WoW v StarCraft

WoW are StarCraft are both games I’ve played for years. But for very different reasons.

At their heart, one is a skill based game, the other an experience based game.

In WoW, the more you play, the more powerful you become. While skill still certainly plays a huge role, it always takes a backseat to experience. No matter how good you are, if you haven’t played long enough to have a level 90 character, you won’t be able to raid. No matter how good you are, if you aren’t geared for heroic raids, your DPS just won’t cut it. That’s how WoW works, and that’s what keeps us playing WoW. We’ve invested literally years into the game, and that investment keeps us playing.

StarCraft is skill based. If you’re one of the best players in the world, like Stephano, you can hop into any account and start pwning all the way to the top. Sure, you’ll need to build a few XP points to get into Grandmaster’s league. But by and large, skill is what seperates the men from the boys.

So imagine my surprise when I read a post on the Blizzard forums that reads something like “XP in SC is insulting.” The person who made the post was taken for a troll. But the more I thought about it, the more I realize he had a valid point.

All these years, I’ve switched back and forth between WoW and StarCraft, specifically on the basis of whether I wanted a skill or experience based game. I think the aforementioned poster had a legitimate point. While adding XP to StarCraft may not be insulting, it certainly makes little sense to me.

Compare StarCraft to an age old strategy game like chess or go, and see how silly it seems. Would chess benefit if players were given XP for every piece they capture, for every fork and skewer they play? What would be the point of XP, when at the end of the day, MMR is the only real metric? And why would Blizzard introduce meaningless XP, while still keeping us ignorant of the only points that matter, MMR?

Rock, devs, anyone on the inside care to comment?