A Quota of Quests
The big Guild Wars4th Anniversary patch arrived a few days ago and brought all sorts of presents for the currently playing pseudo-subscribership, including a special island for Rangers to keep their pets on, new equipment packs for weapon and armour storage, extra unlockable bank box tabs, character makeover services and more, along with the reactivation of various festival mini-games during the anniversary festivities.
Perhaps the most significant of the new features added this patch was the introduction of the new Zaishen Challenge Quests at the Great Temple of Balthazar. Three new banners now offer tasks which change every day; a particular highlighted mission, a bounty on a specific named boss, and a specified type of PvP challenge. In exchange for completing these tasks, new Zaishen Coins are offered, which can be exchanged for item rewards of varying quality. Daily Quests have arrived in Guild Wars.
These new daily quests represent a very hands-on attempt by ArenaNet to direct players toward specific game content that may have fallen by the wayside in popularity over the four years since the game was launched, as suggested in the accompanying patch notes:
"We believe this will encourage players to group up with those in the area attempting to complete this common goal of getting rewarded for that day's Challenge Quest."
It isn't a bad idea at all; a new player joining the game today and working through the storyline of each campaign will often find sparsely populated or even empty mission lobby areas across the mid-game regions, and while AI Henchmen and Heroes can help, some of these missions can be a great deal of hard work without some live bodies on-board. Similarly, it can be very difficult to get matches in some of the more obscure PvP locations, particularly those added in the Factions campaign. Without enough participants, nobody gets to play those.
So a system which encourages players to revisit older content for new rewards can be an excellent way to revive a game of a certain age, particularly one where the majority of players have settled well into the elder game activities; raiding and so on, leaving the early and mid-game areas somewhat desolate, and a place that only sees the occasional alt or rarer brand new player passing through in a hurry to reach the bit where everyone else is.
A player can only take on three of these quests a day however; one of each type, and is limited to nine of them in the journal at any one time. With such rationing comes a certain sense of obligation. The various rewards on offer at the top end of the Zaishen Coin scale include the largest of the new Equipment Packs, along with Elite Skill Tomes and at the very top, the Everlasting Crate of Fireworks, desirable new items which many players will want to work toward. With the completion of all three of a day's quests, including all bonus objectives, between 300 – 500 Copper Zaishen Coins can be earned. The largest of the new Equipment Packs will set the determined player back 7500 Copper Zaishen Coins, or at least fifteen solid days of flawless and complete Zaishen missioning, and probably much longer if bonus objectives cannot be met or days are missed. The firework crate will take at least fifty days to earn.
Something for the longer term then, and a measured pace, which can a difficult thing to observe in the hectic achievement-driven lives of many MMO gamers. We find ourselves driven by the eternal 'Just One More Go' of the basic structure of the MMO; always one more quest to complete, always one more monster to kill, always one more level to ding, and the introduction of quite such a nakedly obvious accumulation task might seem a touch on the blatant side; the treadmill laid a little too bare perhaps.
Daily quests are not a new thing or unique, and World of Warcraft has operated them for quite some time, but here they serve a different purpose, but to a similar kind of effect. World of Warcraft's daily quests were largely an economic measure. With the introduction of expensive Epic Mounts, many players, already burdened with expensive end-game raiding consumables and repair bills found themselves forced to spend inordinate amounts of time in game farming for cash, away from the kind of game that they did want to play. Responding to this need for an income to allow players to then get on and actually play the game as intended, Blizzard introduced a large number of quests which deduct from a daily allowance, creating a set of endlessly repeatable tasks which can be milked every day for a set and known cash income; in a way, giving every adventurer in Azeroth a "day job" of sorts, the pay packet of which could then be used to cover the increasing expense of being an end game raider or keeping up to date with flying mounts and the like.
An important economic lever, this new type of quest likely went a fair way toward reducing the demand and temptation for gold income from third party sources into the bargain, but again, with the presentation of a potentially wasted entitlement of reward, the perils of obsession can become felt; an amount of gold which the player feels they must earn, or lose to waste. This kind of pressure, along with the especially repetitive nature of the tasks involved, in a genre that is no stranger to repetition, can lend an element of drudge to the daily quest, which in turn can become resentment, and in extreme cases, cause sudden moments of clarity.
Recent newcomer Runes of Magic also employs the idea of the daily quest, presenting a large number of specific quests, only ten of which can be carried out per day. Here the intent seems almost reversed, and this rationing is used to regulate the supply into the game economy of Phirius Token Coins, one of the different currencies employed in their Item Shop. Given out as quest rewards, it becomes necessary to ensure that excessive grinding does not cause too much deflation. Mind you, as with much in Runes of Magic, it is possible to buy your way past this quota, with a Daily Quest Ticket, an item which will reset this daily allocation, for a modest 55 Diamonds, or about two US dollars.
The Guild Wars Zaishen Challenges seem somewhat different to these other examples, and seem less about regulating and managing grind in relation to the game economy, and more an attempt to direct players to parts of the game which otherwise might have seen little to no use. The rotating list of objectives almost works counter to the more repetitive nature of the more established daily quest. The accumulation of reward tokens itself might indeed become a grind for many, but precisely because the objectives change every day, the actual earning of the tokens becomes a thing of variety, and of doing a different thing every day.
Perhaps this alternative approach to what can often be seen as a lazy or unimaginative provision of cheap and easy endless content may provide pointers to other long established MMO titles. Yes, there needs to be things to keep doing when you've won, but does that need to always be the same thing, over and over?
