A BIT OF BACKGROUND
World of Warcraft My argument in part 1 was that WoW was based primarily on two older MMOs. The first was Everquest, and the second was Dark Age of Camelot. Both games, I argued, grew because they followed the well-established dungeon crawl model invented by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in Dungeons and Dragons. Their style of play based itself on the idea of small group of friends having a fun adventure. That might take the form of, say, exploring an abandoned tomb, discovering a secret or two, and fighting a slew of baddies. However, there was a lot of variety in the D&D adventures (both the official modules and many unofficial, but publicly available knock offs), and D&D fully encouraged this kind of creativity by DMs. Play sessions were full of battles, races against time, traps, survival challenges, rescues, mysteries, and all manner of swashbuckling. Both EQ and DAoC captured the feel of this kind of content extremely well.
Inexplicably, at the endgame, the developers of both EQ and DAoC decided to change the very basis of gameplay, and they introduced very difficult, grind-heavy content. This content (primarily raids in EQ, and large scale, grind-heavy PvP in DAoC) rewarded players with both loot and skill unlocks unavailable to normal players. What's worse, willing players were rewarded not primarily for their skill or creativity, but instead for spending endless amounts of time in the game, participating in this artificially hard endgame content. In a moment of extraordinary maturity, I referred to this endgame content as DICC: Difficult and Increasingly time Consuming Content.
