The World of Warcraft Beta

Not too long after our retirement from Everquest, the World of Warcraft beta began. The Syndicate had been watching WoW for quite some time. We had been in regular contact with the development team and the community team expressing our interest in the game and our desire to help with the beta.

We felt that at this point in our guild career, with eight years of gaming experience behind us, that we could offer a lot of value to the test. We were very pleased when the Blizzard team felt similarly and offered us a large block of beta accounts, followed later by a second large block. So as May of 2004 got underway, The Syndicate hammered into the WoW beta full steam ahead.

We were immediately impressed with WoW for a whole host of reasons. Those reasons included:

Instancing: One of the major issues with Everquest was the fact that the raid content was a competition between guilds. While we realize that the second M in MMO stands for Multiplayer that doesn’t mean that most players want to be in a constant fight with other groups for rare spawns. That view is reinforced even more if the gear a player uses has any bearing on the ability to move into new content. Everquest failed many gamers on that topic. WoW did not.

While there was substantial content where players would run into people they didn’t know and weren’t guilded with, all raid & dungeon level combat and questing was instanced. This model worked extremely well. It all but eliminated griefing or blocking groups you didn’t like from advancing. It allowed every group with the skill and power to defeat content to do so every time it reset if they chose to.

Instancing makes all content available to all players to progress through at their own pace without being harassed, pressured or having it stolen out from under them. Raiding and end game content became fun for a much larger percentage of the gaming population than enjoyed it in Everquest.

Alt-Tab: On the surface, this may seem like an odd feature to consider important to a game’s success but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. By this point in the history of MMOs almost every guild has a website and a forum. Many guilds used voice communications like Teamspeak or Ventrilo. Just about everyone has email and instant messenger tools. There are many fan sites that contain archives of information about the game and updates on patches and outages.

The early years of Everquest the game did not allow a player to alt-tab out. One could only assume the decision was taken to block third party programs from macroing and turning characters into mindless robots that farmed while the human slept. However, what it also did was cut players off from the other critical aspects of their virtual communities.

WoW allowed players to alt-tab out. This allowed guilds to use voice tools where members could jump between rooms. This allowed guilds to post strategies on their forums and members could jump out and read them before a battle. This allowed people to IM friends and call them for an impromptu raid without logging out to do so.