In the rush to 80, we have a lot of people who are taking the opportunity to change their main characters, level up new characters, etc. Everyone is still being referred to by their pre-xpac raiding character’s name, and some of our people will forever be known by their original vanilla WoW character’s name, which is interesting. Most of the player comments in the guild tab are there to identify someone’s current character with their original character’s name. I guess 4 years of calling someone something on Ventrillo makes a bit of an impact.

Sadly, I’ve recently realized that 7/8 Tier 6 and what was previously best in slot Sunwell gear isn’t even good enough to heal level 80 heroics, so it’s back to farming level 80 blues and starting the whole process again.

Regarding the link between virtual and real worlds, I have a real-life rendering of my character in T6 glory coming my way via figureprints.com – no surprise that they have to lottery the opportunity to have a character rendered, because the demand for tangible representation of something you’ve put so much time into is outpacing their ability to create characters. The quality isn’t even that good, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to TOUCH something.

I think of everything you’ve said here anytime a new MMORPG is touted as a “WoW-Killer.” It takes a long time for a game like WoW to mature, and no title that is newly released will be able to compete with it out of the gate.

Blizzard has done a great job of listening to the community, and responding with both new content and small tweaks that make the experience that much better.

I agree that the investment on the part of player/developers to create mods is something that is unique and of huge value to the game. I know it makes my experience a lot better.

Thanks for your response. Hopefully we’ll cross paths in Azeroth one day.

-Eric

Playing WOW has also reinforced some of my branding beliefs as well. Like the power of momentum (Gerzema is calling it Energized Differentiation these days), which is constantly innovating and moving forward. WOW frequently releases patches that add new content to the game, as well as changing the abilities of it’s characters, keeping things new and fresh. I believe that people don’t want static brands or experiences these days.

WOW is very transparent. You can go to the forums on the website and comment on how the game should be better. On these forums “blues” (game designers) will actually comment and engage in the debate, often acting when enough users are demanding change.

You can personalize the gaming experience. There is a community of programmers that make addons to the game that players download to customize their UI, so the game looks and plays like you want. WOW encourages this and supports it.

They have scale. I believe the strength of MMORPGs, and social networking sites for that matter, lie in the number of subscribers. The utility of this is if you don’t have enough players the gaming experience suffers greately, the ecosystem never really takes over and you can’t experience all the content. Bigger picture as human beings we want to be part of something bigger. We want to belong. 11MM people is now motivation enough.

Lastly, and we were just talking about this online yesterday, online connections are real connections. I’ve been reading a bit about object-centered sociality lately. The game is just the shared interest here. Typically in WOW you buy the game. Do your own thing for a while. Achieve some success. Then you join a guild to experience the end game content. You start making friends, because you have this shared interest. Your guild has a website where you share stories and lolcats and whatever else. You start talking to each other in game with things like Ventrilo. Slowly relationships build, and these are real relationships. In fact, this is what keeps the majority of people playing the game as long as they do. Giving up the game is easy. Walking away from friends isn’t. It’s a symbiotic relationship of the game supporting these communities, and the communities supporting the game.

Holy cow, this was a big block of text. In short, WOWs success is a result of an awesome game and the fact that they act like a truly modern brand.

Adam – Brand Planner
Brotherman lvl 80 Shadow Priest – Dethecus