What's So Annoying? The Documentation!!

This may be a generation gap, but I don't think so. The documentation for World of Warcraft is abysmal. There are three sources of information about WoW: books, websites, and other players. Each leaves a great deal to be desired.

You would think there would a wide range of volumes available for World of Warcraft. With over 11 million players there is a ready made market. Further, it would be in Blizzard's interests to make WoW more accessible as that would mean an even larger customer bases. But sadly it is not so. The main offerings in print are Strategy guides by Brady Games. These are dense volumes that are more like a specifications manual than they are documentation. I have most, if not all of them, and rarely refer to them at all. They are simply unusable. I'm sure there are people who find them useful. But they come under the umbrella of driven singularities which I will get to in a moment. There are also numerous online guides that you can download, some free, some you pay for. The problem with that is that there is no way to know if they are any good or if the information is accurate.

Websites are the primary form of documentation. This is the generation gap that I was referring to earlier. I am used to books. Younger people are used to websites. The question is - is this just a question of different modes or it is a difference of quality. I would say that it is a difference of quality. The WoW main sight is pretty good at giving you the most superficial of overviews, but getting to any depth is nearly impossible. There are sites like Thottbot that are pretty good for quest information. And there are numerous other sites that various people swear by. Nonetheless, there are several problems with all these sites. The first is that there is no systematic overview of the information available. So, figuring out even where to look is an uphill battle. Second, the information is hit or miss. If you are lucky, you may find what you are looking for. Chances are you won't. Third, these sights are organized as wikis making them nearly impossible to use. All this does not mean that people never find what they are looking for at these sites. They do. And this is again the driven singularity problem.

The third source of information is other people. People ask questions in guild chat. Sometimes other people will try to answer. People ask questions in the open chat channels such as the trade channel. Sometimes other people will try to answer. But, using other people as a source of information is even more hit or miss than going to websites. First, if you ask a question in any of the channels, you are lucky if you get any answer at all. If you get an answer, you don't know if it is accurate or not. And the person providing the answer probably does not know if it is accurate. So, any information you get from other people is suspect at best.

Does anybody ever find what they need when they have a question? Yes, they do. And that brings us to the driven singularities.You can say "there is no way to find where a quest is" and somebody might say "sure, just go to Thottbot". You can say "there is no way to figure out if +8 spirit is better than +8 stamina" and somebody might say, "sure just go to wowwiki.com".  Just because specific individuals have had the persistence to find specific things does not mean the documentation is adequate. There are, what I am calling, driving singularities. Individual people who persisted enough to find some obscure piece of information.

There are several problems with driven singularities. First, it takes way to much time to find something if you happen to be a driven singularity. Second, if that driven person doesn't happen to be within earshot when you ask a question, you just won't get an answer. Third, that person might not know what they are talking about. People often over claim their expertise. And finally, this approach only works in a very, very, very small percentage of the cases where people are looking for information.

WoW brags over 11 million users and that is, indeed, an accomplishment. However, with decent documentation, that number might be ten times, a hundred times, or maybe even a thousand times the current level.