Nerfing instance quest XP: A great idea

Thanks to Glyph for pointing this out: Dungeon Quest Experience Reduction
Zarhym

We are applying a hotfix today to all level 1-60 dungeon quests for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms dungeons which will significantly reduce the amount of experience they award.

While dungeons should remain integral to our evolving storylines, and great places to collect gear in cooperative environments, we need to make sure each player’s questing progress remains relevant as dungeon quests are completed. In many cases we’re seeing players enter dungeons to complete quests, only to come out ahead of the leveling curve for the zones they’re in.

This change should allow players the opportunity to reap the benefits of running dungeons, while not outpacing the leveling flow from levels 1-60. At this time there are no plans for making any adjustments to dungeon quest experience for Outland, Northrend, and level 80+ Cataclysm dungeons.

This really does get the best of all worlds.

Yesterday when I suggested that instances shouldn't give experience, I left out a group, specifically players who like to play in groups, in other words, people who prefer to level through instances. Removing kill XP in instances would have ruined the game for them. Instead they'd be entirely in solo situations. Oh sure sure, they can group up for quests, but quests aren't really designed for multiple people: they become trivial (even more so) and there's no simple mechanic to encourage grouping (no quest finder tool), in addition to the XP drop with two players compared to 3 or more. So I still think that instances giving XP is excessive, but it's also necessary. Nerfing the quest XP isn't as big of a deal with this grouping group, since they'd be in there many times and the quests are one-time deals.

This works out well for the questers as well. We're unlikely to run an instance more than once, though I did do WC twice because I was put in a partial instance with a quest boss dead. This means that for us, quest XP in there is a huge portion of total XP from an instance run. Nerfing that will cut out the total XP by a lot as well, so we aren't getting 1-3 levels from a single instance run. That means we can still quest and still run instances, since we also want to do the quests in there as well.

All in all, I think it's a great change. It's simple (though I imagine quite boring and repetitive for the guy who has to go to each instance and pick each quest and change it, not that I'm saying that the devs work by running around the game world, as cool as that would be). It's effective. It won't cause all sorts of weird unexpected problems like we'd find if they had made the XP requirements higher or tried to tweak group XP bonuses.

So bravo.