Trash Talkin

I got into an interesting conversation tonight with one of my co-workers about the affectionately named "Trash" in endgame dungeons in World of Warcraft.

My coworker argued that trash is a waste of time, and that developers should be using their time to make more boss fights and less trash. Personally, I feel that trash is an important part of any world. Trash in the virtual world is equavilent to the normal inhabitants of our everyday lives. Think about when you go shopping, your goal and interest has you dealing almost solely with the employees of the store itself, sometimes not even with employees (I love self checkouts). All of the other people roaming around are not part of your overall goal, nor are they a requirement for you to obtain your ojbective of going to the store. But they do add to your personal experience, you may see people doing something funny, or see someone purchase an item that makes you remember something that you need to pick up. Be it good experiences, or bad, they are a part of your adventure to the store. Not to mention, they make it not so creepy. Ever been in a completely empty store? It feels kind of creepy.

Anyways, trash does a lot to flesh out the world, making it more logical or realistic. In a real world, there are lots of other living beings around. If there weren't, it would be a pretty boring world. Let's say you were storming a castle in real life, would you expect the castle to be empty and desolate except for the king sitting on his throne? Of course not! The second someone saw that you were attempting to raid the castle with your 50 friends, every person in that castle would be up in arms defending the castle with their lives. The same would be true of nearly any dungeon within WoW. Once you've entered into someone else's domain, they aren't going to respond happily about it.

Trash can be used in so many ways, to do so many things. Besides the ability to make sense of the world, trash also serves as a pacing mechanic. Releasing content for an MMO is basically a developer trying to extend the life of their game. If no additional content ever came out, the game would become dull and stale rather quickly. While the content is designed (hopefully) to be interesting, enjoyable, and a challenge, the financial part of the equation is that it's there to keep you playing. In an MMO environment, the company wants to keep you playing and, in-turn paying. I know it sounds kind of corporate and cold when I say it like that, but it's not. All producers and developers know that the best way to keep you playing is to keep you having fun. Developers want you to keep playing because you have having the best experience ever! Any developer worth their salt wants to make the best damn game they can. Can you imagine the feeling of accomplishment releasing a product that makes millions of people happy? A developer wants you to have the best time in the world with their game. The corporate side of it, on the other hand, wants your money. Luckily, the relationship works out great, because consumers are willing to pay for a good product.

Anyways, I strayed off topic there. Let's get back to trash and pacing. Trash is a very important pacing mechanic within a dungeon. A dungeon has to accomplish a few things. First it needs to keep you occupied. If you dinged level 80 in wow, and there were no dungeons, you'd be done. You would either have to start a new character, or move to a new game. There would be nothing left for you to do. Luckily, the developers are smarter than that, there is so much content at 80, that many people feel that hitting max level is only the start of the game. This holds true of each dungeon as well. Getting access to the dungeon (wether travel, or attunements) is where the experience starts. Completing the dungeon is the enjoyable part of it. The trash allows the developers to define how long this experience will last. There are many quick kill dungeons, where you go in, fight a boss, and leave. But these are designed this way, often times these types of dungeons are either insanely hard, or insanely easy, and have rewards that match appropriately. In order to really make something last, you've got to keep players interested and involved in it for an extended amount of time. This is where trash helps. Each pack of trash is like a miniature checkpoint within the dungeon. Due to the long respawn times of trash in WoW, the portion of the dungeon you've already cleared, stays cleared, allowing you to keep your progress. Using trash as a pacing mechanic ensures that the experience lasts the designed amount of time.

A dungeon also needs to be a challenge. When games are just too easy, they aren't fun. Human nature is to overcome challenges, when something is not a challenge, it become monotonous and uninteresting. This level of challenge gives players a series of goals, a number of obstacles in their way, each one being a short term goal, contributing to the larger, ultimate goal of completing the instance. Each trash pull may not be the biggest challenge in the world on its own, but if you don't do it right, you will have problems. You could back into another group of mobs, or not interrupt the mobs heal, or just not be geared enough to handle the instance. Either way, defeating the trash can be a challenge, and can give you a sense of accomplishment. Thus, allowing players to ride this feeling of accomplishment for the whole instance if they are able to do so. We've all been in positions where an instance is just insanely hard, once you complete it, you feel like a million bucks, really feeling like you've accomplished something substantial. On the flip side, I think we've all gone into an instance and just crushed it, every pull went smoothly, and every boss was executed perfectly. This gives us a litmus test to see how we, as players of the game, are performing. Using trash to further define and set this level of challenge, allows us to be more confident that the test results are accurate. Anyone can get lucky and kill a boss once, but when your group takes out every pack perfectly, you may be on to something.

Trash can also serve as a training mechanic. In order to keep the game interesting and evolving, developers are continually trying to bring new and exciting ideas and mechanics to the game. Introducing new mechanics and styles though, is difficult. Players are inherently resistant to change; learning new things can be difficult, especially if they seem to be dropped on a player all at once. Trash can be used to soften this blow and help to ease players into new and exciting mechanics. Take for example the Moam encounter in the ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. This encounter required a group to aggressively drain the mana from the boss to prevent him from exploding. With no precursors to this mechanic, many groups would suffer greatly trying to figure out the gimmick. Luckily, the designers placed Obsidian Eradicators in the instance leading up to Moam. The eradicators used a very similar mechanic, requiring a group to control and manage the mana of the trash mob to prevent it from doing a huge attack. Having the group go through a number of these trash mobs before reaching the boss, the mechanic now becomes immediately recognized, but still amped up to make it acceptable for a boss. In this way, trash is a training ground for the players. Preparing them for what's coming. If you don't get the mechanic right away on the trash, the consequences are minor, some AOE damage, and you try again, on the Moam himself, the stakes are higher resulting in instant death. The training mechanism here is very forgiving and allows players to ease into it on their own terms. Until they reach the boss of course. This can be seen used quite extensively and intelligently within WoW. Look at the introduction of the vehicle system for example. This system could have been dropped on a players head all at once, instead you experience this system multiple times before reaching any large epic encounters where it's used.

Another use of trash can be for story telling purposes. MMO games have a goal of presenting the players with a world to experience. As with any functional world, even fantasy ones, there are rules and social dynamics of how things work. In order to make the world more believable, we need to make sure that these characters all have a purpose. That all of their abilities make sense within the world, and that everything is there for a reason. Trash helps to bolster this concept. Nearly all dungeons have a primary antagonist. This antagonist is usually referred to as the boss of the instance. Now, presumably, this boss has done something to make themselves bigger and badder than the rest of the creatures around him. How can we show this off to the players? Trash. Big bad antagonists have to have minions. You can't trouble the lord of dragons to have to clean the walk ways or prepare the food. He's going to have a staff of servants to do it for him. This is something that can be shown with trash. If the ultimate goal is to destroy the lord of fire, then it's appropriate for this creature to have an army of fire based minions that must be cut down to reach him. This can be further explored through creature abilities relating to a fiery theme. Trash helps to set the stage for the story being told. It adds depth and logic to the world around the players.

Now, I'm not saying that we need more trash in our instances. As with most players, I find that too much trash can hurt the pacing and make a dungeon feel like it drones on and on. But, the next time you're in a dungeon, think for a second about how much the trash adds to the experience.