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Lead Blizzard Dev Outlines 9 WoW Quest Problems, Admits to Designing Stranglethorn Quest (http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1096)

Admittedly he's left now, so perhaps he's more free to comment on these things, but at the same time I admire his willingness to admit to his mistakes, and explain what he learned from them.

I don't like some of his points, though I agree with others.  Point #4, the "mystery" point particularly irks me because he's basically saying players must be led by the nose at all times and told exactly what to go do.  I see that there should be an ample number of quests like that, but it shouldn't exclude quests existing where the player actually has to do a little thinking.  On the other hand, it's a fine line, due to quest sites and such.  It's imperative if you're trying to create a quest where the player actually has to think about solving the problem presented to them to give the player enough information that the average, reasonably intelligent human being will put together the data they've been provided before they grow irritated and simply look up the answer.  Of course, that's a very variable point depending on the individual, but a general average can probably be reached where a lot of players will figure it out themselves, before they get to the point where they'd rather just look up the answer.

I definitely agree with point #9, where he notes that having to collect shit from some monsters and not others, and the absurdity of monsters not dropping their body parts is an irritation to the player (or at least it seems like that's his point).

I don't like his point #2, 'too long, didn't read', since I'm one of the people who DOES want to read the quests, but I do see where it's coming from.  Too many people don't read the quests, so presenting the information in a way that people will be more interested in would go a long way toward getting them more involved in the story.  In this case I'd look to FFXI and it's remarkable and excellent cutscene storytelling, where the player is taken into their own cutscene where their character moves and interacts with other characters.  In order to prevent them from being annoying to players who've seen them before, the cutscenes could set an account-wide flag, allowing the player to skip them the second time through, even if it's on a different character.  WoW inched in this direction with the Wrathgate cinematic (which everyone I know loved, and was an excellent way of communicating that part of the story), but the client is probably not set up to and never will be able to do cutscenes anywhere on the level of FFXI.  Most of my friends who played FFXI with me also agreed that the cutscenes, especially major story ones, were one of the highest points of the game.

Blizzard regularly admits when they fuck things up. Probably 90-95% of the time even. It's their ability to diagnose their own failings that creates the infamous Blizzard shine and all that jazz.



Koyasha, I disagree with your interpretation of number four. I didn't take it to mean "go to X, collect Y" forever. I read it as the mystery should be "Who killed Roger Rabbit?", not "Is there even a murder to solve?". You can have difficult problems that take a little figuring to solve, but you have to actually tell them what the problem is, is what he is getting at.

You can't demand the answer to a question you haven't asked yet. (well you can, but your either an asshole and/or crazy.)

I think you missed his point, what I got from that was the notion that people want immersion through in-game experience, not through reading paragraphs of text. I don't think he's saying he want's to do away with lore, rather than he would rather present it through a more interactive experience (cutscenes and the like) rather than giving people pages of text to read. I think Wrath began to exemplify this with events such as the Wrathgate cinematic, the CoT:Strat introduction and numerous other minor quests where progression within the quest is presented through NPC talk and action, rather than static screens of text.

[Party]Koyasha:  Okay guys, we're supposed to discover which person in town is actually a spy. Now I've compiled a list of clues, and I think if we put our heads together...
[Party]Beefmeat:  QuestMod says it's the baker.
[Party]Stelthkilla:  lol clues! dl qm, fagass
[Party]Koyasha:  Ahem, well anyway, there are probably more quests here. Since Blizzard removed those exclamation points to give a more immersive experience, we should spread out and...
[Party]Stelthkilla: WTF is this ur first day?
[Party]Beefmeat:  Yeah, there's a mod that puts all the exclamation points back. I already got all the quests in this zone. Here, I'll just share them.

So much condensed win.

I disagree with his points 2 and 3.  I read all the text.  I like the story.  Don't skimp on storytelling just because Johnny Pothead has ADD.


Edit:


The problem with that is if you start to rely TOO much on cutscenes and the like, you start to run into people complaining about being forced to watch them all.  Text is easy to skip for those not interested.  Cutscenes and animations, not quite as easy plus you can't go back to review it later.

True, too many cutscenes would be almost as bad. I think the general idea is to find ways to present lore in a more immersive way. Other genres manage to tell their stories without requiring players to read reams of text, so why should MMOGs?

I think phasing is another technology that allows this to move on; I would see the Icecrown quest chains as the next iteration in WoW quest evolution where increasing amounts of the lore experience is shifted off the quest text and onto the actual content of the quests.

Mythic giving a presentation called "Creating a Great MMO" while Blizzard delivers one on "mistakes made" is some hilarious irony.

If you haven't done Icecrown, then you've missed a whole bunch of what I think he's talking about with lore interaction.  You get the back-story on Arthas by being him in several quests, and seeing scripted scenes instead of just reading paragraphs of text about slaughtering the army to raise them as the first scourge, raising the first frostwyrm and fighting Illidan.  You also get a lot of this in Dragonblight with your quest to put the spirits of the betrayed to rest and the bit where you hunt down the cave where Frostmourne was kept.

We have a winner!

Introspection? What's that? I'm sorry, I'm too busy being a bald, braying jackoff clown to do all that...

Interesting.

I think some of what he's saying is too categorical: don't do this, don't do that, when what he really should say is, "Don't do this POORLY".

So take "mystery quest". Why don't those work? They don't work because WoW isn't a dynamic environment. So you get frustrated when you know there's something you're supposed to do and you can't figure out where or what it is, but that's because you know it *will* be something like "fetch me the gnoll paws" or "find the corpse". So you say, "Cut the fucking coyness, tell me which levers I press to get the cheese". But if WoW was a more dynamic world where mysteries actually existed *because* the world changed in response to player activities, I think a lot of us would enjoy a "mystery quest". If a quest-giver said, "Something's wrong in Elwynn Forest", and the answer to that was honestly shifting all the time, it would be fine.

Take the "don't write a long quest, don't write a book". I agree. But that doesn't mean, "Just write a short two sentences that say, 'Get me 17 gnoll paws, kthnx". What's the most popular quest in WotLK so far? Wrathgate. That has a shitload of storyline connected with it. If you wrote it out, it would be a chapter of a book, at least. Why do people like it? *Because it's delivered in the form of the GAME, not as text or some other form that is exterior to the game.* Do your storytelling *in* the medium, but don't fail to tell stories and have atmosphere.

Haha. No.
People like Wrathgate because there's a machinima linked to it. That's it. If the events displayed in that movie were presented in a few paragraphs by a quest giver, most wouldn't even know that Bolvar had died.

Yeah, that would have been insightful. Please. If he had gone up there and said some wishy-washy "Don't do stuff badly!" bullshit I'd have hoped someone threw a tomato at him. What's more, it's worth noting that the topic was "things we did wrong making WoW" and not "holy commandments for all MMO developers who shall ever exist".


Then it would have been a completely different game, and the material of this presentation would have been much different in that alternate universe, yes. Not to be TOO snarky, but come on. The guy's giving a speech, not traveling back in time.


Come on man, you're chasing pie in the sky. I know you really want someone to build a medieval version of the Matrix in which to have infinite adventures, but you're way the hell off into Raph Koster Dreamland right now.

Seriously. This should just be stickied in the Warhammer forum in the Graveyard, because it explains everything.

I am not a big Tigole fan by any stretch, but the massive chasm of competence between Blizzard and Mythic has never been more starkly illustrated than these two presentations.

I'm just saying that it's not the idea of a "mystery quest" that sucks intrinsically, it's that it is ill-suited to a DIKU MMOG, that's all. Which means, yes, for now, they suck. This is kind of his point about vehicles: it's not that they suck intrinsically, it's that they are very ill-suited to the actual engine and gameplay of WoW. Though even there: I hate the WoW vehicle quests *mostly*, but I'd agree that now and again, I do one that's kind of fun or ok, so part of it is bad implementation of a kind of bad idea and part of it is just massive fucking overuse of the idea.

The presentation was about mistakes they made with WoW, not 'the 9 laws of MMO design'.

I'll say this about his comment on vehicles:  Getting up there and saying "You know that major feature of the hugely-hyped expansion we just released a few months ago? Yeah, it was pretty much shit!" was fairly ballsy. Even if you want to argue that WoW is so successful that he could have taken a shit on the podium and it wouldn't have mattered, which is most likely the case, it was still a hell of a lot more candor than I expected.

Most MMO companies, whether they're on top or not, won't admit that anything they do is less than awesome unless it totally fucking explodes in their face, NGE-style.

I've done all of the quests and those are the ones that really stand out.  They really need to concentrate on doing much more of that in comparison to normal "get x and I'll give you Y" quests.  They have stumbled onto a really nice mechanism.   They need to ride that horse hard.

Guild Wars does a really good job with cutscenes, IMO, particularly in later expansions - in particular because the cutscenes put *your* character in the center of the story, even to the point of having voice acting. I think they could get a lot of mileage out of doing something similar for their core storyline quests like they did with Wrathgate (but actually using your character instead of having you basically just a spectator), and leave the normal quests basically alone at that low word count.

I agree that this shows you one of the reasons why WoW is successful. Basically, because the people who design and maintain it are restlessly self-critical, think a lot about what they can do better, and they're not afraid to say, "That was a mistake".

Every other MMOG designer except maybe Cryptic gets more and more hysterical and overwrought as player criticism hones in on their product's major weaknesses or mistakes.

This was the endlessly repeated cycle on the SWG forums pre-NGE.

1. "No, that's EXACTLY AS INTENDED and it's GREAT, it's AWESOME, and only you small group of fourm whiners don't like it. WE are GREAT."
2. "We're looking into that."
3. "We believe in listening to our customers. We're really interested in your views".
4. "We've made the following GREAT, FANTASTIC CHANGE to our game because we ARE GREAT and our game is GREAT and all of our players are very satisfied and nobody is quitting."
5. "John Smedley will be posting tomorrow to apologize in vague terms to you for unspecified things."
6. "No, that's EXACTLY AS INTENDED and it's GREAT".

Seriously, who else has been able to carry out live, continuing postmortems of design decisions besides Blizzard, where that didn't come off as a shifty exercise in public relations?

And it still took a year for SOE to fess up and admit it was a disaster.

Guild Wars did a lot of things right.  I wish more people paid attention to their design.

I think that 2. tl;dr and 3. Medium Envy are more explicitly linked than the list makes them. The point isn't that quest designers need to minimize lore, it's more: "Nice story-arc Robert Jordan, now fit it into 500 character chunks so the player feels like she's PART of it." Evoking plot, background, and characterization in fewer words makes it more powerful, not less. Stretching it into multiple parts keeps the player interacting with the world and deepens the experience. Text is so 1986.

You are in a dark room. On the floor you see a pile of hay. There are exits to your left and right.

It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

The quote they have for the first point about losing all control to guide people into a fun experience struck a cord with me.  It’s a nice sentiment but I see a lot of what hes talking about circling around this notion of homogenizing the WoW experience. Or whatever the hell you want to call it.   Seen it a lot in Wrath.  I’m not a big fan.

My experience getting from 1 to 80 should be about as different as possible from the next guy.  I realize this is hard to do but I think it should be the goal.  He seems to be talking about writing a script rather then a game.  Maybe because it’s easier to design.


I was thinking more choose-your-own-adventure books.

Infocom grew to be masters of character-cheap narrative, though. To steal an example from Graham Nelson (http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.txt), look how much tone and exposition Brian Moriarty squeezed into the first 500 characters of 'Trinity':

Also: Kaplan's commentary on collection quests leaves out my most frustrated critique of them, and one which I hope Blizzard has done away with in the new expansion: They discourage grouping. When everyone can pick up their own copy of the unblemished wallaby appendix from the corpse that finally drops it that's typically okay, but when EACH must collect nine despite the 5% drop rate? That not only spreads the madness around, it magnifies it by the square of the number of players.

The raptor problem in the Barrens wasn't that raptors were less common and easily located than other mobs, it's that they were already dead because some other jackass had already killed them. Grouping up with two friends to find them only meant you were monopolizing everybody's time for THREE TIMES as long as it might take you alone. Maybe. The sense of "How long will this take? Who knows!" is never productive.

The bit where he talks about trouble with having to kill other creatures to get to the ones you want is more obvious with the Horde quests for Raptors in the Arathi Highlands. Not only was the drop rate low, but the raptors were surrounded by wandering aggressive spiders and long-rage roaming aggressive vultures. See also: Hellfire Peninsula.

Hellfire it was less of a problem because almost every mob in the zone is used for a quest at some point. The trick is just knowing (read: using an addon or a quest walkthrough) what order to do the quests so you're killing all useful mobs at the same time.

:oh_i_see:

I always assumed that was by design.  One player killing one mob gets roughly the same XP as a group of five players killing five mobs, so if you need to kill X number of pikachus, then the solo player is getting roughly five times the kill XP for completing that quest (though they may well be doing it slower).  So you'd either need to come up with enough quests that the solo player will never see eighty percent of them, or your group of five players is going to run out of quests before they level and have to stand around farming emus.  The "collect X bits" quests, I thought, were there to balance out the difference.

Yea, yea. I know everyone is ranting about the lorelol in here, but I'm just saying. The raptors in Arathi are quest mobs surrounded by trash. The mobs in Hellfire are all useful at some point. It's not exactly the same situation. And you could learn optimal quest circuits just by "legitimately" leveling through the content enough times, if you were so inclined.

"It's not their fault the game is tedious, if you learn to be efficient you won't have to suffer it for as long."

:uhrr:

It's pretty simple.  There isn't much difference between Kill X and Bring Me X except for when the drop rate isn't 100% it means Bring Me X > Kill X.  Just tell me how many you want me to kill.  If I want to stay out there and harvest more I will.

Also share the credit with group members.  Yes, a raptor only has one head, but give us both credit.  I'm pretty sure I can tell the dude Bob helped, so we collectively gathered the nine he wanted.  (Since Kill X is shared, Gather X can be, too.)

The aforementioned points about exp from kills are valid ones, though.  Remember in original WoW there were barely enough quests to get you to 60.  Some people had to grind anyway because they couldn't find enough quests.

A 'kill X' quest can be said to give Y exp, which is the total for the quest and the total exp that X monsters give, since you had to kill X number of monsters to complete the quest.  However, when such a quest is split among 2-5 people, the exp portion from the monsters goes down anywhere between about 50% to 80%.  Total quest exp goes way down.

A 'gather X' quest that requires each party member to gather their own X's, on the other hand, scales.  Two people need to kill twice the number of mobs, therefore getting the same total amount of exp.  Three to five people actually get a little more exp out of the quest due to the group bonus.  But in general, they're not going to get less than the average amount of exp that quest usually provides.

Obviously the correct solution, which seems to be more common these days, is to provide far more quests than you need in order to hit max level, or not take into account kill exp when calculating how far to max level.  But, in the context of the way it was done in original WoW, unsharable collect quests rather than everyone-gets-credit kill quests make sense in that regard.

I am STILL waiting for a toontown-like system where if you automatically join a group that's beating on a monster, or one that's on the same quest as you and is nearby, it parties you up.

THAT is the way to encourage grouping. Not some convoluted looking-for-group system that everyone hates and goes out of their way to avoid (Hint: Design FAIL when people still spam LFG in trade)

The open groups in WAR were probably the only thing they did right. Even though nobody was necessarily doing exactly what you wanted to do, you could be guaranteed that you'd find a group doing something that required a group to do. I'll have to look up the Toontown system.

I agree that the experience issue was likely why the 'gather X' model was created, but just like it was a bad idea fill folks' bags with pages of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn even though it created a zone economy, I think it's a bad idea to make people feel (accurately or no) like grouping with their friends (or new, potential friends) is slowing them down. Just like the low drop rate on certain quest items did guarantee that people would get more experience grinding quest mobs than if two infected pheasant lungs dropped off every pheasant. Not knowing other than the vaguest estimate of how long you have before you find those last three lungs appeared doesn't make the experience more exciting. Especially when you know that grouping with that jerk poaching your pheasants isn't going to make lung-gathering go any faster.

The thing that's kinda torqued me about quests in WotLK is the uneven applications of the whole zone phasing system.  They were going on and on about how their super new technology let them have quests that made permanent changes in a zone for people who had done quests, but they still had TONS of zones where there'd be no change at all.  Big quest chain, involved the death of a giant god thing.  But the giant god thing is still just chilling in the middle of the zone whenever I go by.  Was it really so hard to just make me not able to see the stupid god NPC after witnessing its dramatic death?  Another zone, same deal, big quest chain, led to the killing of a huge undead construct, huge undead construct promptly respawned and went back to wandering around.  Meanwhile the whole super-uber cutscene quest that people are talking about did change things to fuck up the Alliance camp by the gate where the massacre happened, which is fine, but weeks later it's STILL on fire, and still full of screaming NPCs, which are annoying as hell whenever I'm flying overhead and shrieks start blaring out of my speakers.  Maybe someone could possibly have set things to stop the screaming people after the conclusion of the quest?  Just an idea.

It is annoying.  Also, no phasing mechanism for groups to help you out.

However, it is, whatever the criticisms, quite a large leap forward in the tech of online games.  I expect that the game that actually kills WoW (and it could be blizzards next one for all I know) will use this comprehensively to finally give us at least the illusion of a changing world.

Here's to hoping.

So the next big thing is to pay a monthly fee for 100% instanced single-player games with a chat client?  That incredible breakthrough is already here, its called "Play Baldur's Gate with IRC open."  Pass. 

I'm fairly sure that's not what I said.

You really have a massive reading problem.  Or you're actually that retarded.

Also, candlekeep was much the same when I went back the second time.  Except full of Dopplegangers.

Fucking Dopplegangers.


Edited to add : 

Further, by bringing up 100% instanced you seem to be ignorant of the difference between the two.  Phasing is an entirely different application of technology and has a lot more to offer than instancing.  In terms of 'World Change' Instancing is fucking useless since, by the very nature, it's totally static.  You can NEVER have world change with instancing.

However, you could combine the two.  Imagine two portals, one to Strat and one to Burnt-to-fuck Strat.  Now you run quests that use phasing where you attach strat to 'get in' to the first instance.  On completion, every time you come back, the portal takes you to 'ruined strat' where you can find the treasures you missed the first time or the bandits that have now moved in.

It's different and, actually, fairly exciting.  It's what phasing could have been in WotLK, except that my view is not only did it get rushed, but they didn't have time to really think on it.

Or they're saving it for the next step.

That's really only scratching the surface.

Effectively phasing is the same technology as stealth/invisibility, except you can make the shit that's flagged completely non-interactive with the player.  Assuming they are using a relatively powerful OO programming language (correctly), you could pretty easily set it up so that each player/group/raid has their own small world subspace, and even do tricky shit like make it so that heavily farmed quest mobs are instanced to be player or group specific, so that you don't have problems with them being over-farmed and don't have to enable exceedingly short spawn timers.

One of the biggest advantages I could see is mining/herbalism.  You could fairly easily make the nodes player-specific and put them on a 24 hour (or greater) respawn cycle to keep people from just running laps in Wintergrasp and fighting over nodes and force them to spread out more.

Oh, I know.  That's why the limited useage of it in WoW actually bugs fuck outta me.

It's a real leap forward, but it's not being used properly.  It's like taking a helicopter down the shops.

If quest mobs are phased to be group specific, and I don't have that quest, what do I see? If I already killed the undead giant, how many groups of people fighting air am I going to have to walk past? Or won't I be able to see them at all? Because finding out I couldn't help my friend run the initial Icecrown quests because he hadn't "built" Crusader's Pinnacle yet and was invisible to me was annoying the other night.

How much phasing can you do before 75% of the playerbase can't see each other because they're on the wrong part of a quest chain, or until everyone sees something different and nothing makes sense?

All the Icecrown group quests are all in the last instance of the zone phase. It does mean that you can't boost people, but frankly that's a tiny annoyance which is balanced out by much better content.

The implementation could stand to be improved, but I definitely wouldn't want to see it removed.

Something that would be interesting to see would be back-and-forth phasing. So you could see Crusader's Pinnacle be built, and then later overrun by undead, then rebuilt. This might be better applied to a pvp zone like Wintergrasp though.

I do wish WoW would embrace/steal WAR's public quest node system. I think if they added that part to the game instead of making group quests they way they are now, you'd have a lot better system in play.

The only downside I see to phasing is if you don't watch your zone sizes.  Even if you can't see all the other players and assorted mobs, they're still there, and a peek_a_boo() check has to be made for every item interaction.  They'll have to balance not making the zone feel empty with "cool shit happens here!" across seventeen different phases, and which groups can see what if people are on different steps.

Yes, I could imagine Bizzard doing PQ's intelligently... like one per faction.

A place where you could go to gain faction/xp... join public groups and then sally forth to a dungeon or raid if the group mix is fun.

Better than standing in Dalaran spamming /4 for groups while you wait for the guild event.

Throw a couple quest hubs nearby... allow for branching in and out of the PQ with directed quests... golly gee, might be fun.

I would shed a single tear for Mythic if a WoW refined WaR PQ/Open Group system was their [Mythic's] single $65M contribution to the advancement of MMO gameplay.

I was going to point out the fatal flaw as I saw it in public quests that made them a waste of time for development but your idea solves it. Brilliant.  If the next QD isle quest/daily hub to go in featured public quests, the whole "what happens when the levelling rush is over?" problem with public quests disappears. This idea should be presented to Blizzard, IMO.

+rep.

Ugh.

I was going to point out the fatal flaw as I saw it in public quests that made them a waste of time for development but your idea solves it.[/quote]

Open groups and PQs are both good ideas and WAR served as a good test bed for how they can go wrong. Ultimately PQs need to scale dynamically and reward those players who stick with it (not just any moron who wanders into the area at the right time) and open groups require some sort of benefit for teams sticking together.

You can make it so that an enemy is visible but doesn't respond to selection or mouse-over, shifting from "invisible" to "render only" is somewhat better than seeing people fighting invisible enemies and is no worse than mobs respawning in front of you.

Again, how is this different than a single-player game?  That's the ultimate in phased content...everything you do changes the game! 

Fuck this dimensional shift nonsense.  If the ultimate evolution of the MMO is that everyone runs around invisible to each other in a different quantum state like one of the more retarded Star Trek transporter accident episodes, I'm out.  That is not a "massively multiplayer" game in any way, shape or form.  I might as well call Yahoo chess a massively multiplayer game because there are a lot of people in the lobby before I go in my tiny invisible quantum-locked sanctuary with one other player.

Is the fate of the genre really going to be phased single-player (or 3-4 player) content, with a common bank for everyone to show off their gear?  I guess if devs find enough people stupid enough to pay a monthly fee for that, more power to em.   

I have to agree with tri on this. Phased content is good in some small cases. The deathknight starter areas for instance are essentially a newbie island tutorial for dk's and i'd like to see all starter experiences like this. no different than tortage in aoc or even similar to newbie island in eq2(when it came out) the one thing that is the same is that none of those areas you can go 'back' to and none of them are really designed with grouping in mind. It's a great use of fitting a single player game into an mmo but used to much and it will become a lobby game.

That seems to entirely defeat the purpose which is to preserve the fiction of the game world no?

If they are there but you can't click on them that's a purely mechanical change that actually further erodes the sense of world. So now I beat this guy, he's for some reason still alive and kicking, and also for some other reason I can't interact with him any more. What?

God no!

When my wife and I are playing and taking our time questing (L80 and most of the quests in WotLK still to do) the absolute last thing I want to do is group with some random fucktard and carry them through the quests with them picking up our loot and so forth. I don't mind helping people now and then with quests, but I do it on my terms.

Maybe as an opt-in system it could be ok, but god damn, I go out of my way to avoid the mouthbreathers in WoW.

I kinda figured maybe you could reskin and rename Krognorp the World-Pwner into a generic evil general for a given player after he had completed the Death To Krognorp quest, or whatever. So there's still SOMEONE there to fight, but it's not the dude the game made a big deal out of you heroically killing. But yeah, I don't really want to see phasing EVERYWHERE.

Thing is, you'd almost need to that for every named boss in every instance.

"Hey there Van Cleef! I cut your head off and presented it to the local militia boss two years ago. I'm mostly here for cloth today, but how's it going? How'd you reattach your head and get alive again, anyway?"

The graphics in most MMOs barely matter, you could probably replace a super dragon with a crab and it would be fine.

There's a fair bit of 'not getting it' in here.

 :why_so_serious:

I don't know if I'd like the 'single player mmo' that widescale use of phasing like this suggests would be any fun.  I don't think I would enjoy it, I don't particularly like Guild Wars' lobby cities and then instanced...everything, which is rather similar to what it would be like if I went out into the world and was in my own private phase with only my group attached.

On the other hand it is the only way to give the player any sense of having affected the world, and some of the phasing quests are very cool.  But does affecting the world really matter to the players that don't care about lore, don't care that the guy they're killing this week is the same guy they killed last week, and the same guy they're gonna be killing for the next six months?  If not, it doesn't matter if you phase them or not, just show them some cool shit.  And what does it do for the player that does care about the lore and likes to roleplay?  Well, he can feel like he was important and the hero when out in his own world, but when he goes back to town....everyone else was also 'the hero' in their world.  So there's no real difference from how it is now.

Limited use of phasing as they have now is probably the best thing to do.  It gives us the 'cool' factor without being too separating or too useless.  Although admittedly there are a lot of improvements they could make.  The aforementioned mobs - Akali and Thrym in particular - could easily be phased out once the quests involving them are completed.  But most importantly, they need to get the stupid out of the phasing system, by which I mean, let the player control their phase to a certain degree.  Let players pull others into their phase - I don't care that I don't need the help for this quest, I WANT TO PLAY WITH MY FRIEND.  And let players revisit old phases intentionally, because some of this stuff is cool, and we would like to see it more than once.  For that matter, there's an ever increasing number of NPC interactions that are cutscene-like.  Use phasing to allow us to go back, select them from our phasing control UI, and watch them again.  They are cool.

Personally, I think the quest system th
Respawns.  Fiction headshotted.

I'm thinking along the lines of using phasing as a coping mechanism for extremely high populations concentrated in an area, like Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra on launch day.  Dynamically generating new subspaces for every few dozen players that pile into the zone would make the entire ordeal less hateful.  If they ever add another "Isle of Quel'Danas" type mob holocaust you could do the same phasing tricks instead of having the respawn nodes scripted to trigger abnormally fast if there's a lot of farming going on, which would eliminate the "I just cleared to the portal to do the scrying quest, oops, fives mobs respawned at once and now I get to bend over and take it" phenomenon.

That being said, Blizzzard's approach to creating a fiction is inherently broken.  Randomly scattering mobs around the world with little interaction between them is bizarre, as is the respawn mechanic.  I'm not even going to touch the "everyone is a hero / not everyone should be the hero" problem, because it reeks of grunk.

Oh, for fucks sake.

Would people get OFF the idea of a Whole Phased Server ?

That's not what we're talking about.  It's certainly not what I was talking about anyway.  Another mindless derail.


And I'm not talking about it as a way to manage population or fights between the population either.  I'm talking about solving the eternal problem of a Static World.

...

Fragmenting the players was Age of Conan's by far most popular feature.

Yeah, I do green.

When I got into the WOTLK beta I made a Deathknight (of course), and I had gone out of my way to not read about features in WOTLK etc so that the experiecne would be as fresh as possible.

I was so fucking confused by the phasing.  It took me about 2 phases or so that I realized what was going on.  Its easily my least favorite thing in the WOTLK and one of the main reasons I didn't buy the expansion and cancelled my WoW account.  If that is the direction they are going, I've absolutely no interest.   To me, the fun of MMOs is playing in a virtual world with other people.  If you are going to give us each our own version of that world, or arbitrarily segregate the players into different "times" representing where they are in the story, then it is losing the very thing that attracted me to the MMO space in the first place.  Maybe a lot of people like it, and maybe it makes for good gameplay, but to me MMOs aren't just about the gameplay, they are about the EXPERIENCE.  Good MMOs offer up a really unique experience that is very different than the other games I play, without that feeling, I'll just play something else.

You realize that's only the dk starter area yes? I mean, 95% of wotlk is non phased. I mean I agree, I don't like phasing to a point either but the reaction seems a bit, harsh?

I don't know about you but landing in a town that is being buttfucked by horde, bolstering the town's defense, defending against a final push, then counter-attacking and creating a beachhead which ends at a little town and flight point was a really fun experience.

It was by far the best part of the WoTLK expansion and would have been completely impossible without phasing.

More please.

Well, it isn't the only reason I quit, but it was an important reason. Beside, regardless of the particular amount of phasing, it just shows the game going into a direction that seems antithetical to my conception of an MMO that I want to play.  In any event, I don't miss WoW even a little at this point.  Oh boy, if I still played I could be raiding Naxx content AGAIN with the same people I did it with 2 years ago  :ye_gods:  Even though I know they are releasing Ulduar soon, the raiding game is meh, the pvp is meh, and the one thing they do quite well, which is leveling PvE is going in a direction I'm less interested in (as I explained already).  I came to the conclusion that WoW just isn't the game for me like it once was.


I just cancelled EVE for lack of time to put into it to do the stuff i really want to do, so I'm actually currently without an MMO sub, but that WoW  + its clones aren't where I'll be going.  Need something different.

That won't actually help.

If it's solely on the users end, due to graphics lag, then it would.  When the server is melting under too many people concentrated into a single area it does nothing.  Just because the player can't see all this going on, the server still has to track it.  The more phases, the worse it gets.

You'd need actual, physical instances for it to help.  Even then the server still has to cope with simply being overloaded on launch day, when two weeks later the instances aren't even needed.  Why bother investing in the tech for a couple of weeks out of every two to three years?

Pretty sure he meant to help with the mob camping (etc.) that occurs in places with high player traffic that generally makes questing a royal pain, not as a tool to help server load and the resulting lag issues.  WoW has supposedly had dynamic respawn systems in place since TBC and has made more tweaks to the system for Wrath but it still can't handle traffic as high as you see right after launch.

I'm wondering if they're planning on doing some server tech upgrading anytime soon as the servers still seem to be having some peak time stress issues even this late after Wrath launch and 3.1 with Ulduar probably won't lighten the load.

Which means more mobs for the server to track spread across all these phases.  It can only handle so many entities in the area, and PCs have a larger footprint.  Phasing would only make it worse because now you have mobs that exist which can't be touched by the majority of the players.

Phasing is great for story telling.  You can change the scenery.  If there is a special mob the developers want spawned for an event that shouldn't impact anyone else in the area, it's wonderful.

It's just about the worst tool to think about when discussing ways to relieve population burdens.

I think that depends on where your bottleneck is, doesn't it?  As I understand it, currently, if a mob is "out of phase" with a client, it doesn't send that client information on the mob at all.  That would theoretically cut the bandwidth down, wouldn't it?  If the problem is something to do with CPU load or something, then it wouldn't help, but it should be fairly efficient for fighting the "everyone is in one place and the zone lags" problem, shouldn't it?  Or am I reading the problem wrong?  I am a total layman when it comes to programming, but while I can understand why having ten players in the same room is more bandwidth intensive than having ten players in ten rooms, I don't see why it would be more CPU intensive.

There are several problems we're touching on here.  For CPU limits though, the server, not the player, is the problem.

I am pretty sure this is only partially true.  I've heard people complain about graphic lag in the Ahn instance when fighting the boss who phases the party.  I'm guessing the information IS sent to the client and the client even loads the models, but we just don't get to see it.

You can easily test it by going to the edge of a phase. The one right behind Hodir is a good example. From outside the little phased area you can see the dead iron giants even if you've already done the quest to loot them. If you go in to the phased area, though, they disappear.

Which doesn't discount the possibility of it being garbage collected client-side when you cross the boundary.

Lantyssa, I talking about the very specific issue of several people farming the same mobs, the ensuing depopulation and associated shenanigans, and Blizzard's quirky spawn rate adjustment algorithm.

Now that I think about it, you could have spawn nodes near instantly repopulate after you aggro the previous mob from said node, but have the new mob be phased so that the player which just killed it's predecessor cannot interact with said respawn.  You still run into the "monster poping into existence when the player hits it" visual problem, although I really don't see how that's any more immersion breaking than respawn rates of >15 seconds.  As a plus, the number of mobs needed would be exactly proportionate to the number currently in existence amongst all subspaces.  You would need to be creative about building the mechanism for phasing though, I can see it being memory intensive.

The technical limitations are why I'm saying this won't work.  If what Ingmar is saying is true, this is doubly so because then the player's machine becomes yet another point of failure.

Phasing saves a bit of memory on the server-side in that it doesn't have to track mulitple copies of world geometry.  It loses some of those savings in keeping track of the differences between "histories", with more changes meaning less savings.  When you start adding players and multiple phases of mobs, then it starts eating into the server CPU because it still has to perform calculations to check whether A can interact with B, with C, with D, then B with C, with D, then C with D, etc.

Phasing hits the CPU while saving memory.  Memory is cheap.  CPU time is not.

To overlap a couple of "instances" it's an acceptable trade-off, especially if the art assets don't change much.  There are good reasons to use it in moderation.  Layer too many though and suddenly you have to do a massive number of calculations just to cast an area spell on two or three targets.  To check aggro.

If you're worried about spawn rate, it would be far better to discuss adjusting their algorithm than how phasing can solve that problem.  It can't, because that isn't what it is designed for.

Thrymm must be a bug or something. I don't know if everyone else has noticed but you fight him in a phase, only available to people doing the fight. Why they can't make him disappear when you kill him I have no idea but it's a big immersion breaker imo. (lol, did I just say immersion in a WoW thread?)

Refer back to original argument: if you're respawn rate is near instantaneous but a player is not capable of killing more than one spawn per point the spawn rate problem is fixed completely, there is never any shortage and not a lot of reference bloat.  The only additional measure needed would be a scripted effect (likely attached to an aura, itself attached to a node) which stores which node you are and aren't allowed to see the corresponding mob references for, and boolean variables are cheap.

Clock time isn't an issue, boolean variable comparisons are computationally trivial.  It's not like I'm suggesting they calculate distance from an arbitrary point via processor intensive floating point arithmetic to four of five actors simultaneously, then applying damage using a two-roll system to said mobs every second in addition to pulsing a speed mod debuff, yet even if I were it's not like Blizzard has any problems with... well... Blizzard (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=42940#taught-by-npc).

I rather disliked the phasing stuff. Partly because of the alternate reality feeling, and also because once you've tripped the quest flag and phased, the world goes back to being static again.
I also disliked the Wrathgate. It's a block of quest text wrapped up in a machinima wrapper. Bottom line is that I was still forced to take a break from playing the game in order to recieve a story infodump.
Generally, I was underwhelmed by the questing and storyline in Wrath as a whole. The only thing that kept me going was that after all the bullshit was over, I'd get back to raiding with my guild. That's what I'm paying 15 bucks a month for. Without raiding, I'd just quit and go offline single player and dream of the next sandbox MMOG.

How do hate on Wrathgate?

Sheepherder, I'll tell you this gently. Stop talking about things you clearly have no fucken clue of. You're talking about server design like someone who has built a Breakout clone might talk about rigid body dynamics. Lantyssa is, as far as I know, a chemist and appears to have twice the insight you do in general server architecture.

In short:

Anything that's calculated per actor = Bad (Why do you think collisons aren't server-side? It's just a distance check to an arbitrary plane, right?)

Anything that can be generalized across a large number of actors = Good

Ok, I'm done.

I don't get the Wrathgate hate.  I've only played through Alliance side, but I love it.

The phasing stuff is terrific, in my opinion.

Wrath has just knocked my socks off - but then, I'm a hardcore casual.  I don't raid much, preferring to go through zones when they're on farm status.  I like to sightsee through them.  Doing instances over and over again is not my idea of fun.  What I like to do is read the stories through the quests and explore through the zones.  Wrath has been superb.

Cool article, terrible derail.

Chemistry and Comp Sci, for what it's worth.  Though I've been programming since I was like ten, with an interest in design due to my MUD days.  Mind, there are people here who could crush me with their computer knowledge.

/informationalselfpromotion

And yet the only job offers folks around here give you are as domestic help.

I think they're just trying to get you into a french maid's outfit.  Beware!

Player geometry collision is already checked a second time by the server, though it's handled primarily by the client so that you don't get strange warping and shit.  Anyways...

1. The actual conditions used to determine whether or not something can be interacted with / seen are simple, being functionally identical to those employed to conceal path nodes, info actors, or triggers.
2. Toggling the proper flags on the mob only needs to happen once per spawned mob, thus the number of times the script actually needs to run is equal to the number of mobs that need to be killed.
3. The script that actually manages the flags can be attached to the player, the spawn point, a third actor placed in the vicinity tracking all the spawn points / mobs, or split up between any or all of three, possibly including the mob itself.  Of course, it could also be a global script, that would solve the "calculated per actor" problem, amirite? :why_so_serious:

Yes, we're trying to get Lan into a maid outfit, what does that have to do with anything?

EDIT: I'm going to stop fagging up this thread, honest.  Go inform yourself with a game editing tool or something.  I'd suggest tinkering with Warcraft III's "Combat - Targeted As" and "Combat - Attack # - Targets Allowed" settings in the object editor for a really simple GUI demonstration of what is effectively the same technology without the removal of visibility / collision.  There might be some associated triggers as well.

Except it's not.  That's why model editing your files allows you to bypass some parts of world geometry and is a major exploit.  The most well known instance of this was in AQ40 where people edited some files to be able to go directly to C'thun rather than go through the entire temple.  The only places where the server has extra checks for that are specific places like that where they really, really don't want you going.

I've died by falling 5 feet onto a roof in Dalaran after my computer lagged heavily after being dismounted.  You might be surprised at some of the shit that a terrible connection and a mediocre computer can reveal.

That's because falling damage is calculated by time spent in the air, not distance fallen.  If your computer lags and therefore thinks you spend more time in the air, you take more falling damage proportional to the amount of time you spent falling.  Essentially, since it assumes you're falling at X rate of speed, it doesn't have to keep track of the exact Z position you started and ended your fall at, simply the amount of time your status = falling.

Guys and gals, I'm so, so sorry for SirBruce'ing this. But I can't help myself.


Carry on.

wtf does all this crap have to do with quest design?

The more I think about it, the more ways I realize Blizzard's quest system works against grouping.

Multi-part quests frequently take you all over a zone, and occasionally all over the world. Zone-wide communication won't necessarily help you find a group, and asking in a a capital city or large guild isn't much better. Even if you find someone within your level range who's either one step before or one step beyond what you need to do, it could be half an hour before you're both on the same page. Then, finally in an ideal situation, the entire quest chain may take an hour to complete... with no time estimate beforehand and, if either of you have to leave early, the promise of starting this whole lousy process again.

Now I specified "within your level range" because the loot reward is usually at the very end... so you can out-level anything that requires a group, at which point the reward is worthless. Helping low level players might be socially satisfying, but in game terms it's a waste of time. Equally, grabbing somebody whose low level means they can't receive the quest will waste their time too.

The LFG system added with Burning Crusade made it possible to look for other people on specific (Group) tagged quests, but only if they'd reached that particular point in the chain and hadn't given up entirely and stopped looking. That's a relatively narrow window for any individual player, and really no more helpful than asking in [1. General]. By Burning Crusade, however, Blizzard had aimed for considerably more localized quest chains, less worldwide travel, and almost no world elites, and plenty of soloable rewards. From what I hear, Lich King hardly ever requires groups outside of instances.

The Future of WoW: Massively parallel solo gaming, punctuated by instance groups.

Future? It's been this way since vanillia. I soloed and 5 manned (mostly soloed) up unti the end of BC. (With a short bit of raiding, but I was tagging along with my brother's guild, and I wasn't really as gung-ho for raiding as I am now.) I won't crap on people who enjoy single player MMOGing, but lately I'm just done with it. Single player offline is better suited to storytelling, and doesn't have a monthly fee.

Very little, I apologize for my wall of text. I was sleep deprived.

Phasing, wave of the future (or not), enough said.

What I would like to see is if you do a step of a quest, you get credit for it.  Within limits perhaps, your level doesn't matter, you don't necessarily have to talk to anyone to get credit, but the game recognizes you've completed that step.  Basically allow players to come and go as they please.  The game already tracks what quest you have or haven't done, so it's not that big a leap.

Of course this has problems, too.  How do you keep people from joining their buddies on doing just the last leg?  Do you block access to previous steps (it'd be confusing to work backwards) or give credit at completion for previous steps so advancement isn't halted?  Rewards could be more of a renown system which you trade in, but I still see this having troubles working in a level-based game.

It would certainly be difficult to revamp WoW to fit anything I can conceive of.

Group quests in general that aren't bound to an instance need to go away. Those are pointless and frustrating for very little to no actual award, usually just a crappy blue that's sub to a dungeon item. A group quest that encourages you to try a dungeon is completely different because it rewards you for participation in an already defined group activity. Random elite bastards roaming around the areas of a zone do not. Those only serve the purpose of annoying you, and all your guild members you have to hassle to get them done, especially if you didn't level up with the first round of people who saw the expansion.

You shouldn't be encouraging grouping to do quests. Quests are by nature a way to level your character by yourself. To me, "group quests" are an oxymoron.

So why not eliminated group content entirely until the endgame? Why endTortage at 20? Go all the way to 80!

Would that make it harder to justify demanding a monthly fee for a one-player game with a chat client?

There's nothing wrong with questing in groups. At times it can be hugely faster, but that's an honestly not the theme of most quests. They are there purely to advance your level in a fun way that's not grindy. Dungeons and raids are there purely to provide a fun challenge to advance your equipment. One can be solved almost exclusively solo, the other can only be solved in a group. Seperately they are fine, and I like doing them both.

Still, there are 8 group quests sitting in my quest log for Icecrown, just taking up space. I've run every dungeon and raid into the ground, and these quests are still around because I don't want to bother other people to get them done, and I've long since passed the need for any silly blue rewards they can provide. When I pick them up, I look for ANYTHING else I can do so I don't have to try and find other people for what would amount to a 5 minute task. It just seems to be a ridiculous waste of prep time for something that inconsequential.

I'm not wholly against group quests, although I agree with Paelos' sentiment to an extent. I think group chests that are dumped midway through, or at the end of a solo quest chain are counter-intuitive. However, I think group quest chains where all the quests are group, and outdoor events like the ring of blood are a good thing.

The group quests mixed into a solo quest chain do feel like a cockblock, although the Group[2] quests are usually soloable by most competent players and the odd challenging mob which doesn't just fall over for you can be nice. The only exception are quest chains which lead you to a dungeon, and then the dungeon quest is implied to be a group one. These serve a useful purpose to both direct people to instances, set up some story, and offer a nice guaranteed instance-equivalent reward. These are a good thing.

Actually I wish they would add more level-80 quest chains associated to heroics and raids. I'm not advocating attunements (particularly of the kill end-boss X type); however the associated quest chains were fun to do. I particularly enjoyed doing the Kara and SSC/TK attunements, even after they ceased to be necessary as they offered interesting extensions to the level-80 game. These are the sole instance where mixing raid, group and solo quests into a single chain is acceptable in my view, as the raid requirement is implied, so you would not expect to solo all the elements.

I like group quests as a change of pace, but I agree with what Paelos said. The overhead on doing them far exceeds the actual quest, even if you get boosted by a friend. Unless the reward is just silly for my level, I will likely not bother. In order for group quests to become effective as a tool for levelling, they'd have to pack lots of them into a small area so you can get ten done in an hour using the same group of people. But that's really just an un-instanced dungeon.

I really think WAR was onto something with PQs when it comes to grouping. Don't make it about Influence, but make group quests act the same way. First wave should be normal mobs that can be soloed and are quest mobs for another solo quest. Then a couple of easy waves of elites that can't easily be soloed, but done with 2 or 3 people and finally a boss that gives a nice XP reward and the chance at some sweet loot. I would like to see open-ended group quests of that sort. With some creativity you can make escort quests and what not.

Well sure, but apparently it comes at the cost of quality storytelling, quest design, and even the illusion of impact on the game world. Heck... let people play the single-player portion with their friends! You can always pop into somebody else's timeline and play along from wherever they are. Trading would be disallowed, and money and gear drops wouldn't come from mobs (making loot entirely quest based), and the whole thing can run client-side, only alerting the server when particular quests are completed and items are earned, bought, or sold. If people want to cheat, it's their loss! They'll just have had a shallower experience by the time they hit the MULTIPLAYER RAID ENDGAME.

I don't understand at what point your rant has anything to do with the mechanic of non-dungeon, non-chained group questing. How do random group quests make the game deeper? How does having the random quest boss be an elite asshole that takes 5 people to kill have anything to do with the storyline or design that a soloable boss couldn't provide?

I'm just trying to understand why adding optional multiplayer to a mediocre single-player game with shallow, largely identical quests and lots of travel time makes it worth $15 a month. I agree that the way Blizzard implemented group quests was abysmal -- I had a whole post about that -- but eliminating all non-instanced group content seems a bit short-sighted. Random grouping is THE way I meet new people online, and the new people you meet online are largely what makes these games sticky. Unless quests encourage random grouping (or at least fail to punish you for it) then people are only going to meet new people in instance PUGs.

In my general experience, that was too late.

The random people I meet definately aren't what keeps me playing.  My guild does that.

It doesn't.  But like pxib said, while that type of game is ok- why the hell would I pay a monthly fee for that?  I can solo things in SINGLE-PLAYER GAMES, while chatting on IRC- ta-dah, same functionality!

Why are we playing this little semantic game at all? Nobody is saying ALL CONTENT SHOULD BE SOLOABLE, are they? All overland content soloable isn't going to put one tiny little dent in the number of people that play WoW or in the amount of social interaction takes place. WoW is already completely group centric for endgame content, but group-only leveling content stops being used as the population naturally hits max level. Its fine for the stuff that is at level 60/70/80 to be group stuff, because that stuff gets a decent lifetime from the pauses in leveling that the cap creates, but random outdoor group-only content is just a waste of dev time, it stops being used WAY sooner than endgame group content does. You can see this happening to the piles and piles of fellowship-required quests in LotRO.

I'm kind of surprised by how much of it there is in Wrath, frankly, after Blizzard realized they had to go back and de-elite all the outdoor elite monsters in the old world to make the content relevant at all.

Is there are lot of it in Wrath outside of Icecrown? I know there are, what, 4 or 5 quests in Dragonblight that need 2/3 players (with one that needs 5 players - or one properly specced warlock  :drill:) but that's out of 100+ quests in the zone. The zone quest achievements can all be done solo and the surplus quests are invariably group quests.  I can't even think what G3+ quests there were in HF or BT.

aaaannnnd, we're back.

 :uhrr:

There are at least two Group[2 or 3] quests in every zone in Northrend, but depending on class/spec/gear/skill/etc. many of them can be solo'd.  I don't mind them at all since they usually aren't required to hit the quest achievement for a zone, are fun to try and solo or duo, and typically give a reward that is significantly better than other quest rewards in the same zone.

This isn't a thread about why you don't want to pay for the game. It's a thread about quest design decisions and the way you would improve the gameplay experience.

I don't think random grouping outside of the dungeons does much for the social aspects of the game. It's effectively a short and terrible wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am so you can get on to the rest of your questing. I don't remember the people that I randomly met and invited because we were in the same place. However, I do remember people (good or bad) that I ran dungeons or raids with.

I do agree that if they want to do more group oriented quests, they need to be related to group only quest hubs. Somewhere that you and your friends could come in there and really knock out quests in a fun environment. Here's an idea I've been kicking around: What about Blizzard implementing more group-daily quests revolving around dungeons? Not just a specific random dungeon, but one quest for every dungeon that you could choose to run? What about adding in quests that reward "hard-mode" achievements in heroics with daily rewards? Maybe they could pour more life into those 5 mans by adding a "hard-mode" quest faction with cool epic items.

I don't see anything terrible about them and that is exactly their designed function, which isn't being served by any other conent so I don't see the problem.  If someone has 45min + to dick around with 4 other players there is already 5 man dungeons designed for that.  If someone only has 10-20 min or doesn't want to do a dungeon for whatever reason but would still be up for group activity this is the only content in the game that fits the bill.  Not to mention there are other incentives to do these quests as well.

Just because they're not your cup of tea doesn't mean they are a design failure that needs retooling and I already mentioned they don't really have a negative impact on anyone who doesn't want to partake in them.

If Blizzard decided to spend the last several months developing water slides to place in-game instead of Ulduar it wouldn't hurt anyone, right?

I fail to see how adding a few elite group quests for every 100 or so regular quests when they designed the zones of Northrend for the expansion relates to that terrible analogy.

I'll rephrase.

Group content is one of the big selling points MMOs have over other computer games. Blizzard's open-world group quests are poorly implemented, and their LFG system sucks. Instead of fixing the problem with multi-player leveling content, Blizzard is focusing on removing it or making it soloable. Indeed they are spending much of their development time working on honing the solo player experience and inventing systems like "phasing" which actively discourage group play.I believe this is a bad direction since it puts them in direct competition with single player games with better quests, more interactive combat systems, and better storylines... all for the base cost of the game.

Quests, like every flexible aspect of an MMO, should work to funnel players together rather than to spread them apart.

I think if you look at the logical outcome of your point, Blizzard is moving towards group content at the level cap instead of during the leveling curve. I think this makes sense given the amount of time that an average toon will spend at level cap vs. time spent leveling. I believe it's a good use of resources because you will find a higher bulk of the playerbase at the level cap to participate in group activities, versus finding people in the right level range at an intermediate period. The current level gap of expansion can be easier to find those people than others, but as you go backwards from the 70-80 range of this xpac, to the 60-70 range of TBC, to the 1-60 range of classic, the chances of finding correctly ranged groups to do the group content decrease exponentially. Instead, you get tells to powerlevel people through group quests rather than actually do them as intended.

In essence, using leveling quests as a focus for your group content or multiplayer experience is a waste of resources. Even if they are completed, they are a one shot deal. People run dungeons and raids hundreds of times during an expansion cycle. In that regard, Blizzard should focus the Multiplayer of the MMOG at the group dungeon/raid content. I also believe that Blizzard learned over time that a large majority of people that quest like doing it on their own. When I was leveling up, I would quest when I couldn't get a group, and I would run dungeons when I could.

The game is over 4 years old now. The cash cow is on the endgame. The leveling aspect is just something to reset the playerbase every expansion, and that's about it. That doesn't mean they don't spend countless man-hours designing cool zones, great music, and writing quests to guide the player along the way. However, I don't think they want that experience to compete with other single player games. I think they want their group activities in pvp and the endgame to rival any other multiplayer game.

If someone would elaborate on this topic and explain why they have this particular opinion instead of making blanket statements like it's an already proven fact this discussion might get somewhere.

Blizzard has been implementing open-world group quests just like the ones in Wrath (minus the phasing where applicable) since WoW launched.  There are obviously enough players who enjoy them that Blizzard feels like spending the tiny fraction of development time to implement them (in this manner) is justified. 

If you feel they can be implemented in ways that would appeal to more players, without ruining them for the players who already enjoy them as is, that's great.  I just don't get why this is treated in such a zero sum manner.  I don't think it's impossible to have open-world group content like it is currently implemented and have additional open-world group content implemented in other ways, especially since I can't imagine the current implementation takes hardly any resources to produce in comparison to other types of content like normal quests, daily quests, dungeons, and raids.

I like the way most Group quests are implemented in Wrath: standalone chains or single quests. In the old world you would often find solo quests turn into elite quests, which I was not a fan of. Getting most of the way through a quest chain then finding I needed to find 2 or 3 people to help finish it was annoying, especially because Blizz likes to save the actual item for the last quest. Making the entire quest chain Group lets you know up front whether or not to bother doing it.

Some specific examples of the Wrath quests I liked are the Runed Giants quests in Howling Fjord and the Mage + Owl + Magnataur into Frost Wyrm in Dragonblight. Ring of Blood/AoA were also great quests. If they made RoB a solo questline, the items for it would be green and it wouldn't be worth an achievement.

There's a multitude of reasons why these quests are poorly implemented:

• The presence of decent crafted gear, the low barrier of entry into heroics, and the numerous dailies available even to a brand new 80 make these quests insignificant from a materialistic standpoint.
• They're typically at the end of very long quest lines and can then lead to further quest lines has finding people with personal interest in doing them very, very low.   This aspect also means that you don't get a lot of response if you advertise in general.
• People in these zones are either doing dailies/questing/farming, which combined with the above points, makes helping you out with this a waste of time. Like it or not, people playing WoW are more concerned with doing what they want to do rather than acts of altruism.
• The Icecrown group quests are typically [5] man group quests even if they can be done with far less.  If many of these were adjusted down to 3 people or incorporated mechanics that didn't necessitate healing/tanking you'd probably see them getting done more often.
• Most guilds don't have 4 people on standbye that are so bored that they'd rather do a pointless quest in Icecrown.  It is hard enough convincing friends to do a quest simply for achievements or a piece of crappy blue gear that's going to get vendored or DE'd.  It's easy to get these done before 80, but honestly, I don't see anyone choosing to go deep into Icecrown when they could level somewhere else where they're not getting constantly gated.
• The older the game gets the more reluctant people are to do these quests. Combine all of the above and let it age over a time. 

I don't like these quests because they tend to just clutter my quest log and prevent me from closing out very long quest lines. It's like reading a long book but the last chapter is closed out to you unless you can get 2-4 friends to read it with you.   My friends will have an easier time completing these and I'll get some more done just because they're completionists and they'll know I'll have a healer available come 3.1.  Out of any guild I've been a part of, there's usually only one guy that's gungho about doing these or helping.  Most everyone else would rather they just go away once they hit 80 and the incentives for getting them done aproach zero.

I would rather see world group content being spawned from dungeons or raids and leave my level progression content with soloable material. 

Side note: arena quest lines are so popular because everyone knows they give weapons that tend to last you for several levels.  They also provide a huge exp and cash boost at the level they're given.  I have no numbers to back this up, but I'd wager the Zul'Drak arena line is done far more than the Icecrown one.

edit: I don't really consider most of the leveling group quest lines very signficant to this discussion.  Almost every 2 or 3 man one can be solo'd or done with at most one other person.

This is the zero sum attitude I don't get personally.  How is the majority negatively impacted by Blizzard throwing the minority a few bones with a few group quests from time to time?  If you only want do solo quests there's tons and you can just go about your business like the group quests aren't even there.  However, if you want a nice change of pace after doing 50+ cookie cutter fed ex/kill X/collect Y/use quest item Z quests, or if you want some short group content that doesn't take 1+ hours and a properly balanced capable group, isn't it great that you have the option?

Not to mention, how do you know who is the majority in regards to these quests?  Your taking personal taste/playstyle and just assuming it's the majority.  Blizzard has proven people prefer quest driven story/leveling over simple grinding.  They've also shown people like having the option to reach the level cap solo.  Since solo leveling/questing is designed to be faster and more efficient than grouping in WoW (other than a few rare circumstances) people will naturally gravitate towards it, since MMO's and WoW especially have also shown the path of least resistance is typically the most popular.  I don't think you can directly infer from WoW that people only want solo leveling content and nothing else till max level.

And before anyone tosses out another crazy hyperbole with water slides and post expansion raid content, I don't think adding the occasional group quest is a significant drain on Blizzard's vast development resources.

My only problem with them is when the rewards aren't seen as "worth it" and therefore very few people bother to do them.  Sure, I may get a merciful run from a guildmate who has nothing better to do, but when I had to log in several different times over a week to get a quest done because no one was interested in doing it?  That's annoying.  The Nessingwary questline in Nagrand once WotLK came out was like that.  As was the Forge camps chain in the same zone.  Almost impossible to find a group of people wanting to do it (at least on my server).  Sure, it happens.  But usually when I was a healing class.  If it wasn't a tank or heal already involved, most weren't interested in waiting around to get one.

I think we're talking past each other. Rasix are you talking about Group quests at 80? I agree those are dumb.

If your in the majority you only want to do solo content so you wouldn't even bother with those quests in the first place, if you want to complete them regardless of the reward then you are definitely in the minority.  In any case it's still an itemization and incentive issue not a problem with group quests themselves, people expect to get a better reward if they have to put more effort and time into a quest with higher risk of death, and rightly so.  Historically, Blizzard has been very hit or miss in terms of itemizing group quests well so that doesn't help the general populations perception of them and is probably why they only go out of their way to do them when they know the rewards are very good.  This is a shame because generally they have improved in this area with each expansion.

This is an excellent point I hadn't considered. Blizzard is genuinely abandoning the idea that people are going to be starting their game from scratch. They assume they've totally saturated that market, and that players who join now will already have friends within the game who will invite them to groups and to a guild practically as soon as they start playing. They know from the start that leveling content is supposed to be inferior to single-player games, because ultimately it's just a boring cockblock to keep you from enjoying the multiplayer portion too soon.

The content of an expansion, the majority of Blizzard's money spent on development, only exists to justify the box purchase. The real money is in getting us to run the same five instances for eight months.

I don't understand how this is a good thing, but it certainly seems to be the plan.

I think all group quests are significant to the discussion, the fact that some are fine and dandy but others have issues helps point to the implementation issues that could be causing problems.

I agree that the group quests in Icecrown specifically have some major issues and you touched on several of them, but I think most of their issues boil down to some major miscalculations on Blizzard's part and it shouldn't be used as grounds to just eliminate every group quest from the game.

I think Icecrown group quests suffer from TBC style thinking in terms of zone design.  In TBC Shadowmoon Valley and Netherstorm were packed with group quests and they got lots of use initially after the expansion was launched and maintained steady use even well into the expansion.  However, most of that use was due to the major cock blocks on the end game when the expansion launched.  All of the raid content had long attunements.  Kara was brutal for a fresh 70, T5 content even worse, and Heroics were locked off until you bought a key at Revered which usually took some work after hitting 70.  Even normal lvl 70 5 man dungeons were rough for fresh 70's and 2 even had their own attunement/key nonsense.

All of that created a perfect storm for group quest participation.  Whether it was doing an attunement chain for a raid/dungeon/daily quest zone, working on reputation, trying to make gold for an epic flyer since daily quests weren't around initially, or typically just trying to get gear good enough to start the 5 man dungeon content.  Group quests were basically the only endgame content available for a fresh 70 player until well into TBC when most people were in epics and could carry them through content.

Wrath is the exact opposite, the perfect storm for max level group quests being reduced to insignificance.  No attunements for anything, daily quests and tabbards for rep, plenty of daily and regular quests for gold, and all of the end game PvE severely reduced in difficulty thus requiring almost no gearing up phase at max level.

Why Blizzard decided to design Icecrown and to a lesser degree Storm Peaks just like SMV and Netherstorm only with the addition of phasing instead of adapting the zone design for the complete lack of end game cock block is something only they can answer.   :uhrr:

It's like they expected them to be just as popular as ever even though they have been essentially made insignificant.

edit: by zone design I mostly mean quest types and distribution/prevalence

I am going to guess you have not done the quests in icecrown, so I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Most of them are also dailies.  The lions share of the more annoying group quests can be repeated afterward for some gold.  Off-hand, the ones that aren't dailies are the ones related to the argent crusade way over on the far west side and the riders ones.  I believe I was able to solo all of the rider quests as a prot warrior except one.

It will also be much, much easier to find partners for the group quests in 3.1 with the addition of the argent tournament.  Now there's a reason for people to spend a few hours at a time just chillin' in Icecrown.

The rise and fall of Drakuru, in Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak. If you want to do that in the intended order you have to do a normal Drak'Tharon Keep instance at level 76-78, because the quest-lines in Zul'Drak pick up from where the group quest in Drak'Tharon left off. Good luck LFG. That's one full solo zone and half of a solo quest-line cockblocked by a single group quest. And the thing is, the more compelling and immersive storylines Blizzard makes, the bigger portion of their playerbase is going to be noticing this problem.

You're just wrong.  I completely cleared zul'drak, including the Fall of Drakuru, before I did a single Grizzly Hill's quest or Drak'Tharon Keep for that matter.

How is he wrong? Story wise, you did those events backwards.

Oh I see what I did there.  I missed 'intended' but did not miss 'cockblocked'.

I fail to see why I should craft a better analogy when you're advocating that serious time should be spent on creating disposable content.

Incidentally, the time and talent required to make a group quest is effectively the same as is required to make an instance boss.  Want to know a great way to make group quest more popular?  Put an instance portal on the Amphitheater of Anguish, tie it into the LFG tool, add drops.

Snarkiness aside, the real issue is that you can't mix and match group and solo quests on the same line. A group quest hub where you know there is a long line to do means you can go in there with a group of friends for an hour and knock them out. OTOH, a 13 solo quest line that ends with a 5 man boss is a giant "fuck you" to the players.

Were there any group quests in storm peaks? I seem to remember soloing all of them for the loremaster achievement.

Well, you can, but only if skipping those group quests doesn't gimp your character and people don't pay attention to quest text. The first point is not a problem with WoW. The second point...

With the amount of free to play MMOs coming out with random fetch and kill quests, coherent quest lines could be something to justify a subscription fee.

That fucking Harpy queen, she's a bitch for most classes to solo (its listed as a group 3 I think, only need 2 though, or 1 if your like, a Protection something class)

Ah, alliance quest. I don't think there's a single group quest for horde in that zone. None that were un-soloable at least.

IIRC there was a Horde side quest for an elite Jormungar (those worm things); thats the only one I remember offhand. Of course, I play a DK so everything is soloable and I might not be remembering others.

Ding Ding.

What the fuck are you guys on about? I thought it was pretty clear that the reason they've moved away from group content during leveling is precisely BECAUSE they expect new people to start from scratch. They don't expect Joe Newbie whose main is level 30 to stand around spamming LFG all day for every third quest when 80% of the playerbase is off in Northrend or whatever anyway.

It's the same reason they've sped up leveling in the 20-60 and 60-70 brackets, and the same reason each expansion renders the previous set of raids obsolete. They don't want that EQ syndrome where someone coming in years after release has to level for six months, look for groups in underpopulated low-level brackets, and then start at the bottom of some horrible ladder of raids, the bottom rungs of which the majority was done with years ago.

Heroic dungeons is one of the best things they could have done. You get a chance to do them while levelling for some quick easy gear with a forgiving dungeon if you want. if not you can skip them entirely and still experience that content at 80.

On a related note I completely cleared Storm Peaks, Fjords, the Tundra, Dragonblight, and Zul'Drak before I hit 80. I got about 15 quests into Icecrown before I quit out of annoyance. I still can't make myself go back there and finish the place out despite being interested in all of the lore there.

Sholazar Basin can go fuck itself too, but that's mostly out of my distaste for any zone that resembles Un'Goro Crater or Stranglethorn Vale.

Sholazar is totally redeemed by the bigmouths and evil puppymen though, and that one questline from the Avatar of Freya.
Hell, even the Nessingwary quests aren't that bad - just "go kill x animals of any sort from this list" rather than "go kill thirty tickbird hatchlings" "Okay, now go kill 30 mature tickbirds" "Now go kill thirty elder tickbirds" "Go find Greybeak, destroyer of ticks, and bring me back her gizzards"

On my warlock alt, I finished Howling Fjord, Grizzly Hills, and Dragonblight, and got through the Hodir line to the dailies in Storm Peaks, when I hit 80.  Didn't set foot in ZD or Sholazar, and only did a few Coldarra quests to get the Nexus line in Borean Tundra. 

Rested xp is a wonderful thing.

On my hunter,  I finished all of the quests.  The last Icecrown quest I had was The Guardians of Corp'rethar, which entailed killing 10 elites (listed as a 5 person quest, knocked it out with another hunter).  I fully expected a quest after that, as the entire questlines seemed to be heading toward... something.  But it just ended.

I haven't done a few of the dungeons - the annoying ones, apparently, that nobody pugs.

Icecrown was by far the most enjoyable zone since the starter zones the first time you played them for me. Zul'Drak and Grizzly Hills were the ones I enjoyed the least. Scholozar and Dragonblight were probably joint 2nd in enjoyability.

-Borean Tundra has a much simpler layout(fewer rivers and mountains) than Howling Fjord and fewer group quests.  It sports the single worst quest chain in the game for people that aren't shaman, DKs, or alchemists/obsessive hoarders/.

-Scholozar is a very fast and efficient zone.  It's quite enjoyable to rip through.  Its token vehicle quest requires a lot of patience.

-Dragonblight gets a fifty dkp MINUS for including a quest that you shouldn't complete if you want to complete the zone as fast as possible.  I found it to not flow well; there were a few cases where I found myself back to a quest hub again from another bread crumb quest elsewhere with more quests to do.  IIRC, it was due to that big group of group quests.  The Wrathgate event is incredibly boring your second time.

-Grizzly Hills is pretty and and with way the fuck too much running.  The bread crumb quests are OK at leading you around - except for the PVP area to the SW.  I'm pretty sure there is no hint to go there.

-Zul'drak's color scheme is depressing.  I feel like I should pop a couple zoloft before I fly through it.  Its vehicle quest is horribly unfun and some of the early quests are incredibly aggravating.

-Icecrown is a good zone with a number of fun and innovative quests, but doesn't flow well at all.  There are breadcrumb quests, but they aren't very rationally sorted.  The worst offender is that a shitload of quests are locked behind you completing...I think it's a breadcrumb quest that starts inside a mountain that you only go to as a part of another quest.  I don't even want to think about how horrible this zone would be without an epic flyer.

-Storm Peaks is one of the best designed zones of the expansion.  It leads you around fairly well once you get past that the bread crumb to the next quest hub after the first one requires you VERY thoroughly comb the area to the east.  You get some form of quick travel between most of the quest hubs.  The quest chain where you fly back and forth to whathisname is kind of aggravating evenw iht an epic flyer.

The Wintergarde quests are awesome every time.

The implied sequencing of Fjord--->Dragonblight or Borean----->Dragonblight can get very screwed up if you do either of the starter zones partially and skip between them (perhaps to join up with guildies, etc.): you can end up with some bizarre pockets of quests that are very palpably out of order. I dealt with the Taunka refugees in Dragonblight before I dealt with them *before* they became refugees from Borean.

I think the implied route is either Borean -> Dragonblight -> Grizzly/Zul'Drak or Fjord -> Grizzly -> Dragonblight/Zul'drak. However either starter zone can easily get you to 73-74 if completed fully, and by this point most people have heard how awesome wrathgate is and head to Dragonblight. I know if you come from Borean as I did (skipped Fjord on my first toon) the quest hubs make a pretty logical path around the zone. If you come from the Fjord you get thrown straight into the wrathgate, which sends you all over the place, and afterwards I guess the zone seems disorganised.

It isn't Fjord->Grizzly->Dragonblight but rather Fjord->Dragonblight->Grizzly; the breadcrumb quests in Fjord send you directly to Wintergarde Keep for Alliance at least (and fly you right past Grizzly Hills). Then there's a later breadcrumb quest in Dragonblight that sends you to Grizzly Hills; there's no logical path from Fjord to Grizzly Hills, as the starter quest hub is smack in the middle of the zone with no directions sending you there unless you take the intro flight from Dragonblight. I would definitely agree that the zone transition is handled better going Borean->Dragonblight, though.

Again, comments apply to Alliance only, haven't done any of it on the Horde side yet.

Don't forget the lovely Drakuru quest, which is both griefable (a disguised player can kill your troll) and is completely out of place unless you've done Grizzly Hills and DTK before it. 

I hate that stupid zone.

For the Horde, there's a breadcrumb going from New Agamand in Fjord to Venomspite in Draongblight. Then there's a breadcrumb from Venomspite to Conquest Hold in Grizzly Hills.

I took both of my 80s thru both Fjord and Tundra before I startde on Dragonblight. That let me hit 80 in Zuldrak and then have the final 3 zones to make quest cash. My first 80 has almost finished all the quests and has 13k gold without even trying.