I think I'm special

Okay. So last post I was a little bit unhappy about the Daily Quests. I have, however, come across more than a few people who are really excited about them, so I decided to see what the big deal was.

Maybe I'm special, because after a week of daily quests, I pretty much stand by my previous appraisal. They’re boring, repetitive, and stupid. I’ll take it even further to say that this game of WARcraft has become nothing more than a mini-game collection of Simon Says and Lasso the Donkey. It’s World of Wario. Anyone excited about these quests is just trying way too hard to justify their addiction at this point. It’s like a hopeless drunk saying how easy it is to get to sleep at night. Well yeah, but most people don’t ‘sleep’ in the gutter by the bus stop. We call that ‘passing out in a ditch on your face’ around these parts.

Rep grinds are attached to each new daily quest, imagine that. Looking at the quartermasters for these two factions, I see one worthwhile item from each vendor, and (surprise!) it requires exalted reputation to acquire. Why they even put in subdivisions of honor is beyond me. Why not just have two values? Up until 42000 honor you can be “no”, and then at 42001 you can be “yes”. I hit “Honored” with one faction yesterday, only to find it allowed me to buy some crappy soup or something. It heals for 6000 HP (less than what’s given by free conjured mage croissants), and gives me a 20 STA buff. To mitigate the awesome potential of this Game Breaking Soup, they make it so I can only have twenty bowls of soup at any given moment. It doesn’t even matter if I have them on my actual person at the time, either. Oh, I’m sorry; did you leave 18 in your bank? Well, I can only sell you 2. Otherwise you’d obviously go and win the game, and we certainly can’t have that.

The money awarded for these quests borders on ridiculous. You get 12g for an ‘escort quest’ that involves killing 4 mobs. If I’m quick with a sap, I can boil it down to three. In fact, I think today I may just do nothing and see if the guy I’m escorting can do it all himself. It wouldn’t surprise me. This is either Blizzard’s solution to gold sellers (“let’s just GIVE everyone the gold!”), or a complete lack of effort. They’re designing huge raid encounters for European guilds like Nihilum and Curse, and shunning a huge population of the game. I mean… I can see where they’re coming from, it would be much more FUN to design huge scripted boss fights, but why do they have to block that content off from the rest of the population? I recently saw a video of a flythrough of the Black Temple. It looked really freaking cool. All kinds of spooky corridors where summoners are holding conjured demons in check with force beams. Sweeping vistas of ballroom type areas where blue tapestries hang on the walls. Awesome shit that probably less than 1% of the game’s population will ever actually see. Watch the video. Even the guys being interviewed; the guys from 1up that went to Blizzard’s office for a special presentation of it, are like “yeah, I’m never gonna get to go there. Way to go Blizzard. Whoop de fucking doo”.

I wish I had statistics on how much of the population at large is actually keyed for Hyjal. I know I personally did a few runs in BWL, but never made it very far in AQ40, and never set foot in Naxx. I’ve been in “raiding guilds”, but I’ve also been “earning a paycheck” and could never raid from 8 am Monday to 8 am Tuesday. Is that the demographic they need to satisfy? Apparently so, since guilds like Nihilum can openly admit to buying gold, and suffer no repercussions. Blizzard blows its mighty trumpet on its front page each time it bans 100,000 accounts of some schmucks that felt like they needed to buy 300 gold to afford the stupid flying donkey, but the “best guild in the world” can just go on the record saying “yeah, grinding blows, so we buy gold”, and Blizzard rewards them with a new Superdungeon.

Nihilum gets PAID to play WoW. They have corporate sponsors that give them PAYCHECKS for logging in and raiding. They get ONE THOUSAND DOLLAR BONUSES for getting world first kills on bosses. They each got like ten grand last week for clearing the Black Temple. And yet, they still can’t be fucked to bother killing skeletons and sell the netherweave like the rest of us.

Yeah, earning the money is a drag, but I thought that’s why there was an economy. The solution, apparently, is to give the rest of us a list of chores we can do in-game when he gets home from work. Welcome home, Joe! Make dinner, lasso a donkey, put the kids to bed, throw dynamite at bird eggs. Here’s 70 gold. Grats, see you again tomorrow. This way, Joe Average is out of Blizzard’s hair, and they can get back to what they really want to be doing; giving hand-jobs to 25 people in Europe. I’ll put money down that NO ONE in Nihilum would be caught dead throwing dynamite at some stupid bird eggs in Skettis, or playing Simon Says out in Ogri’la like the rest of us scrubs.

What I don’t understand is why they don’t just reopen every quest line again. Let people run SFK over and over and over, looting the book of Ur every single time. Why not? Would that be too game breaking? Would that allow people to level their way out of the barren wasteland that I’ve come to call ‘old game’, the ‘old’ side of the Dark Portal? Have you re-rolled an alt recently? Trying to find a group for Razor Fen Downs is a joke. I can’t wait until my level 45 druid needs Sunken Temple runs… nobody wanted to go there in the first place, and they’re sure as hell not going to go now.

And yeah... Ice Cucumber Pepsi. Pretty sure I'm completely alone on this planet.