Eidotrope at OutDPS: This is a follow-up to a piece I wrote earlier on maintaining the WoW playerbase. This post focuses on something largely left out of discussions so far: narrative.
Storytelling has been left out of the discussion of WoW’s alleged ills related to declining subscriptions and player apathy. I bring it up not because I think it is the most compelling aspect of these problems, but because it is a part and has been overlooked. WoW is an MMORPG (the emphasis of this piece being on the latter three letters) and part of playing such a game is participating in its story or stories. Your avatar often starts from humble beginnings and then ventures out into a larger world and begins to operate on a much larger scale, be it slaying dragons or founding empires or exploring alien planets. Even if you, the player, have no interest in the lore as all this goes on, you likely still want the hoops your character is jumping through to make some degree of sense, and that sense comes in large part from good storytelling.
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