Eorzean Evening Post: The Warcraft Effect .

MMO players can be a migratory bunch. It doesn’t take much to get us to change our allegiances and move to a new game.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know it’s true. How many people flew away at the mere sight of The Elder Scrolls Online, just to come back two months later harried and broken?

There is a constant in MMOs, though. A single force that always seems to summon players, no matter what they’re doing. I’m talking of course of the dominant one, the MMO that defined the genre. World of Warcraft.

Ah, it’s you again, eh. Don’t we all have memories here?

There’s a familiar cycle to MMO gaming nowadays. Games tend to fly off the shelves about a year after WoW’s most recent expansion, as dates are placed at exactly that time so they don’t have to compete. However, WoW is reliably adding an expansion once every two years, and as of last Thursday, the 13th of November, the newest one hit the markets. From everything I’ve seen, Warlords of Draenor has had a few glitches but gone off like every other expansion for that game. The population of WoW shoots up, and every other game kinda drops off. So what happens in those other games, when players remain behind after the big dog barks?

I’ve done a bit of research on Warlords of Draenor. Of course I have, who wouldn’t? It is WoW after all. The game’s gotten a significant graphical overhaul, especially to the character models and while it is by no means comparable to the gorgeous views of Eorzea, it’s better than it was. Graphics don’t make a game in my eyes. It’s not the most important thing, though it is a lovely addition to have. What makes it for me is the gameplay and the interactions within the world, and for that, there’s nowhere else but Eorzea. I’ve gone into why I love the game’s combat style, how I prefer the slower paced skill activation with a faster paced set of mechanics. However, even a minor model upgrade (and it’s not all that significant, it really isn’t) can be enough to bring people around. Let’s not mince words, it is World of Warcraft. We’re not talking about a small MMO here, we’re talking about the ultimate elephant in the room. It has command, and that command is seen best in the populations of the games around it.

What’s below is Limsa Lominsa at around 11:30 p.m. Central Time. A bit later than peak times, but CERTAINLY not so far into the night that we should be abandoned like this.

Ninjas? Niiiiinjas? Hello? It’s really concerning that I don’t see any of you…

The city’s empty, and it’s been like this in pretty much every city and major location since Thursday. Mor Dhona, which usually has a thriving population, is now capable of being loaded into without having one’s system have a momentary heart attack. This changes things in the game rather quickly. Seeing a distinct loss of population causes major changes in how one operates.

FFXIV has been operating under a very high queue timer for quite some time now. The introduction of Ninja in patch 2.4 didn’t help this, since everyone wanted to relive their favorite Naruto memories. However, Draenor’s release has caused a reversal of this path pretty quickly. A lot of the NIN players that came to the game were the fairweather players, who come and go as they please, jumping from game to game with minimal regard or intent to hang around. Thus, when the new hotness that was Warlords of Draenor showed up, so did they. There’s nothing really wrong with these sorts of players – Twelve knows I used to be one of them.  As a matter of fact, this has been pretty positive for a lot of FFXIV’s more dedicated players. Dungeon queue timers of approaching an hour dropped overnight to ten minutes. DPS can now actually do something within the game without having to worry about going to get a drink and coming back to a timed out account and a missed queue. The market for purchased tank and healing runs died overnight, and even though I do those, believe me, it’s a good thing. That doesn’t mean that Draenor’s arrival has been all positive for our beloved game, however.

A lot of people play MMOs to progress, and WoW is no different. There were players hitting Level 100 in mere hours after Draenor dropped, and those players are there to run through the progression as hard as they can. These same players were responsible for much of the progress in FFXIV, and their loss has been noted. Dungeon queues are faster, but even for tanks, raid timers are going much slower. Whereas usually I get instant queues as a tank, now I’m waiting five to ten minutes on average. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a noticeable change. It’s unfortunate for me because I was just finally starting to get some momentum. There’s also been murmuring of players forgetting how to play their classes as well. A lot of the melee DPS require proper use of facing mechanics, and a common thread that’s been bouncing between my linkshells is that people simply aren’t changing their angles of attack much if at all. WoW was never very stringent on facing requirements, with backstab attacks being the most common and most concerned for. However, with Warlords of Draenor they’ve completely removed them, and that means that the Dragoons and Monks who were getting used to it are now coming back with their skillsets for proper facing trashed. Dragoons and Monks require that facing to do proper damage, so there’s been a few fights that I’ve had that should have been easy that were instead a nightmare because the DPS was just punching nails in the face.

I’ll see you one day, Final Coil, but it looks like it’ll be a minute.

So where does this leave us? We’ve got immediate changes to our playstyles. Statics are breaking apart like wildfire and people are looking for new alliances. Free companies are being abandoned, and houses that once had many players within them are growing cobwebs. World of Warcraft is always felt on the MMO community, and Final Fantasy XIV is no different. However, there’s good for it as well. There’s going to be a shakeup, and perhaps Eorzea needed one. Is it necessarily bad that we’ve lost a lot of ninjas? Is the dissolution of a few groups a horrible thing? If you’re looking for a fresh chance to get in on the ground floor of some work, this is the time to join the game. So if the servers of Blizzard are feeling a bit stagnant for you, and you can’t get into WoW with those immense queue times, wander on over to Square Enix again. We’ve got a warm hearth and plenty of room. We’ll find the positives, even as our numbers dwindle. They’ll come back up, they always do. Until then, we just keep a light on and wait for our treasured allies to return.