One of my guilty pleasures is to be a part of a raid team in World of Warcraft. I have played the game since The Burning Crusade, which launched in 2007.
When I purchased the game, I recall seeing that there were three boxes beside each other each with a different sticker. The first sticker said “3 million copies sold!”. The second sticker said “4 millions copies sold!”. The third said “5 million copies sold!”. I was greatly amused that they were selling so fast that they could not print the stickers fast enough.
World of Warcraft is a very popular game, and it dominates the MMO genre. I do not really think that is a good Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO). I recall having a conversation with David Maynard years before where I talked about Massively Singleplayer Online games. I think he can still verify that I used this term before Will Wright tried to make it popular. I believe WoW is a very good MSO, with some multiplayer elements.
We can quibble later about what is and what isn’t an MMO. I have been watching for innovation in the genre without any reward for that effort for many many years.
A few weeks ago I made a note to write an angry rant about a quest in the most recent zone added to WoW; A quest called “Think of the Critters”.
I am somewhat amused to see there is a change in the patch notes from last week:
Quests
- Resolved an issue with Gromits during the “Think of the Critters” quest in Korthia. Hungry Gromits now anxiously await your delicious treats!
You can find some interesting notes on this quest at the following link.
I think that they made a directionally positive change on this quest.
I still think it is one of the worst quests created in the game.
It has me asking myself some very profound questions.
How did this quest get through any kind of QA?
Who created this quest?
And most importantly to me:
Did the person who created this quest ever play this game… ever?
I can generally feel the invisible hand of designers in many of the games I play and online products I use.
There are a few quests in the most recent expansion that left me feeling a little frustrated, and a few systems that are so incredibly obtuse that it made me wonder what they were attempting to do.
This one quest has so many different stages to it and uses so many friction-inducing mechanics that it stands out as the worst of the crop. It has no peer for the amount of steps to take, the complexity of mechanics, and the amount of failure per attempt. It sounds like they addressed the failure rate (the last part of the quest) in an attempt to address player’s issues with it.
The good news is that these quests are randomly generated. That means you will not get this quest every day.
The Korthia daily quests also have random rewards. This has been frustrating because many of these quests drop uninteresting rewards. I have had days where I get 100% of them dropping Anima versus the new currency that matters. That is a silver lining here because if it has bad rewards it means it is one less quest for me to pick up on my pursuit of collecting currency items for the zone. The random rewards here are an anti-pattern that helps me cull pointless activity out of my day in a way that ought to make data analysts at Blizzard afraid that I might self-select into the churn bucket.
So why am I raging about this terrible quest?
I love online games and playing with other people.
WoW has a very strong community and has a lot of great content. You can set aside that the current story tends to focus on how you, as “The Champion”, are generally chosen to save the world (much like everyone else logged in around you). It is the clear king-of-the-hill of the MMO genre.
I have played many betas and early launches for MMOs over the years. It is why I took a job making games. Twenty years ago I sat down and crafted a half a dozen cool systems I would love to see built that would take us from MMO 1.0 into MMO 2.0.
Unfortunately everyone trying to compete in this space has to replicate MMO 1.0, or at least at a minimum try to make MMO 1.1 due to WoW.
So why do I still play WoW?
I still play WoW because I want to see how it ends.
This game is a technical marvel in many ways, and a design marvel in many others. People debate “the end of WoW” quite frequently. The people that have been in the industry the longest or have some of the best insights have generally said “the only thing that will kill WoW is WoW itself”.
This ridiculous critter quest is one of the positive proof points that we may be nearing the end of an era.
