General Discussion

Originally posted by Waterlily

Originally posted by paulscott

It allows the developers to send players everywhere and anywhere.

breaks up the boredom since players aren't always in the same spot.

spreads out the player base allowing the servers to load balance more efficently

allows the developers to say see we have a developed world with hunderds and thousands of quests.

allows the developers to 'herd' the players from one spot to another so you're with people your level.

attaches signifigance to areas players wouldn't ever want to be before experiance venders were there.

...

I know I'm missing a least a dozen other things.

 

Levels already did all that. They already directed you towards mobs you could handle.

Questing is there because anyone can follow something which directs them from point A to point B. A quest which tells someone to get 10 pieces of skin from a wolf and bring it back is doable by any child, how dumb or intelligent they are, or how skillfull at the game, doesn't matter. They will get XP no matter what.

It takes away any reason to form a capable group. WoW caps any skill to level because there is always a way to gain items and xp through quests. They reach an enormous audience with it, but their game is very shallow.

There are group quests splattered throughout your solo quest grind, and instance dungeon quests. Plus there is Raiding at end game. I just did an Onyxia raid 2 days ago as a lvl 64 and it's anything but easy. Look at questing as a easy and relaxing way to get into the game and learn your character, because group instances and raids get harder as the game goes on.

Originally posted by solarine

Simple: human beings relate to stories and quests are the only reliable form of giving you stories in an MMORPG. Trying to tackle the topic of quests by taking it out of the context of story completely and referring to it as merely "handholding" makes no sense.

I do read the quests. If I don't like what I'm reading, it'll put me off the game. If I do, it'll pull me in. It's one of the more enjoyable aspects of playing an RPG for me. Apparently "shallow" in MMOs has become a misnomer. Almost by definition there is more "depth" in an MMORPG with stories than a simulation of mindless mass fauna destruction.

QFT.

I was talking to a veteran WoW player the other day who was bitching about the DK quests. It was 6 hours of quests that sunk you knee deep into death knight lore. It was really fun and the climax was a huge battle, where at the end a lot of talking went on between two NPC's. Very engaging and entertaining, but this veteran was bitching because he wanted the NPC's to hurry up so he could get the reward.

I confronted him on this, after all, the expansion just came out a day ago at the time, so he shouldn't be burnt out on the content. I asked him if he cared at all about the story and lore and he said he doesn't read that stuff off the website. I told him there is plenty of quests in WoW that draw you into the lore and he had no idea which quests I was talking about as I named off many that I experienced on my way to lvl 55. He never heard of them and admitted to skipping the quest dialogue, because he can careless about the lore or story and just wants the loot.

My point is that the lore and story is there, but people aren't patient enough to read it. There's a reason people in this forum feel like their grinding while doing quests, it's because they aren't reading their quests and getting into the lore. I didn't like WoW either at first. I felt it was a bad quest grind. However, after playing Warcraft 3 this past summer, it changed my tune quite a bit. Now I understood everything that was happening in the quests, and knew who these NPC's were and their significance.

Some quests can be boring in WoW, but they still have story surrounding it. Not all stories are entertaining for all people, or else there wouldn't be so many types of genre's of books out there. The same goes for MMORPGs, except players are driven to complete every quest in the game, so they are inadvertently lead into stories they will find boring. I think WoW has a good quest system and balance of group v. solo play. It's just one of the many things that makes WoW a great game that it draws in so many people. LoTRO also has good quests, it just doesn't have the little things that make WoW a cut above the rest.

I like questing as long as the quests are an optional path to maxx level and they give benefits for groupers over soloers.

Originally posted by Conley

 

I absolutly hated the quest grind in LOTRO, but I love the quest grind in WoTLK. The reason is that the quests are very much mini storylines with a beginning and an end, and a variation of gameplay that makes them interesting from start to finish.

QFT.  Outlands, and a LOT of old-school WoW was very 'grindy.'  For instance, Hellfire Pennisula.  I never actually cared about any of the crap there.  Kill it, move on, etc.  Never drew you in.

Now this is obviously a personal opinion, but if you compare the so-called war in the Hellfire Penninsula (which mostly seemed to be a bunch of demons patrolling around in circles and Fel orcs standing there waiting to die) with the war in the Dragonblight - villagers fleeing in panic, guards and undead clashing across a huge front, a squad standing by your side as you take down a lich, you see something completely different.

This is not to say that the entire expansion is this good.  The Grizzly hills are mostly non-dynamic, though I believe this is deliberate (it's a heavy PvP zone, so having a huge quantity of undead vs. Horde/Alliance would make no sense, as thematically the horde and the alliance are fighting for resources).  The troll area is just kind of meh.  But the Borean Tundra proved equally amazing, and the Howling Fjord was a lot of fun. 

So, YMMV.  But seriously, if you dislike quest grind, you owe it to yourself to check out WotLK, and see what questing SHOULD be. 

P.S.  Still a themepark, but that's WoW.  It'll never change, because the last game that totally changed its style in the middle of subscription was Star Wars Galexies, and that never worked out well.

Originally posted by JK-Kanosi

Originally posted by solarine

Simple: human beings relate to stories and quests are the only reliable form of giving you stories in an MMORPG. Trying to tackle the topic of quests by taking it out of the context of story completely and referring to it as merely "handholding" makes no sense.

I do read the quests. If I don't like what I'm reading, it'll put me off the game. If I do, it'll pull me in. It's one of the more enjoyable aspects of playing an RPG for me. Apparently "shallow" in MMOs has become a misnomer. Almost by definition there is more "depth" in an MMORPG with stories than a simulation of mindless mass fauna destruction.

 

QFT.

I was talking to a veteran WoW player the other day who was bitching about the DK quests. It was 6 hours of quests that sunk you knee deep into death knight lore. It was really fun and the climax was a huge battle, where at the end a lot of talking went on between two NPC's. Very engaging and entertaining, but this veteran was bitching because he wanted the NPC's to hurry up so he could get the reward.

I confronted him on this, after all, the expansion just came out a day ago at the time, so he shouldn't be burnt out on the content. I asked him if he cared at all about the story and lore and he said he doesn't read that stuff off the website. I told him there is plenty of quests in WoW that draw you into the lore and he had no idea which quests I was talking about as I named off many that I experienced on my way to lvl 55. He never heard of them and admitted to skipping the quest dialogue, because he can careless about the lore or story and just wants the loot.

My point is that the lore and story is there, but people aren't patient enough to read it. There's a reason people in this forum feel like their grinding while doing quests, it's because they aren't reading their quests and getting into the lore. I didn't like WoW either at first. I felt it was a bad quest grind. However, after playing Warcraft 3 this past summer, it changed my tune quite a bit. Now I understood everything that was happening in the quests, and knew who these NPC's were and their significance.

Some quests can be boring in WoW, but they still have story surrounding it. Not all stories are entertaining for all people, or else there wouldn't be so many types of genre's of books out there. The same goes for MMORPGs, except players are driven to complete every quest in the game, so they are inadvertently lead into stories they will find boring. I think WoW has a good quest system and balance of group v. solo play. It's just one of the many things that makes WoW a great game that it draws in so many people. LoTRO also has good quests, it just doesn't have the little things that make WoW a cut above the rest.

There's a difference in single player games, and MMORPGs. Usually in single player games I read the quests and enjoy them, because they actually change the game. It's easy for the developers to code this, because the game world changes just for me, the single player.

But in an MMORPG, I don't read the quest dialog, and I don't care about the lore, because the world doesn't change.

For example, if an NPC asks me to do a quest, like save the princess, in a single player game, then the princess is always and forever saved after that, and the whole game is changed for me. In an MMORPG, the NPC asks the next player to save the same princess. Nothign changes in the MMORPG gameworld when I read a quest, except I get some loot, so why should I read it, or care about it except for getting the loot since that's the only game world change?

But in a single player game, everything can change. Who will join me as party members, what NPC's are friendly to me, which NPC's will attack me, what areas are open or closed to me, buildings can disappear or appear, entire towns can  be destroyed, etc.

Normally I would agree with you, but WotLK is the exception IMO. I got bored of the questlines in classic wow pretty soon, same for TBC. Also tried LOTRO and AOC and in both cases i would start reading the questlines but eventually give up since it really wasn't all that special.

In WOTLK it is the other way around. I started out playing and skipping quest text like i always do, but along the ride i started noticing that the quests where really amazing, and that they where little storylines tied together.  So this kind of forced me to take the quest texts more seriously. Unlike The Burning Crusade in WotLK all the quest stories tie together in the great struggle against the lich king. Eventually I was taken aback by the quality of it and now i read all the quest text, not because i have to but because i want to.

On that note, the Death Knight starting area can easily compete with any single player game out there including Oblivion. It literally has it all, suprise, betrayal, journey trough time, consequences for your actions, etc, etc. It's a rolecoaster storyline that at the end (when your level58) gives you an epic final battle.  All this is done by offering players a variety of gameplay modes from shooting turrets to bombing locations, from spying to destroying villages.

If WoW was your first MMOG, you have absolutely no idea how fun it was to find a camp far into the wild or deep inside a dungeon and spend the whole day there with like-minded people. The puller would run in, bring back the mobs and after the kill frenzy, you would sit and regen while having awesome conversations.

I'm so disgusted with today's theme park single player quest grind. It completely defeats the purpose of playing a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER Online Game.  Group questing is the farthest I'll go but even those have left a bitter taste.. As soon as the quest is over, people drop from the group like flies. Ugh.

WoW commercialized the single player quest grind for the casual masses...they have little time to play, so they do a couple quests and log out. It's unfortunate that every company wants to cash in like Blizzard and destroy what was once a compelling genre. 

There's nothing really "non-casual" about mob grinding, I did it for 2 years in FFXI and ran into more bad groups than I did good ones. The first time a pull would go bad or the group would wipe people would start blaming one another or someone would drop group without so much as a word. I have no problem with grinding out lvls on that game, I just got tired of spending all day on it with only one or two good groups to show for it.

The problem with these quest driven games is that they want to hold your hand with map markers or waypoints to every objective, leaving no real thinking or reading for the player. You grab a quest without even reading it, have the objectives displayed in a window on screen, and in some even a marker or waypoint to show you where to go.

Rpg games are all about adventurers exploring and doing deeds for the people of that world, not getting together with a bunch of people just to hunt endless lines of monsters.