Vash'jir was the best zone in Cataclysm

It's like they say, "Second time's the charm." They were too impatient for the third. Anyway, I ran Vash'jir on my warlock. It was pretty awesome.

The first time around I just entirely missed the story. I read the quests, but I never put them together into a complete story. I missed the forest for the greens.

Speaking of greens, it's pretty. I didn't realize just how much better it looks than Hyjal. Of course by the story they're telling, Hyjal is supposed to be a dark, burnt-out, smoke-filled wasteland. It's not a failure to deliver, I just didn't like what they were delivering. In general, my favorite zones are green, orange, or white. Grizzly Hills: green and awesome. Durotar, Silithus, and Barrens: orange and nostalgia-filled. Alterac Valley, Storm Peaks, Winterspring: white and filled with awesome, nostalgia, and excellent music. On the other hand, Icecrown is white, but also very dark, so maybe it's more like grey, and I really only like it because fighting with the Ebon Blade is just plain fun.

Vash'jir is colorful, but not garish. It isn't filled with humming purple crystals. On the other hand, if you pop up to the surface, it's just flat. The island over which we're fighting is a small atoll, of no use except as a naval base to attack Stormwind. It's obviously just a battle for the sake of a war. The water is flat, perfectly flat, without any features at all. Maybe that's lazy design, but it's also perfect for indicating that you are in the middle of nowhere, stranded.

That's the story: war and folly leaving us stranded. I'd somehow managed to miss that this isn't a zone of triumphant victory. It's us sailing off to glorious battle and getting our asses handed to us by a much worse enemy. It's an entire zone of us fleeing for our lives, trying to accomplish a little bit while we can. We're not rescuing lost marines out of kindness, but out of absolute necessity: we have no reserves, no backup, and no army. We cobble together a decent fight here and there, only to retreat when we find that our enemy is orders of magnitude more powerful than we expected. At the end of the zone we lose.

In Hyjal, despite the gloominess of it all, we won, driving out Ragnaros, rejuvenating large parts of the land, waking the ancients, and killing a whole lot of Twilight cultists along the way. It's essentially an unending march toward victory. Vash'jir is a beautiful zone of crushing defeat. Yet, it's not entirely a lost cause. We accomplish a lot while we're there, dealing major blows to the Naga and Old Gods; it's just not enough.

I like a little desperation in a story. I like the feeling that our victory is not pre-ordained, but is something that we will struggle for, and not get the first time around. While Hyjal consisted of us waking up the ancients so they could do the heavy lifting for us, Vash'jir was us doing the hard work, and everyone got creative with everything from improvised explosives to finding air to breathe.

My title might be hyperbole, since I think Twilight Highlands was great, particularly on a PvP server, but Vash'jir is definitely competitive, and makes the other zones look simplistic, ugly, and boring in comparison.

How population affects the world

Some quests are better with an empty world. The lone hero who saves everyone quests in particular work best when there isn't someone else also around saving the world. Waiting in line just gets to be ridiculous. "Excuse me, sir, but could you hurry things up a bit? I also need to destroy this threat to the world." Kills and spawns can get silly too when you've destroyed the threat to the world, only to have it pop back up again and fight you while you're riffling through its pockets. This gets doubly bad when the next guy in line to save the world has to wait because you've gone and tagged the threat to the world. It's not as if shared kills solve this, as then we end up with a handful of Lone Saviors of the World teaming up to repeatedly kill the threat.

On the other hand, if things are too empty, then quests can get to be too hard. Many quests with elites are of this sort. Many of those are gone. This can still end up looking silly, because the quests were clearly designed for multiple players involved and went from being a significant accomplishment to being lame. I'm looking at you, Jintha'Alor. On a side note, not only was that place tricky to run at level, but it's also the worst Archaeology spot in the history of ever. Quests for mass killing are simultaneously well- and poorly-suited to a high population. On one hand, if those rats/orcs/rarcs are such a problem, then it makes sense that there would be a ton of people hired to kill them. It makes it feel a bit more like a war/magically oversized pest control when you have a dozen people busily killing them. Yet this depends a great deal on the spawn rate: if they come back quickly, then all is good. But, if the respawn is slow, then you have a bunch of guys standing around drinking coffee and yet, none of them claim to be supervising or on break.

Population variance can take a turn for the comical, utterly ruining the quest, but creating an equally-great situation, if only you can see it from the right perspective. For example, Westfall is meant to begin with an investigation into a murder. This should mean the lone player carefully questioning various vagrants, possibly bribing them, a feature that I believe all quests should have. In practice, it means racing people for the opportunity to punch a homeless person. Perhaps not what the developers intended, but it works just as well. And the ragamuffins have a field day.

Finally got a pandaren off of Turtleland

Their quests made me angry. I'd make a monk, because frankly, a non-pandaren monk and non-monk pandaren just don't make sense to me. Then I'd play the monk for a bit. Then I'd get bored by the wonderful mix of "you are the greatest person ever" and "you must learn humility" and go play something fun.

I finally decided to go for it. I'm on my new server, so I have no shortage of character slots. I struggled through it all, until finally, I got in a balloon and talked to a turtle. This confused me for a couple of reasons. First, it was a bit out of nowhere. "Our turtle island is dying" didn't seem to come up much. There was some issue with the little element guys, but that struck me as being their own version of Cataclysm aftermath. Second, why had no one talked to him in so long? Surely a little check up would make sense. Maybe some small talk. Or big, slow talk. Perhaps ask permission to mine the copper nodes.

Then I went to a forest and suddenly... the trailer made sense. This was the strange island that the Alliance and Horde washed up on. Of course I then was wondering what ever happened to Turtle Island. Did it just go on its merry way and ignore all the problems in Pandaria? Did it get lost? Maybe I missed a bit of quest dialog somewhere along the line.

I greatly enjoyed getting to Stormwind and talking to Varian. He sold the Alliance very well, as what appeared to be an Azerothian NATO (an attack on one is an attack on all). The brawl, or the aftermath, was perfectly done.

It did leave me wondering through, is Pandaren society screwed? From the sound of it, there are a lot of Pandaren who are leaving to join the Horde or Alliance. Clearly joining one faction or the other, or being totally neutral, strike me as safer situations. In the former, there are allies to back them up. In the latter, each side has an interest in avoiding a conflict, since that could force them into the other faction. Being mostly neutral but losing new recruits to the factions surely must be causing some terrible societal divisions. When no one is joining anyone, then opinions about the factions don't matter too much. But what about when someone's offspring, siblings, or parents, want to leave to join a faction? Just the notion that they can leave, that they can abandon all they knew, can shake a society. Now make where to go not just a matter of choice, but of division, and things get messy. Even without outside manipulations, there would be those who want to promote or disparage a particular faction, and those people surely will not get along well. It isn't yet a civil war, but what is to suggest that it will not be?

Perhaps that's a good sign, when I'm left with more questions and caring what happens afterward.

In defense of big, bright exclamation points

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!
are you done yet? you don't look done. maybe you need to kill some more bears.
YOU'RE DONE! THAT'S SO GREAT! I AM VERY HAPPY THAT YOU ARE DONE AND I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU A REWARD IF YOU COME TALK TO ME!

Let's ditch that weirdo and instead get into the world, yea! Let's go talk to this guy, see what's up with him. It is nice weather indeed. That's cool. It's like a world. In the real world no one has quest markers, you have to talk to them to get a job. How about this guy? Kids died in the war. That's sad. I wonder if I can visit his kids' graves and drop off flowers for him or something? No? I guess I am a complete stranger. That's realistic that he has nothing for me. Maybe this guy. How's it going? Need to me to shoot any bears? Yes? Great, I'll get right on that.

Yep, these bears are so dead and this world is so awesome. I mean, none of those weirdos with the shouting and then whispering and then shouting some more. Pretty great. I kill those bears, sir. Thanks for the firewood, I mean family heirloom.

Hi! I'm an adventurer in search of adventure. Do you have any for me? No? Okay. Hello over there. You don't talk, got it. You, fellow, how are you today? Winter is coming? Yes sir, it is. Hello ma'am, do you need any help with anything? Going to the well? I could carry some buckets for you? No, you have it covered? No one fell in?

*unsheathes sword*

LISTEN TO ME: I am not here to socialize with a bunch of scripted idiots. I am here to get excuses to kill stuff. Unless you are going to give me something in exchange for killing something else, I do not want to talk to you. I'd prefer to not even look in your direction. The next person who looks at me and doesn't have a quest to kill stuff or carry stuff past people who I get to kill will die.

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!

Thank you, insane shouting man.

This is not the quest that turns the tide of the war; it never is

When you get down to it, the GW2 hearts are quests. They're a lot more flexible than WoW quests, but they are ultimately quests. At this place, do this or these things. Yet there is a key difference that I think makes GW2 quests superior. It's in the quest text.

It's not the lack of quest text. They have that too, if you hover over the heart. They even send you letters, which is better than needing to trek back to the quest giver through the bandits that you supposedly wiped out but have since respawned. But that's not the big improvement.

Quests in WoW were almost always about advancing. Complete this quest and you'll have changed the world. You assassinated the enemy leader, smashed their army, and saved the day. This then looks ridiculous when everything has respawned. WoW dealt with this with a mix of phasing and ignoring it.

Quests in GW2 are almost always about maintenance. Sometimes they are literally that, including fixing broken equipment (which I suppose are repairs rather than maintenance and the accounting department is going to be on my case). Often times they're more generalized: thin the herd, keep spiders away from our apple trees, help downed patrols. All of these are things that need to be done, but none of them are the single thing that breaks through and wins the war. It's all keeping the world from collapsing, rather than raising it up. While that sounds less fun, it also makes a lot more sense in the context of a game where everything respawns. WoW dailies have this same feel, but they are dailies and therefore get no praise.

In general terms, WoW quests are written for a non-static world, while GW2 quests are written for the static world. Given that both worlds are essentially static, set pieces placed there to entertain, rather than to be remade by players, it makes a lot more sense to write the quests to fit the static world. In effect, by accepting that it is a theme park they make it look less like a theme park.

Even the dynamic events fit into this. Something shows up to go on a rampage and we stop it or don't. If we don't, then there is an event to clean up or retake lost ground. Alternatively, if we capture something, we then get an event to defend it. The enemies actually fight back and can do so successfully. If events simply reset, then we'd have the illusion of progress. Instead, we can actually make progress, taking and holding ground, but if we heroes wander away for too long it falls apart. It is temporary, but it is not illusionary.

[edited for a bit of grammar]

GW2: It's all connected! Events, Hearts, Dailies, and Trains

As the title and highly-detailed and complex diagram indicate, GW2 has a wonderful way of making everything interconnected.

Dynamic events often take place in the same area as the quest hearts, with qualifying enemies often spawning with it or being the expected filler between the boss fight. The result is that you either kill two birds with one stone, or two kill birds with two stones, but the second one doesn't fly away and make it hard to hit it.

The daily achievements tend to include a large dose of killing in a particular zone or mob types, both of which are the inevitable results of hearts and orange circles.

I tend to like the champion trains, though in a sense they're all I know, since I wasn't around for the clearly better thing that happened before them (I've been there before, I know that change is always for the worse). They feed into the dailies, giving some of the trickier things such as veteran kills, and an abundance of junk to salvage.

While we're on the subject, I rather like the daily system. The gathering one is a natural part of any movement outside the cities. At least until I've finished my hearts the zone kills are a freebie. Salvaging flows from killing. That leaves two more, and those can be as easy as reviving player or NPCs or doing a couple events, both of which you're probably going to run across during hearts or gathering. There are WvW ones as well, but I've not yet needed them. Given the sometimes slow pace of WvW I can see how those could be tricky for someone who wants to hop in for a quick completion. Of course I dislike the aquatic slayer one because I get disoriented underwater, but I've never felt like I needed it, so I see no major problem.

Finally, there is a missing link in the diagram. Players eagerly work together on chained dynamic events. Maybe chains aren't trains, but they rhyme, and that's what really matters when you're drawing diagrams on a chalkboard.

Does your game world exist outside quests?

Items
"Find a penny, pick it up, then the next day have good luck."  Or in the MMO universe, "Find a quest item, you can't pick it up, maybe next time around you'll have better luck because you'll have gotten the quest first, noob."

"Does this thing exist?"  In the real world this leads to all manner of philosophical musing, mo less than most of it utterly useless.  In the virtual world the answer is complex.  An item may exist, but what the existence is may change.  Without the relevant quest it may be in a mob's inventory, waiting to appear.  Or it may be an object on the ground, with appearance and may even physical interaction with the world, yet it cannot be picked up.  In some very rare cases the item is a quest item and it will exist with or without the quest, but the quest is merely piggy-backing off non-quest items, such as turning in gold or trade materials for reputation.

If a quest requires an item to be picked up, what should the item be without the quest?  The developers could leave the items out, waiting to be picked up, regardless of whether the players has the quest.  Then it becomes an inventory issue.  Are players going to fill up bags with currently-useless junk?  Can they destroy the quest items, rendering them incapable of completing them later?  Will quest items take up no capacity?  That can end up looking strange if the quest item is more than pieces of lint, which is itself rather strange.

If the quest item does not exist yet or cannot be interacted with without the quest, then the world itself is altered by the presence of the quest.  At times this may have an explanation, such as if you previously lacked the magnifying glass needed to see the pieces of lint.  At other times it instead appears that your character is magically blind or utterly incapable of expressing any interest or interacting with particular items in the world, until someone asks about them, and then no longer once the questions end.

This latter method is most glaring when the item has little reason to have not been there before.  While the quest may explain that the villain fled and left something behind, it often does not.  Even worse, you may go through an area and kill the villain, but he leaves nothing behind without the quest.  Seemingly immobile items, such as tools in an abandoned factory, may or may not be there depending on the quest, suggesting that Quest Gnomes are sneaking into abandoned factories to leave tools, which means that they should properly be called not-so-abandoned factories.

Phasing
In WoW we saw the rise of phasing.  While it is a neat idea, and makes sense, that the world would change in response to player actions, that is not actually what happens.  It doesn't matter if you kill a billion mooks and bosses, your side will never advance.  Instead, they will advance after you complete the quest that calls for you to kill ten mooks and maybe one boss, though those only count if done during the quest, and killing extra has no impact.  The world is nothing without the quests.

Story
*muttering to myself* "What's going on here?"
Nearby exclamation point guy: "Let me tell you, brave adventurer!"
Me: "I'd like to figure it out for myself."
NEPG: "HA!  You can't."

In a mystery novel you may be able to piece things together.  You might figure out the villain before the big reveal.  You might anticipate the villain's next move.  The facts may be there to figure things out, but lack the narrative structure and analysis needed for less-brilliant readers to figure things out.  Or there may be some facts missing, so that competing theories cannot be eliminated yet.  Despite the incomplete story, it is still there and you can create a narrative, perhaps incomplete or even wrong, but based on something.

Quests tend to hijack this process.  The world is presented, but it is nearly a blank slate.  It is merely there.  You cannot ask it anything, you cannot investigate.  There is nothing more to learn.  There is certainly not enough to form any sort of explanation for why it got to be as it is.  Instead there are quests.  They explain why it is how it is and how to change it to what it will be (though with likely no mention of how you want it to be).

It is like playing Clue, but rather than seeing that the victim is the maid, with a bloody candlestick nearby, and a trail leading down to the wine cellar, you instead are told that the maid has died and you are sent to investigate the body, leading to a quest in which you look for nearby blunt weapons, which are of course sparkling ever so slightly, and then you're prompted to follow the trail of blood, which is also sparkling and you may not have noticed until someone nearby who is apparently paralyzed in a standing state or is a faceless voice in your head prompted you to follow it.  Then in the basement you find the butler with a gun and a dozen armed minions, yelling in large red text about how he'll kill you for interfering, while the previously-mentioned paralyzed man or faceless voice do nothing at all.

Mists of Pandaria is an abomination, unworthy to be called a WoW expansion: Proof inside

Gourmet Kafa

A poop quest.  Of course.  All expansions must have them.  In one, we ate the results.  It was as it should be.

Then Mists of Pandaria comes along and just ruins everything.  All that is proper in the world of World of Warcraft is undone, destroyed, thrown out, as if it were nothing.  But it is everything.  Or was.

Gentlemen, ladies, ungentlemen, younger males, younger females, and females of less-than-reputable standing, I have a terror for you:

I won't ask you to gather it--kind of a mussy task, not fit for hero-- just mark it so we can find it easily when the mountain is safe again.

I thought it would be the kung fu panda that ruined WoW.  I was wrong.  It is the dung poo not-in-handa.

MoP: First Impressions

I don't like the login music.  It fills my ears with whining hurt.

The second quest sends me to the airship, which is not marked on the map unless you pick Azshara.

After that things were generally uphill.  I was still mixed up by my new everything and did not remember inquisition.  I'm also unsure of why I am notified of Art of War procs (resets exorcism) when the cooldown isn't up anyway.  That just confused me.  On one hand, it is nice to be able to get inquisition up quickly, but generating holy power from strong sneezes is tricky to deal with.  It was smart of them to have the pool of five; I don't think it would have been much fun with only three slots to store it, too much would get wasted.

Gyrocopter attack!  Let's just try the gyrocopter attack again!  I'm out of ideas.  Gyrocopter attack?
(I'm trying to say that I was amused by the gnomes, then I killed them)

It seemed as if the Alliance was set up as the bad guys.  But the commander we kept hunting, he seemed to have the best of intentions, trying to keep the land free of the taint of the Horde.  And then he turned into scary stuff that means he's a bad guy.  That was followed up with more yelling about not bringing a war, which of course the Horde ignored.  I'm curious to see how this turns out.  I don't have high hopes for the presentation, but we'll see.

All in all, it appears to be more of the same, which is exactly what I expected, and hoped for.

Now to fix those addons...

I heart hearts

Are hearts just quests?  Yes.  On the other hand, no.

Quests and hearts tend to do similar things: tell you want to kill, fiddle with, or retrieve from a designated area.  In this regard, quests and hearts are the same.  However hearts have advantages in terms of presentation.

First off, hearts are active the moment you're able to participate.  If I am shooting wasps it means that I'm shooting wasps for the heart.  Contrast that with a quest where you might kill a dozen bears on your way in, only to be told to go kill a dozen bears.  I'd not mind that if they actually wanted two dozen, which is really just a matter of presentation: count number of bears killed before quest, add that number to the total required, thereby creating the illusion that the player got credit for them.  However they don't do that.  The overall effect of the hearts in this regard is to reduce the sense that I am killing mobs pointlessly.  Neither system deals with post-quest/heart slaughter.

Second, hearts are simultaneous and comprehensive.  I'm helping Farmer John with his farm, which includes everything from killing wasps to digging up large and aggressive grubs.  Maybe all I did was kill wasps, but if I killed a ton of wasps, that's helpful, even if I ignored the grubs and leaky pipes.  This even helps with the problem that a dozen other people are already there killing wasps.  Since we're rendering a sort of general help, rather than heroically saving a very tiny part of the world, it makes sense that more than one person would be involved.  Furthermore, having many people helps average things out, so I can imagine that despite my obsession with shooting wasps, someone did eventually get around to fixing the pipes.  Quests can use the trick of stacking, having a few quests that relate to the same area, but this doesn't give the flexibility of wasp-killing vs. pipe-patching.  When the quests come from multiple NPCs, particularly NPCs who aren't standing right next to each other and presumably overhearing what the other ones told me to do, then it can feel artificial, excessively planned that everyone just so happens to want me to kill a dozen bears, harvest a dozen bear asses, and kill a dozen angry stalks of grass which feed on bear corpses.

Hearts don't fill my bags with terrible vendor trash 'rewards'.  Instead, the heart-giver is a karma vendor who might sell me something neat.  Or at worst, helps me empty my bags of whatever trash I got off the wasps.

Another Torture Quest

Maybe Blizzard learned from the torture quest in Borean Tundra.  For context, it was a quest in which you're tasked by some mages, who are themselves not allowed to use torture, with torturing information out of a prisoner.  Some people were not happy with this quest, giving us no choices or options, only requiring us to go ahead with the torture, or abandon the quest and the many that followed.

There is another torture quest, added with Cataclysm in the Northern Barrens.  Though that's not the right term.  It's an interrogation quest.  Note the word choice.  Interrogate. The goal of the quest is to get information and it can be done by means which do not involve the use of a neural needler.

Here are the summaries, if you hate clicking on links:
Librarian Normantis on Amber Ledge wants you to use the Neural Needler on the Imprisoned Beryl Sorcerer until he reveals the location of Lady Evanor.
- Prisoner Interrogated
 Question the nearby Razormane prisoner. If he's not there or unconscious, Togrik can revive him for you.
 - Razormane Prisoner Interrogated


Both use interrogated in the quest completion part, but the brief descriptions have a different way of phrasing it.  The Borean Tundra quest only mentions, specifically mentions, the torture device.  In contrast, the Barrens quest gives the more general word of question.  And it means it.

You get five options at first.  One is the predictably ineffective choice of demanding to know who is leading the Quilboar.  Second and third options are punching and kicking.  Fourth is to give food and the fifth is tickling.  All of these options work.  In fact, the last two options, the non-violent ones, work faster.  Apparently no one can resist tickling or criticizing food.  You even get a buff based on the actions you take, though the 'nice' buff isn't very useful.

I wonder what the extra development effort is for this compared to a few jabs of a neural needler.  I suspect it's not a terrible increase in effort.  Enough to not do it for every quest, but I think not so much that it cannot be done more often.  It's only a small change, with no impact on the quest text or rewards.  But small changes, small choices, are important to players, especially when we've got a neural needler and a willfully blind mage.

If zones gave experience

Rather than quests giving experience, zone completion would.  With this model, a zone designated as level 20-25 would take the player from level 20 to level 25, no more or less.  Quests are already grouped into hubs, so give each hub a level, or a level for two hubs, however they need to be divided up to fit the zone leveling.

Obviously mob kills, dungeon quests, and heirlooms are all unaddressed problems.  I'm ignoring them just to focus on the zone leveling idea.

Playing for the quest completion sound

On Friday I wondered about nostalgia, and lack thereof, resulting in comments pointing toward the quest design as a possible culprit.  Maybe they were on to something.

What's the big deal with quests?  Is it the story?  The bonus experience and gold?  The tendency to point toward mobs of approximately our level?  Maybe we simply need the structure, being lost and despairing without it, incapable of figuring out who to murder or not without direction.

Everquest was a game strangely lacking in explicit quests, instead being a sort of "make your own quest" game, by which I mean "kill ten million charizards" (my gut tells me that's a creature from Everquest and nothing I've looked for disagrees).  WoW, being based on EQ, by which I mean it used EQ players as developers, EQ players as players, and EQ everything else, actually didn't always have a lot of quests.  Early leveling had quests, but they ran out and players were thrust into the wilderness of plagued lions and glacial slimes (my gut tells me I made those up and it's usually right).  During testing they found that players preferred the quests to the grinding.  Somehow killing ten snow meese (little-know plural of moose) was okay if someone gave a quest for it.

I propose science.  Using a time machine, go back and beat up WoW developers until they do what we say.

First, remove story.  Reduce quests to nothing beyond "kill # of [thing]" and don't even give a name to the location, just a dot on the map.  See if people still do quests.  Since that's how people quest these days, maybe we can skip this round of developer-punching.  If players still quest, it will suggest that non-story elements are sufficient to drive quest-following behavior, though it does not mean that story does not also contribute.

Second, remove the experience bonus and other rewards such as gold, gear, and reputation.  If players still do quests, then it suggests that non-reward aspects are sufficient.

Continue on, beating up developers and removing aspects from quests.  Remove both story and rewards.  Remove the level-appropriate aspect (vanilla already got that part in a few).  Throw enough science at the wall and something is bound to stick.

And then I'll know why my paladin won't just fly up to the Grizzly Hills and fight bears among the wonderful scenery and beautiful music without a quest telling her to do so.

Learning to be a Death Knight, at level 1

Is anyone tired of having their DK's leveling narrated by Batman?  It's a great set of quests, but perhaps it has gotten repetitive, particularly given the highly-linear, scripted nature of it.  Beside that, given the small changes that have taken place since Wrath of the Lich King came out, there is justification for a new source of death knights.


That source?  Take your pick.  Warriors or paladins could have a corruption chain which converts them.  Warlocks could take a liking to inch-thick steel.  Alternatively, they could start at level 1.

Like any other class, the death knight would start off as a little nothing nobody.  But they'd learn something else.  Something darker.  Gone would be the scripted DK creation/rebellion sequence.  Instead, they'd play in the same level 1 world as everyone else.

Surely the Knights of the Ebon Blade could feel a similar pressure as the Forsaken, pressure to ensure their survival, both for their own interest as individuals in need of allies and as an organization that doesn't want to see the return of the Scourge.  However, while the Forsaken need abominations and corpses to increase their numbers, Death Knights can be converted, willingly.  The weak would desire such power, though only the strong would survive it.

This could even be beneficial to the player population overall.  Death knights wouldn't be hit with so many ability so quickly, then having barely learned their class (if that), shoved right into the middle of the leveling curve filled with players who expect people to have half a clue.  The outside impression could be improved as well, removing the "you started at level 55" or "you're lazy" element.


Rather than delete the current death knight quests, they would be a class quest chain, starting at level 55.  They would be optional, though I expect that the gear rewards would be a strong draw.  Rather than being directly about breaking away from the Lich King, they would instead be set as a series of challenges, to confront the past history of their class and those who wield such power.  In this form, it could be broken into multiple quest sections, so that players would not need to complete them all at once.  Contrast this with the current quests which essentially imprison the death knight until they are entirely completed.


Would you want to level a death knight from level 1?

Gold for Quests: The Beginning of the End

Once upon a time there was not a conversion of xp to gold when a player hit the level cap.  If you were level 60, quests gave whatever the reward was, and that was it.  The xp part just didn't exist anymore.

Imagine the economy without quests, particularly daily quests, giving large amounts of gold.  Instead gold would come from a scant few coins from quest rewards, fewer still from mob kills, and then there was vendor trash.  We needed that stuff badly.  It was the source of gold in the economy.  Nowadays you might throw out those few copper of charred boar glands, but back then, those charred boar glands were good stuff.  Bag space could be an issue but thankfully, no one ever needed more than one set.  That last part was a blatant, ironic lie.

Then one day that changed.  Excess xp, which was of course all of it at 60, turned into gold.  And there was much rejoicing.  Verily, did we prance about Silithus in our clown costumes of non-set green gear of the monkey, and we quested and it was glorious.  Gold, precious gold!  Oh the feeling, as if we'd been in a desert and seen a drop of water.  I suppose I was actually in a desert, so... anyway, it was pretty neat.

Or was it?

Without quests giving gold, the notion of dailies seems a bit ridiculous.  Why would we have these strange quests that are the same, day after day?  For reputation they make no sense, since dungeons give that.  They are bosses, so we can't expect them to give loot.  Aha, gold.  But wait, why would dailies be a way to get gold?  Quests don't give gold.

When quests do give gold, without dailies, they players hit the cap and start racing about to find more quests because that's where gold comes from.  And then they use up all the quests and have run out of sources of inflation.  They could switch to farming to get materials to trade for gold or farm mobs for gold, but the first one doesn't add gold and the second is slower.  They learned to expect inflation and ended up with the strange idea that the way to play was to print money rather than generate actual resources.  In effect, they had learned inflation expectations and then wondered where they printing press had gone.  Dailies came to the rescue, giving a new way to dump more gold into the economy.  In the process, they made it necessary to get even more gold by driving up prices.

The concept of going out and farming the materials can get lost on people.  This isn't helped by the tendency of someone to pop up and say "I farmed it for free", followed by a few dozen people saying that they didn't because nothing is free and ranting about opportunity costs.  That's a useful economic lesson, except when you're dealing with "I farmed it for free", you're also not dealing with people who are applying the minds much (this isn't a judgement, merely a statement; it is a game after all).  After a round of "no you didn't farm it for free" there is a tendency to get the "farming is for idiots" idea instead, which is equally ridiculous.

I don't much like the proliferation of dailies.  A few are good.  But they've become excessive.  Yet scaling them back is difficult.  Now that the economy has adapted, as best it can, to this steady influx of gold, removing that could prove as damaging as adding them.  If no new dailies are added in Mopland, players could feel compelled to run the old dailies, causing them to have less fun.  Or if all were removed, then there would be huge imbalances of wealth which would be semi-permanent.  That's where you get violent revolutions, or worse, customers quitting.

So as is typical, my advice is to make a time machine and go back and make everything right.

Assassinate Creed

You know that great feeling you get when you've been struggling with a boss and finally get it down?  That's how I felt after this quest.

It's part of the rogue legendary quest chain and is definitely a rogue quest.  You must not only sneak, but sneak well.  And sap too.  Sapping and sneaking and being patient and quick.  Patient and quick, that's a rare thing!

This particular part takes place in Gilneas, sneaking past highly-alert guards to assassinate a black dragon disguised as a human.  It was great to see the city used again, and used well.

It took me four tries, though I don't count one of them because I was just testing the circles.  Tip: the outer circle is the detection one.  The inner circle is... round.

But I triumphed!  Then I cooked some food to help me fight the boss.  And then I forgot to eat it.  But he died and I didn't.  Then they gave me daggers that match T6 quite nicely and sent me to go kill bosses in Dragon Soul and the other place which might be the same place, for a few weeks.

So let's hope I can get into the raids.  Maybe if I kill a guildy.  That's a legitimate rogue tactic, right?  Maybe not funny to joke about after the EVE incident...

Anyway, point remains, bravo, Blizzard, on an amazing quest.

Objectives Rather Than Quests

Kill ten pirates. How would you complete that quest? You'd run over to the arrow and use your relevant class moves to kill pirates. Auto-attack is likely to play a part, or some core spell in a caster rotation: mind flay, frostbolt, shadowbolt.

Bring a Gyrochronatom. How would you complete that quest? Well, it depends. Maybe you're an engineer, so you could make it yourself. But for that you'll need iron and gold. If you're a miner, you can get that yourself. Otherwise you'll be at the AH to buy the materials. If you can't make it, you could buy it off the AH or find someone to craft it. Maybe there are none on the AH that day.

Bring 10,000 gold. Now what? You could do dailies for a while. Or you could farm mobs for coin and trash. Maybe you prefer to farm materials, skinning certain mobs. Or you could fly around looking for herbs. If you're a crafter, then you can make something people want. What do people want? Now you have a completely different challenge.

Even a fedex quest can do this. Depending on where your hearth is, the trip can be much faster or slower. Maybe you're a mage and all the cities are a click away. Or you're an engineer and you have mostly-reliable and safe transportation to a couple neutral cities as well as various lakes in Northrend. Even the branch of engineering you pick will make a difference.

Notice how different goals can change the experience? Simply changing what the quest giver asks for will personalize the experience, without needing to write a new quest for every single player.

WoWing around again: Hillsbrad (Horde-side, just in case Alliance has quests here too)

"Yes, this horse IS made of STARS."

"Bears are soulless beasts put upon this earth to torment us."

"The mine spiders refuse command and are running rampant."

Yea, we're off to a good start.

Rogues, take note when shackling webbed prisoners: they do not die, they despawn. That means your combo points cannot be used for recuperate. It's a small problem given the general harmlessness of enemies, particularly when overleveled.

Moving on to other entirely unacceptable failures of game development: the murlocs do not flee.

On the plus side, Dumass is the best-designed escort NPC ever. Mostly because he acts like a normal escort NPC but has the dialogue to back it up.

Sludge Fields: Who keeps screaming? And then, like any good quest will do, the question is answered. But while we're talking about good quests, is it really necessary to retcon all the player actions from vanilla? I realize that respawns and that sort of thing were all necessary mechanics in lieu of a dynamic world, but did they have to rewrite the stories as well? It doesn't seem like a good way to bring back old players if every other quest says "you did nothing." The quest in question and the associated book were good reads, but would anything have been lost by renaming the NPCs?

I feel bad for Jenny Awesome. All the quests seem to have been miswritten and used "he", but the Forsaken know she's a she. For some strange reason, the quest to save the humans is not repeatable. Lost opportunity there, Blizzard!

Apparently the Forsaken have begun recycling. Oh look, Helcular is here, brought back by "a group of heroes" WAS THAT SO HARD!? Now if he'd quit whipping out his rod at every opportunity...

Quest objective: "Explain to Orkus that he is standing in shallow water." This all ended in sadness, and not just because of how the quest turned out.

Tarren Mill requires level 21. My time was done. But at least I got to fight angry slimes.

Leveling is too slow

You might have noticed me complaining that my warrior was too high for the Barrens by the time he got to them. Well that was stupid! Leveling is too slow, always too slow.

Even if level 13 was too high for Barrens, it was too low for instances. That's what I was interested in. I already knew the leveling game was a mess and hadn't been fixed, but what had changed in the intervening months on the grouping side, that was my real interest. For this, any leveling speed was too slow.

Leveling just gets in the way of the real game, by which I mean grouping at level 15.

Maybe this same lesson can be extended. Possibly it applies to level 85 and grouping then as well. That means that there are not merely 14 barrier levels, but an entire whatever that math would be. More than 14! Unacceptable.

But of course it's all just a trap. I rushed to get to level 15 so I could play in groups. And I did. But before I knew it I was level 20 and geared like a boss. Suddenly all that previous questing stuff was not just a waste of time, it was a really easy waste of time. So of course I stopped doing that. But then there I was, capped out at 20 and gearing up, but gearing up is really just a two-word way to say "running the same places over and over again with various random people who don't want to be there much more than I do."

Damn. Now that leveling thing doesn't sound so bad.

WoWing Around Again: Silverpine

Turn on the music.

First impression: Looks like someone is looking for a war. Big big Forsaken army, with lots of plague launchers.

You're just in time, Octondenub. It is Octondenub, right?

Grand Executor Mortuus looks at a sheet of paper.

Yes, that's what the paperwork says: "Octondenub."

Grand Executor Mortuus points to your name on the sheet of paper.

Yep, that's a Forsaken.

Garrosh arrived as I'd expect: jumping in and yelling the second he arrived. Things went uphill from there, with him actually sounding quite reasonable when questioning Sylvanas' use of val'kyr. Perhaps she could have phrased things better, saying that the Horde would lose its grasp on Lordaeron rather than the Forsaken. Maybe all the skilled tricksters of diplomacy died when the Apothecaries revealed themselves.

"They won't take out land without a fight!" - Forsaken soldier and something between irony and hypocrisy

As would be expected, the first quests involve ingredients for plague. And killing worgen. For which I was giving a Nubish Cloak. Like a nub, I was happy to get it.

I'm still not sure of the point of plague. It doesn't seem to actually be contagious. So it's a chemical weapon. But then I'm still not seeing the benefit over explosives, since it often seems to disperse quickly. I suppose it's one of those examples of how cultural norms drive weapon development. They died to plague stuff, so they make plague. I'm an American so I lean toward nukes and drones. Or ideally, nuclear drones (Get to it, Obama! We know it isn't legality holding you back.)

It really is an act of brilliance for a Forsaken to hide in an outhouse. It hides his stench. Quite clever. Poor Yorik.

After that there is more running. I see a very tall Ettin. It is elite and it wanders. Being so visible, it is a poor substitute for the Sons of Arugal, but I appreciate the effort.

"Goblins got us drunk" may be the worst excuse ever for getting your ass kicked by a bunch of Twilight fans.

"Within the butt of this bush chicken is a stick of dynamite." On one hand this means that the ettins are just another gimmick quest mob rather than a sinister stalker of nubs, on the other hand, it's a Forsaken quest involving an exploding chicken which is also coated with diseased organs, so that's a point up in my book.

I was sent off to kill spiders and rescue orcs, with a vague hint of 'if you see the broodmother that would be a good time to kill her'. Then I saw a rare spawn spider, but that was not her. So I ventured into the mine to find the broodmother, and found her I did. I got some nice boots. Then I broke out the victims near her and killed another spider (but not the last one for the kill quest). At which point I got the quest to kill her. Yet another case where it would be great if quest credit could be gained for quests not yet given. Apparently completing either the kill or rescue will trigger the matriarch quest, which is an improvement, and something I did not know quests could do.

Kill the refugees. Okay. That just sounds like a war thing to do, particularly for the Forsaken, who are unlikely to be shown and mercy in turn. Bring with a val'kyr to raise them as new Forsaken. Well... okay, I guess. It didn't seem like such a horrible thing back in Deathnell. Also, mind control them. Uh... With all due respect, Ms. Sexy Corpse Lady Queen, those are not new Forsaken, they are merely tools. The Forsaken are the free-willed undead, not slaves. If you want to kill humans and raise slaves, I can see the practicality of it. But do not call them Forsaken!

I won't spoil it, though it probably has been many times already elsewhere, but let's just say, that was a surprise, both what happened and the reaction of Agatha.

Then Sylavanas gives a speech which seemed to consistent mostly of cognitive dissonance with the quest I had done five minutes before. This was interrupted by a dungeon queue for VC, which as a rogue meant ending the cinematic so I wouldn't miss it. That seems to have broken the quest and I did not get discovery credit, so no FP from the Sepulcher, so I had to run back, then abadon it to remove the phasing that was hiding Sylvanas.

Then I got a quest called "Honor the Dead." This was paired with the similarly hypocritically named "Excising the Taint." The followup was triggered by the worgen killing and had me find a book. I can find books. Or I thought I could. Searching all over the place with no luck. No named mobs in sight, nothing. Eventually I was just running around without stealth. And got attacked in the barn. Huh? I didn't see anyone in the barn and I checked it twice! I see what you did there, Blizzard; you made a quest mob that spawns when the player is close, but not if they are stealthed, meaning that rogues can only do this quest once they are frustrated enough to run around aimlessly unstealthed, as opposed to being the purposeful, sneaky types that they are supposed to be. That's just stupid.

On the plus side, my brief trip into VC didn't totally screw up the mob levels. They're still green rather than grey. I'm guessing another dungeon run will fix that terrible problem of mobs giving xp.

Now I'm at the Forsaken Front. Does it ever not rain in Gilneas? I seem to be missing a few objects, because the quest herb and catapult shots have been replaced with blue and white checkered boxes. The ettin throwing boulders was a nice touch.

Then everyone died and everything was ruined. I don't think I've ever spent so much time as a Forsaken running away from imminent defeat.

So yadda yadda transimensional portal attunement, you know,a typical day. And then I saw a Witchalok. "What is a Witchalok?", you ask. Click the damn links! Also, they have doomskulls, which have a very high magnitude of doom. And, armies of wolfoids. Unless you're looking to take on a nearly-invincible elite, you'll want to avoid the doomskull. To top it all off, they are immune to sap. Can you believe it?

Godfrey really likes shooting people he doesn't like. Including other Forsaken. He fits right in. Perhaps too well...

The zone ends with a battle, in which I took no part because my job was to run really, really fast after Sylvanas while she shouted at people.

And that's Silverpine.