybe nothing will go wrong at all, and that’ll be great — but going into it prepared is still the right thing to do for our users.

Nope. I haven’t really decided if we’ll continue with them or not. We take the gameplay approach of jumping in blind, assembling a deck, and seeing what happens. That means they aren’t strategy guides — what we do isn’t necessarily advisable and probably won’t win you real matches — but they’re fun to play that way. Some people find that fun to watch, but the number isn’t very high. Certainly, in the hour or so it takes us to record it, we could’ve done something else which a far higher number of people would’ve watched/read/enjoyed. If we took the approach of turning it into a strategy guide, it would take significantly more time to figure out a winning strategy, it’d be far more boring to record, and it would only be useful for a couple of days for all that effort.

What tends to happen is the new Brawl goes live, Matticus and I figure out where we’ll have a free couple of hours in both my schedule and his schedule, and if an answer isn’t immediately evident, it falls off of our radar because very few people are watching it anyway. For me, video content is work on top of existing work, and for Matticus, it’s something he needs to record in between other responsibilities. If it’s something people are watching, we’ll make it happen. If they’re not, our enthusiasm for making it happen drops significantly. It’s a little soul-sucking to spend time creating something nobody (or nearly nobody) wants to read or watch. Creativity requires feedback as fuel.

Like I said, it is still fun to do, but last week’s Tavern Brawl had less than 200 total views. I could probably record a fart and get more views. Views aren’t everything, but they’re a pretty good indicator of whether or not people are enjoying the content. It’s pretty clear the number of people watching our Brawls is a miniscule sliver of our audience.

I don’t think the prequel book will be necessary to read. What will be necessary, though, is game fans knowing the cinematic universe isn’t going to be the same as the games. It’s like comic book adaptations — the movies, TV shows, cartoons, and whatever else all take inspiration from the comic books, but they’re never identical. From everything we know, the Warcraft movie isn’t even trying to be a direct adaptation of the games. They’re telling a version of the story which works as a movie rather than as a game. Some little details will be different. Some big details will be different. Don’t freak out. It’s just different.

Opinions of microtransactions will all differ per person. For me, it comes down to gut feeling. I’ve played games that offered XP boosts and healing potions in a cash shop where I never felt like I needed them. I could get to the level cap without ever spending a dollar on those things, and maybe it took a little longer without those things, but it never felt unreasonable. I didn’t need them, but if someone wanted to speed up the process, they had the option. That was fine. I’ve also played games where the leveling process took an eternity of grinding because they tuned leveling speed with the expectation everyone would buy those real money items. I suspect, though, there were still people who didn’t buy those XP potions — and felt the grindy leveling speed was perfectly fine. You can only decide what feels right or wrong for you.

Really, what a lot of these F2P games are doing now is deciding what the minimal cost of their game should be. If they want every player to give them at minimum $60, then they’ll sell “premium” membership for $60 which gives you the standard experience of a buy-to-play game. If you don’t buy premium, you’ll get less XP, get less gold, and so forth — so you need to buy gold or XP potions to be on the same level as a “premium” member. They use the free-to-play model to get people to try their game, and if someone who tries it enjoys it, then they’ll spend money. For every person who spends $0, there’s someone who spends $120. By making the game “free” with a cash shop, they get their money either way. If you enjoy it, you might as well go premium rather than nickel and dime yourself on potions.

When it comes to strictly cosmetic things, I really don’t care how much of that a game adds. In fact, I love having a ton of cosmetic options. I’ll throw a few bucks in now and then to customize my character. One of the things I enjoyed about The Secret World when I first picked it up was the clothing options! It’s a game set in the modern era so going through the cosmetic cash shop was like taking my character to the mall and trying to decide on my person style. I think I spent $5-10 before I even started playing the actual game because I wanted to quest while wearing a cool jacket and cool shoes. I truly and honestly believe every MMO, World of Warcraft included, would greatly benefit from having real world fashion designers in their art department.

I’ve mentioned that point about fashion designers before and peoples’ immediate reaction was to scream noooooo! Here’s what many people don’t understand about fashion: everything you wear was designed by someone. “Fashion designer” doesn’t only mean those avant garde fashion shows where people are wearing picket fences as hats. Those are concept shows where designers throw ridiculous ideas out there and get people thinking about what is or isn’t possible. A woman wearing a dress made of live snakes at a fashion show isn’t meant to say someday we’ll all be wearing snakes. They’re not going to go brilliant! and then start selling people dresses made of snakes. People will look at it (knowing how ridiculous it is) and think about what actually made it interesting and how to apply it to real clothes. Eventually, that might mean integrating more curves and sweeping lines into dresses people will actually buy in stores and rely less on straight lines and angles. Is there an easier way to reach that conclusion? Probably, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it?

World of Warcraft would just give you a dress made of snakes.

Most of the things you wear started out as something completely absurd at a fashion show. Your favorite piece of clothing was, at some point, designed by someone in the fashion industry. Without those people, we’d all still be wearing loin clothes or burlap sacks. The only gaming company I know which actually pays attention to the fashion industry is Square-Enix and their characters are consistently on-point with the fashion of a game’s era. In hindsight, we can look back and laugh at Final Fantasy X‘s Tidus in mesh half-shorts. However, as someone who was 14 years old when FFX released, his outfit was cool as hell at the time and exactly in line with what people like me wanted to wear when I was a teenager — precisely within the target audience of FFX. It’s isn’t surprising at all Final Fantasy‘s Lightning is now a spokesperon for Louis Vitton. Final Fantasy characters are still iconic today because they were the essence of the era in which they existed.

The MOBA market was crowded when Heroes of the Storm launched, too. And I suspect Overwatch will end up in the same position as Heroes. That is, it won’t be top dog — the most popular titles will remain the most popular titles — but it will be popular enough. People will play it. It’ll stick around. It won’t dominate its genre like World of Warcraft did, but it won’t bomb, either. (Fun Fact: Heroes of the Storm is our #2 most popular title on the site in terms of readership.) Personally, I think Overwatch‘s greater victories will be in its multimedia — if Blizzard does a good job with comics, graphic novels, animations, and so forth, all of that will be a larger part of Activision-Blizzard’s machine than the game itself. Personally, I’m not too excited about Overwatch‘s gameplay, but I’ll greedily consume whatever multimedia they offer. I love the game’s style and its universe even if the gameplay isn’t my thing.

Not many people on our site seeming too thrilled about Overwatch doesn’t mean nobody is interested in Overwatch. Our audience has never been terribly hardcore about PVP. The people who are hardcore about competitive games hang out elsewhere. Our slice of the community isn’t indicative of the world at large. Note how unpopular Hearthstone tends to be on our site. Does that mean Hearthstone is an unpopular game? Hell, no. That game is huge. But it’s a competitive title, which doesn’t jive too well with our audience.