A decline of heroics, or a rise of player creativity?

It's been ages since I ran a heroic dungeon. I'm not sure exactly when I swore them off, but it couldn't have been long after patch 3.3 was released, because the dungeon finder made heroic groups so easy to form that I chain ran them like nobody's business. With those badges rolling in like Draenei alts rolling into Azuremyst Isle after Burning Crusade was released, I ran those heroics non-stop until I got all the gear I wanted. It was then that I realized, why am I going through these heroics? Because aside from the Frozen Halls, they just weren't interesting. Kill order wasn't important anymore, the bosses didn't provide a challenge, and victory was practically guaranteed. They were just plain not fun, so I stopped, and with Wrath's solo content exhausted and raiding out of the realm of possibility, I went back to leveling alts, leaving the world of heroics behind to evolve as it would.

And evolve it did, as I have become quite aware over the past few weeks. I first became aware of this evolution when I read a WoW.com Breakfast Topic asking players how they spice up their heroic runs. My comment could be summarized, as Skarn so eloquently put it, thusly: "...while there ARE things you can do to make an instance more interesting, once you reach the point that you have to come up with these crazy things, is the place really worth running any more? Hasn't the activity worn itself out?" However, what got me thinking about this whole situation in a different way was a response to my commend that said the following: "what he's saying is that running the heroics itself should be fun all by itself, and the fact that he has to change a normal routine a bit to keep his interest is not what he's paying for. " That latter part got me thinking: what if I really am just sticking too closely to my normal way of doing things? What if finding ways to spice up boring content isn't a sign that the content has run its course, but an expression of creativity on the part of the players, and I'm just showing a lack of creativity by not doing that?

The second thing that got me thinking about this possibility was a post by Larisa of the Pink Pigtail Inn about people trying to take short-cuts in instances and how doing so is a waste of time, since taking shortcuts usually makes the run take longer (since they usually don't work) than it would have taken to just kill the enemies being skipped. My comment on that post remarked that taking those short-cuts probably wasn't about saving time; it was probably about trying to make those boring old heroics interesting, and adding the possibility of failure back into heroics definitely makes them interesting again, since that possibility has long been absent from them. In other words, these shortcuts are another way to add dimension to easy content, and a rather impressive way at that, for finding and pulling off these shortcuts is no easy task.

So I was forced to ask myself, am I just too used to the fun in this game being handed to me to see that fun can still be had in heroics? Or is the fact that players are resorting to these measures to make heroics interesting a sign that they really have run their course? Really, what the question comes down to is, should this game be fun on its own without players needing to make their own fun, or is it ok for the game to exist in a way where players do need to make their own fun?

It's not an impossibility, after all. Rare as they may be, games and mini-games where you largely have to make your own fun have been successful. The best example I can think of is Nintendo's series Animal Crossing, a life sim lite where there really aren't many true "goals", and the few goals there are take so long to get that you need to make your own fun along the way. However, the game provides so many outlets for you to do so that it's easy to make your own fun. There is a huge variety of goals in the game: paying off the loan on your house, as well as successive loans on your house's expansion; trying to catch every fish in the game, trying to catch every bug in the game, trying to complete the exhibits at your museum, trying to improve the layout of your house to appease the Happy Room Academy (who judges your house for what you put in it), etc. There are also a number of creative outlets within the game, including a tailor shop where you can make designs for all sorts of uses (t-shirts, laying on the ground, etc.), you can change the layout of the town itself by planting trees and flowers, you can buy furniture to make your house look the way you want it to, etc. All that is to say that a game where you have to make your own fun isn't that out-there of an idea.

But could that idea be applied to WoW? Unlike WoW, Animal Crossing was designed from the group up to support this kind of play, which exactly why it's the main form of play in that game. WoW, on the other hand, has a much more straightforward design where it's much clearer what you're supposed to do for fun: level up, do quests, go into raids, go into battlegrounds, make money for the money sinks, etc. Really, the most creative aspect of the game is making money, since there are more ways to do that than any other activity in the game. Not only that, but for the longest time, it was also the part of the game that inspired the most creativity on the part of the players, mostly through people who found ways to fight in so-called "auction house PvP", or players who found unorthodox markets to try to corner.

Thing is, like most games with this kind of design, the game stops being fun once the content is exhausted. Animal Crossing could keep being fun even after you completed everything there was to do in the game (and I doubt anyone actually did that) because of all of its creative outlets, but as we have seen with heroics, when a game is designed to be fun in a straight-forward way, it loses its appeal much faster once we have exhausted that fun. The Wrath heroics have been around for long enough that that very well could have happened ages ago, and the lack of challenge in heroics now just makes it harder to ignore. Players trying to find ways to spice up their heroic runs and taking short-cuts to put some challenge back into heroics are really just doing the only thing they can do to make heroics fun again: putting some creativity into a part of the game that wasn't designed to support a creative playstyle.

So, where does that leave us with our original question? Are these alternative ways of running heroics signs of heroics being on the decline or signs of players playing more creatively? Well, I think it's both, and the second is simply an instinctual reaction to the first.