Massively^™

There's a person out there who claims that all they need to know about business can be learned from World of Warcraft. A fine sentiment, to be sure, but I take issue with its accuracy. Today we are discussing the first of their eleven business topics: value chains – and why they don't work.

In brief, value chain analysis states that for any good requiring multiple stages of production (meaning you don't just rip it out of your backyard and eat it), value is added at each level of refinement. Therefore the price should increase along its path to becoming a finalized product.

In their current state, skills in MMOs could be improved. Tell me exactly what kind of 'skill' is involved in clicking a button a few times until the game decides that you're able to make something better? What if your character's skills were a direct result of how good you were at actually performing the task in question? What if an action's level of success was dependent on how well you actually carried out the action and not on how often you had clicked a button?

The effects of a system like this would be most apparent in crafting; imagine a game where, in the crafting interface, you had direct control over the creative process, a system where the quality of the item varied according to the level of skill employed by the player during the creative process, and not on how many times you had clicked a button to make the item in the past.

The beauty of a system like this is that players who naturally excel in a certain skill would be rewarded for it, regardless of the amount of time spent grinding their skill level up, but at the same time, players who simply created the same item again and again would get better anyway, because after all, practice makes perfect.