Cracks starting to show?

[K9]

Level 80 is the game for me with little exception.

Achievements and raiding 10-mans with guildmates who I like are all that pique my interest in the game really. My interest in PvP has waned because the barrier to entry is too high for my time or patience; quests I had done my fill of (although the new world could well drag me back for one more ride). But frankly Having done 1-80 twice now (one starting in vanilla, one starting in TBC) and having a DK done 55-70 (levelling through this stuff again is dull), doing the same stuff again held zero interest to me. Endgame is where the novelty is at, and that's where I play. I'll enjoy the levelling content in Cata, just like I enjoyed my first time through Outland, and then Northrend. But running through the same zones time and again just doesn't grab me. I didn't use questhelper on either of my first two toons, but I can see why people would for any alt really.

Also, you could point the same question towards people who cheat in Single Player games. The folks using third party software to beat Starcraft II baffled me completely for example.

[proudft]

Different people like different stuff.  My interest goes down quite a bit at level cap.   So I try to take my time leveling, but I usually fail.

[Ratman_tf]

If people do not enjoy leveling, then why are they playing a game that is all about leveling?  (Which I think brings us back to his original question about why people find it fun or is it just Pavlovian?)

Because they like killing things and leveling, but still don't care why the village needs bear asses.

Because they don't need bear asses and we all know it. It's a farce. There's no reason for me to read flavor text because it has absolutely no change to the world. Except for this catastrophic event, that same guy is sitting there asking for bear asses 5 years after I GAVE HIM SOME FUCKING BEAR ASSES! How many asses will it take to fill the void in your soul, quest-giver? A hundred? A thousand? Millions? I pity you. I really do. Because your unquenchable lust for bear asses has cost you everything you held dear.

Would we care if a quest had a lasting effect on the game world? The cynical part of me says "No.". Digging deeper, I don't necessarily care about bear-ass-less village, or the crazy guy collecting bear-asses. Hell, I'm pretty much ambivalent about the Horde/Alliance situation, or how Bolivar is now the Lich King. It doesn't impact my game, and if it did, I'd probably resent it.

There was a time when I wanted MMORPGs to break out of the camp the spawn mentaility. Now I want them to break out of the questgrind mentality. It's high time for something new to drive player action. Personally, I think the next big thing is going to be giving players more freedom and responsibility in their motivations and actions. You see the beginnings of such in Eve. It's time for somebody like Blizzard to file the rough edges off that kind of thing.

[Malakili]

Why do players pay $15 a month to play a game and then not want to play the game?  Why not just charge people $20 for a level capped toon?

I think they do want to play the game, they just define playing the game as different than you.  To them its all 100% pure meta game.  There is no "World" of warcraft, there is no "their shaman" not to say there you enjoy roleplaying, I really don't know if you do or not, but just the fact that to you the game is consistent with what is actually happening in the game world is different than how a lot of people approach I think.

Consider the following to statements "I have a level 80 shaman in WoW "  "I am a level 80 shaman in WoW"  My feeling is that you would identify with the former and the people you don't understand would identify with the latter, because to them they don't really buy into the whole thing as a package, so reading the in game quest text, or following a guide, both are just sets of text that get them toward beating the game, or beating the content, or whatever, and one set of text is a lot more efficient/better at achieving that goal.

All of that may be complete bullshit though.


I think a huge amount of this revolves around quests also.   Quests have killed RPGs for me, but more importantly, everyone realizes they are just a laundry this at this point.  As Paelos said, everyone knows they don't actually NEED bear asses.  They say they do, their is text saying they do, and their is an XP reward at the end of giving them bear asses, but thats it.  There is no actual bear ass shortage requiring attention.  Imagine that quest with no XP reward.  No one would do it.

Guild Wars 2 seems to be saying they'll offer a different approach, where the quests that get completed, or the actions you take, or however they are structuring it actually have some effect on the state of the zone. Now that would be interesting, then maybe there actually WOULD be a need for bear asses, to make leather armor for the NPC soldiers to push back the goblin hordes or something.  I'd be pretty damned interested in an MMO where bear asses were actually needed.

[Sjofn]

realistically no one gives a shit WHY the town needs you to go kill 20 bears and bring back their asses.

/raises hand

I read every word, watch every cut scene, etc., in any game the first time I'm seeing a given piece of content.

And that's why you're my snugglebutt. 


I'm one of those damn dirty levelers, and I don't read quest text after I've done the quest on a character (although I will reread it occassionally if it's been a while and I remember liking the quest in the first place). I also don't think the default quest guiding really ruins the experience for me. I read the text, but sometimes even then the directions aren't perfect (and sometimes I am a moron who fucks up what direction southeast is ... for some reason I go all dumbass when it isn't N, S, E or W) and it's nice to be able to open my map and say, "Oh duh, it's over there."

I also don't say "I'm a level 80 <whatever>" as often as "I have a level 80 <whatever>" because I have a lot of 80's, and I wuvvum them all.

I can't really get behind the whole QUESTS ARE TEH DEVIL thing, either. Yes, of course they're just excuses to send you somewhere to do something in order to give you experience, but so fucking what? That's all quests have EVER BEEN in basically every game ever.

[Ratman_tf]

I can't really get behind the whole QUESTS ARE TEH DEVIL thing, either. Yes, of course they're just excuses to send you somewhere to do something in order to give you experience, but so fucking what? That's all quests have EVER BEEN in basically every game ever.

For me, it's that my character is doing shit for other people. Yeah, he gets some XPs and a widget at the end, but really they could cut out the quest and just make me wait for the 5 or 10 minutes it would take do do the quest, then give me the reward for all I care. Raiding and PvP is, on some level, a bit more of me (my character) doing stuff for myself, instead of drudgework for some moron who can't figure out how to pick his own fucking flowers, or whatever.

[Sjofn]

There's been an amusing number of quests so far where my quest giver comes with me. It keeps me from getting lonely!

[Ashamanchill]

To me the debate seems more empirical as opposed to philosophical. The numbers on how long it takes the average player to level (in any fashion; i.e. item level, pvp ‘level’) are more important then the goal posts in the debate. I mean, if your are totally opposed to grinding, or totally inured to it, the the game ain’t for you, and they don’t care: they know how a bell curve operates.

If you are going to be reductionist then I think nebu is absolutely right, this shit is pavlonian. I mean, you ring a bell and make a dog salivate; well human brains are more complex, so it is going to require a funkier bell.  And for those that dabble in that ‘science’ it’s a question of getting the numbers right.

Put it this way: if WoW is a run through a maze for cheeze and we are mice, then they have done their homework. No one is going to want to be in the maze where you have to slam your head against the wall a thousand times just to get a crumb (Aion, WaR, what have you), but you know what? If it gave us the prize too easily, then we would be full, so to speak, and the cheeze would become devalued. Their art is knowing what pushes something past both those yard marks.

[Cadaverine]

What I'm trying to determine is: What is the primary motivation for wanting a quest guide to just tell you where to go.  Is it because the current content is uninteresting?  Is it because players are programmed to not care about the 1-80 content and instead only care about the content at 80?  Why do players pay $15 a month to play a game and then not want to play the game?  Why not just charge people $20 for a level capped toon?

The old issue with having been through all the old world content dozens of times notwithstanding, I use Carbonite, and Quest Helper before it, to point the way to where the bear asses are.  I'm not the "Must get to 80 and raid" type, but I also don't have any interest in wandering around aimlessly, spending an hour in the totally wrong area, looking for bear asses that will never be there. It's the same frustration I have when I have to kill 20 bears just to get one bear ass to drop. 

I still read the quest text, and I still have to walk/fly/swim to wherever.  So, to me, I'm still playing the game, I'm just cutting out some unnecessary time wasted.  That said, playing a new Tauren Paladin,  I've had less need for Carbonite so far, as the quests have been much better laid out, and I'm not having to run all over hell and back.  I'm only in Azhara, though, so that might change as I level along.  They've also improved the drop rate issue for quest items, and I think loot in general, though I may just be blessed this time around.  So far I've had very few instances where I didn't get the quest drop from every mob I killed, which is nice. 

On a side note, I actually wish they'd roll back the xp boosts they added to the 1 to 60 game in the past, as I am outleveling a lot of the new content.  By the time I got done with Mulgore, the little Warchief Sez Go Here Next billboard quests were already green, and they've been that way through most of Azhara.  So, if I go back to North Barrens, I'm going through grey quests, which takes away some of the enjoyment for me.  It'a bit too much like picking on grade school kids, or something.

[Numtini]

As someone who uses a full leveling guide, I am mainly in this for the social aspects. It took me really the end of my EQ2 career when I'd lost faith in the game designers to even get past middle level in WoW because I just don't like the solo-quest-grind game. With my current alts, I'm leveling almost entirely through instances.

Why a full quest guide rather than Questhelper (or just the new tools built into WoW)? Well, one of my main criticisms of vanilla WoW was that it used travel, often from a quest hub to a killing area multiple times, to slow advancement. A leveling guide instructs you on things like "do this quest before that one, because it opens up 2 more that kill the same mobs and they're all a good 2 minute walk each way across the Barrens so you don't want to make the trip more than once." It also screens out the quests that are ludicrously time consuming for little reward. In other words, it corrects for bad quest flow design.

Cata's been a big advance from what I've seen for a lot of what a leveling guide fixes. Through Silverpine, I never ended up going repeatedly to the same areas. And there was actually context to the quests. It was also about 10 times as fast as it was the first time I did it. Cata has also put the dungeon quests inside the dungeon, which eliminated the use for a levelling guide to say "btw you now have all the prequel quests for Dungeon X, so you should do it now." Back when that meant shouting in a zone for a group, that was pretty big.

[Selby]

Why a full quest guide rather than Questhelper (or just the new tools built into WoW)? Well, one of my main criticisms of vanilla WoW was that it used travel, often from a quest hub to a killing area multiple times, to slow advancement. A leveling guide instructs you on things like "do this quest before that one, because it opens up 2 more that kill the same mobs and they're all a good 2 minute walk each way across the Barrens so you don't want to make the trip more than once." It also screens out the quests that are ludicrously time consuming for little reward. In other words, it corrects for bad quest flow design.

This 100%.  I don't use quest guides because I have to get through the game ASAP, I use them because my first 2-3 times through the game the horrible quest layout and designs with all of their built in travels to far away lands for a single foozle made leveling a real pain in the ass.  Not to mention that until a few years after release, you might very well run out of quests and end having to grind to gain a level or two.  The guides spelled it all out so that I didn't waste time running around doing 1 quest at a time traveling 10 minutes each way to get there or accidentally skipping quests that opened up new quests or waste time on quests that require 8G worth of materials to craft a turn-in item that netted me 80S and some small XP bonus (Jarl in Dustwallow... looking at YOU!).

Now that Cata has mostly come out, I don't need a quest guide for the 1-60 game anymore.  I still use it for Outlands and a slight bit in Northrend, but the incredibly slow and painful process that was the 1-60 game has been fixed.

[Typhon]

If people do not enjoy leveling, then why are they playing a game that is all about leveling?  (Which I think brings us back to his original question about why people find it fun or is it just Pavlovian?)

Because they like killing things and leveling, but still don't care why the village needs bear asses.

Because they don't need bear asses and we all know it. It's a farce. There's no reason for me to read flavor text because it has absolutely no change to the world. Except for this catastrophic event, that same guy is sitting there asking for bear asses 5 years after I GAVE HIM SOME FUCKING BEAR ASSES! How many asses will it take to fill the void in your soul, quest-giver? A hundred? A thousand? Millions? I pity you. I really do. Because your unquenchable lust for bear asses has cost you everything you held dear.

This is both funny and hits the nail on the head why the quest text just doesn't matter.  Unless the quest is funny - which I think Blizzard understands, which is why so many of the quests try to inject humor.  If you are a person that has a blind spot to the quest not mattering (in the grand scheme of things), I guess I could see how the humor might be annoying.

[kildorn]

About the only crack this expansion is showing is that while we all knew in Wrath that Outlands was just a terrible layout/design/plot/everything, the revamp of the old world's quest design has made it even more jarring.

In Wrath leveling, going to Outlands was where your character suddenly got a lot more powerful feeling. In Cata leveling, going to Outlands is where the quests suddenly start to suck, send you all over creation at random, and generally go back to using travel as a pacing mechanic.


Also: hah, the new undead area's quest rewards are funny. Going from 1-10, I got around 8 leather belts as the only leather reward option for most of the quests.

[Paelos]

The Cataclysm should have closed the portal to the Outlands. At some point they just need to do it. That content is unquestionably horrible.

[Rendakor]

I was hoping that they'd at least add new 60-70 content so you have the option to skip Outlands.

[Xanthippe]

Outlands goes by so fast anyway.  One or two dungeons per level?  Something like that (but maybe that's on rested xp only).

Put me in the camp with people who like leveling to max_level more than I like being at max_level.  In fact, I want to find a new server where I can make alliance toons (pvp please) because even though I have one of almost everything, I want to go back through leveling each race to 60, and my slots are full where my 80s are.

I started some little hordes on Arthas but that was a mistake - horde outnumbers alliance by almost 3 to 1.  Ick.  I prefer even odds or even being in the minority.

Love love love the horde Stonetalon questlines.  Thousand Needles barge quests were quite amusing as well.  It's weird being in Strat and Scholo in the 40s.  Tried zipping through Ragefire to pick up baby greens on my 45 shadow priest and had to sit and drink all the time.  Dungeon mobs have a lot more hps now, even little elites.

[kildorn]

Outlands goes by so fast anyway.  One or two dungeons per level?  Something like that (but maybe that's on rested xp only).

Put me in the camp with people who like leveling to max_level more than I like being at max_level.  In fact, I want to find a new server where I can make alliance toons (pvp please) because even though I have one of almost everything, I want to go back through leveling each race to 60, and my slots are full where my 80s are.

I started some little hordes on Arthas but that was a mistake - horde outnumbers alliance by almost 3 to 1.  Ick.  I prefer even odds or even being in the minority.

Love love love the horde Stonetalon questlines.  Thousand Needles barge quests were quite amusing as well.  It's weird being in Strat and Scholo in the 40s.  Tried zipping through Ragefire to pick up baby greens on my 45 shadow priest and had to sit and drink all the time.  Dungeon mobs have a lot more hps now, even little elites.

Questing is far faster than instances in outlands, still. But it also further shows the "wow, outlands sucks", since they didn't put quest givers in the instances in Outlands yet. So not only do you have the bizarre "go pick up X Y and Z out of the way quests for this instance, but the instances themselves don't normally give a lot of xp (outlands heavily reduced the amount of bullshit trash in instances, barring Shattered Halls and Shadow Labs, and trash is where the XP is)

[Rendakor]

They didn't put quest givers inside instances in Northrend, either. There are a few which have always had them (UK, UP, CoS), but the old ones are still scattered about and/or hidden behind long chains.

[Ingmar]

On a side note, I actually wish they'd roll back the xp boosts they added to the 1 to 60 game in the past, as I am outleveling a lot of the new content.  By the time I got done with Mulgore, the little Warchief Sez Go Here Next billboard quests were already green, and they've been that way through most of Azhara.  So, if I go back to North Barrens, I'm going through grey quests, which takes away some of the enjoyment for me.  It'a bit too much like picking on grade school kids, or something.

Azshara and Northern Barrens are both 10-20 zones. You're not really meant to play through both on the same character anymore. There are 2-3ish leveling "paths" you can take on either side, which means subsequent alts after the first one could be totally different quest experiences. I think this is a big plus, not a minus.

[kildorn]

Helps with overcrowding as well by spreading the population out. Same thing they learned in Wrath with the two identical level zones to start in so there wasn't the "release week hellfire" crapfest.

[Paelos]

Questing is far faster than instances in outlands, still. But it also further shows the "wow, outlands sucks", since they didn't put quest givers in the instances in Outlands yet.

Yes, it does suck, and they will continue to make it shorter and shorter until eventually people won't have to go there. My thought is, just cut out the middle man. Put in one zone for the regular content, put all your 70-80 quests there, and close the Outland content. It's now the most ancient and useless part of your game, and the most laughably out of place in your already laughable lore.

[kildorn]

Questing is far faster than instances in outlands, still. But it also further shows the "wow, outlands sucks", since they didn't put quest givers in the instances in Outlands yet.

Yes, it does suck, and they will continue to make it shorter and shorter until eventually people won't have to go there. My thought is, just cut out the middle man. Put in one zone for the regular content, put all your 70-80 quests there, and close the Outland content. It's now the most ancient and useless part of your game, and the most laughably out of place in your already laughable lore.

Outlands from a lore standpoint does continue to get more and more absurd. But I think that's going to happen to all the content as a new BIG BAD OH GOD WE WILL ALL DIE event happens, but you're still being asked to fuck off to some other continent/dimension to screw around. Like, the entire Horde + Alliance theme in Wrath just doesn't mesh with the whole "Horde and Alliance are at WAR" thing going on in the rest of Azeroth.

[Ingmar]

We're doing a lot of stuff now that will probably make less sense once Deathwing is dead too. Just the nature of the medium to an extent.

[Azazel]

What I'm trying to determine is: What is the primary motivation for wanting a quest guide to just tell you where to go.  Is it because the current content is uninteresting?  Is it because players are programmed to not care about the 1-80 content and instead only care about the content at 80?  Why do players pay $15 a month to play a game and then not want to play the game?  Why not just charge people $20 for a level capped toon?

Short version for me:
I like levelling. I like questing. I read the quests. (I do grey quests to have done them.). I enjoy the scenery as I move around the world.

I do not like wandering around looking for the one interactive valve in the field of pipes, or the pile of papers that is almost invisible in the grass, or the pile of dirt that is subtly similar to all of the other piles of dirt in an area. I do not like trying to figure out just what the questgiver means by "near the edge of the mountain" for 10 minutes, or where exactly the specific type of bears his current bear ass fetish demands live - despite the fact that they look just like the bears that are right here. I just want to go over there and do it.

Maybe to you, the game is all about the second point. Figuring out "puzzles", trying every handle, spending 10 minutes looking for the correct gnoll. For me, it's not how I wish to spend my time - deciphering vague directions and trying every pump handle in the station to see which one turns.

[Azazel]

I think a huge amount of this revolves around quests also.   Quests have killed RPGs for me, but more importantly, everyone realizes they are just a laundry this at this point.  As Paelos said, everyone knows they don't actually NEED bear asses.  They say they do, their is text saying they do, and their is an XP reward at the end of giving them bear asses, but thats it.  There is no actual bear ass shortage requiring attention.  Imagine that quest with no XP reward.  No one would do it.

While no system is perfect, having come from EverQuest where quests were structured slightly differently, I'm very happy to do WoW-style questing. I no longer need to realise that this particular a_Goblin_tooth is not flagged as junk, and leave the game to search in the internet to see what quest it's used for, in which city, and what other crap I need to get hold of.

Those quests gave fuckall xp. So you got a group of friends or randoms together, found some orcs, set up camp, and sat there smacking them for an hour or two.

Yeah, the WoW model is so bad. Fucking kids these days... 

[Simond]

The Cataclysm should have closed the portal to the Outlands. At some point they just need to do it. That content is unquestionably horrible.

I remember when Outland was launched to universal praise about how much it was a quantum leap ahead of old-world content. 

[Ingmar]

The Cataclysm should have closed the portal to the Outlands. At some point they just need to do it. That content is unquestionably horrible.

I remember when Outland was launched to universal praise about how much it was a quantum leap ahead of old-world content. 

Which it was in a lot of ways.

[Minvaren]

The Cataclysm should have closed the portal to the Outlands. At some point they just need to do it. That content is unquestionably horrible.

I remember when Outland was launched to universal praise about how much it was a quantum leap ahead of old-world content. 

Which it was in a lot of ways.

But the Nth time you have to go through Hellfire Peninsula, you just want it OVER.   

[Chimpy]

One thing Blizzard has done consistently is look at their work critically and improve on places where it needs it. Northrend was leaps and bounds better flow-wise than anything they had previously released.

[Sheepherder]

We're doing a lot of stuff now that will probably make less sense once Deathwing is dead too. Just the nature of the medium to an extent.

Except Blizzard's problem here isn't the medium, it's that they have absolutely no plans to gracefully retire expansions.  You have to trudge through every fucking one to reach the end.

The easy fix is to keep the zones intact, and just build the zone portals a little more creatively.  For example, to get into Outlands you need to be inside the Goldshire inn, with a pint in front of you.

[K9]

Meh, you can level through Outlands so fast these days it's hardly worth complaining about. With the RDF and lowered XP curve you can pretty much bypass HFP and just hit up Zangarmarsh (which does have a reasonable quest flow).

[Sheepherder]

I'm broken like WUA.  It pissed me off that they feel the need to remove Wrathgate, but leave all the shit about fighting Arthas intact.  Particularly since the new Undead intro explicitly states he's dead.  Leaving everything intact and having a beer induced time warp would at least be coherent.

[Rendakor]

They didn't take out Wrathgate, just the battle for UC.

[Abelian75]

I remember when Outland was launched to universal praise about how much it was a quantum leap ahead of old-world content. 

It was a huge leap in terms of how you structure quest progression through a zone and through the world as a whole, but it was not, in my opinion, a huge leap forward in terms of how you make quests tell a coherent overall story of the world and your character.  Outland pretty much is an insane mess in terms of story, with almost no coherent story being told as you progress through the zones (at least imho).

But yeah, from a technical standpoint the quest progression is much closer to the quality of current questing than it was to Vanilla.  It's just that there's no reason to give a shit about anything you are doing.  It's just this random-ass alien wonderland of incoherence.

Unfortunately I imagine part of the reason they didn't want to make it totally irrelevant is that it's one of the only times that the Draenei and Blood Elves (especially the Draenei) are relevant at all.  I imagine this tension is part of what motivated that recent comment about how they didn't do a good job integrating the Draenei into the Alliance.

It is kind of striking to me how easily you can just ignore that TBC ever happened and it barely changes the feel of the story at all.  In fact I'm not even sure what HAPPENED in TBC for the most part (other than Sunwell, which I don't even think was going to be part of the expansion in the first place).

[Ingmar]

If they had conveyed the story for Outland properly then i think we'd all feel better about it, but they didn't.