Important Stuff!

Thursday, December 18, 2014

[WoW] A "daily" adjustment

A new player to Warlords (do those exist?) would have to be forgiven for having absolutely no idea what Daily Quests are. At level 100 I see at most a handful a day and most of those are optional quests from the Garrison. This fictional new player would have no idea that at one point in WoW's history (amusingly enough, when WoW was taking place in Draenor's alternate history predecessor, Outland) a player could expect to _FILL_ their quest log with dailies during any particular day. Expansions since Cataclysm have pared down the bloat. Truth be told I like not having an entire quest log to grind through every day; the fewer daily quests feel like they give me more meaningful and open-ended, "Do whatever the #$%@ I want" sense of accomplishment. There's just one more tweak I wish Blizzard would make.

Before you call me a whiner or blithering idiot, this is a change I am essentially stealing from another game. Not that there's anything wrong with outright stealing gameplay ideas when they work, but I admit I feel a smidgen of guilt at suggesting one game I play steal from another when they're in direct competition for my (and everyone's) attention.

That moral quandary aside, I want Blizzard to treat the new "Go kill ~100 things in X area" quests like Final Fantasy XIV treat it's daily Hunts. For those not familiar, FFXIV gives you a daily set of Hunt Marks at level 50. Hunt Marks are essentially quests that involve "Go to place X, kill X things." You can only have one set on your character at a time, but you can pick up that day's even if you had yesterday's on you, one you complete yesterday's. So if on Monday I pick up my Hunts but end up setting my face on fire and don't get a chance to play, I can login on Tuesday and go murder whatever random mobs Monday's hunt directs. Then I can turn in the hunts from Monday (actually they auto-complete but it's the same idea) and promptly pick up Tuesdays, allowing me to do effectively two days of hunts in one day. However I haven't actually GAINED any extra hunts, I just didn't miss out because one day I couldn't.

Now, making it so that you could just keep picking up dailies and do them all at a later date would be a bit much, but giving people a one day grace period helps alleviate the feeling that I am punishing myself by missing on the largest apexis shard injection per day. Wanting players to login daily is one thing, but the time investment it takes to do the apexis shard quest makes me want to just say "Screw it..." more than it makes me want to stick around and play.

2 comments:

  1. I'd like Achievements with bars to fill and a periodic reward. Kill 10,000 monsters in Draenor and every 50 or so gives a nice little loot bonus.

    Basically, I want the things we have already, but with smaller, more frequent rewards so it doesn't feel half as bad!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Try building the "Inn" garrison building. The "daily" quests from there seem to work exactly like what you suggest (the ones you get once you have completed the specific quest once already). I log in every day and pick up the days inn-quest. And then when one day I have time for some heroics, i do a lot at once and hand them in. I Really!!! Wish that blizz would take your suggestion and do this with more dailies. They are already doing something similar with conquestcap as well. If i dont cap conquest one week i can just play a bit more the next week and (almost) get to the same point i would be if. I had done some each week.... More of this style please :-)

    ReplyDelete