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The Daily Quest: "Looking for Waldo"
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. The Pink Pigtail Inn is collecting nominations for a "list of the year," picking the best in a few different categories from the World of Warcraft in 2009. Go leave a nom for their awards, and then come back here -- we'll have our own year-end list of top stories as well. Kinless Chronicles has not had such a great experience with the Dungeon Finder so far. Low level DPS might be out of luck on finding groups fast. Tank Like a Girl examines some good tanking gear in the new Frozen Halls 5-mans. And while Alliance pride is hard to find, Kimberly D knows exactly why she's Horde. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
The Daily Quest: How to fail the Trial
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Fel Fire is a new warlock blog that just started up recently, and they've already got a good overview of the Auction House up. Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn is definitely one of those who doesn't think that Mr. T represents her game. Pwnwear examines the issue of tank numbers and balance in game design. Too successful in Trial of the Grand Crusader? Let Caer Morrighan help you out with a few surefire ways to fail the instance. PC Games Hardware nabbed a shiny new Radeon HD 5970 video card, and they ran benchmarks with World of Warcraft, among other games. 76 FPS? Yes please. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Jante Law and player psychology
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has been posting some really interesting things about psychology and the World of Warcraft lately. The other week she wrapped up a little survey (along with the folks at Dreambound) about personalities of players and how they correspond to the roles they play in game, and this week she's got a little analysis up about something called the Jante Law, developed by a Norwegian author for a novel back in the 1930s. You can read the whole idea on her page or over on Wikipedia, but basically it all boils down to one "rule" for overseeing each individual member of a community: "Don't think that you are more special than us."She applies the law to the WoW community at large, and says that without knowing it, comment trolls and those who attack people who differentiate themselves on the forums (including the folks who caused Ghostcrawler to rethink his role there) are following this law, and attacking those who stick their neck out as different. Personally, I don't know that the "haters" in the community give it that much thought -- most of the time when they do attack others, they do it to try and build themselves up rather than enforce any community standard ("You've won 1,000 AV matches? Big deal, I win in there all the time.").
The future of the ingame Darkmoon Faire
Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn misunderstood the news we posted the other day about the Darkmoon Faire live event in France being canceled, and instead thought that the actual ingame event had been shut down for good. And that brought up an interesting question to her: so what if it was? The original Faire was an interesting idea, a way to bring the fun of a regular holiday (along with the usual quests, special items, and even a reputation to grind) around every month or so. But just like having Christmas every month would get old after a while, the Faire has sort of worn out its welcome -- players really only go there for following some arcane questline, and when they do get there, they're undoubtedly disappointed by how barren the place is.So what to do? Larisa suggests that the Cataclysm might just claim the whole thing -- Azeroth gets rocked, and no more Darkmoon Faire. I'd actually like to see the story go the other way: if there's a traveling group of performers with vast magical powers that's allowed to move at will between Horde and Alliance lands, wouldn't it be great if they were actually part of a secret society that had bigger interests rise to the top in a disaster situation? I'm sure Blizzard has more than enough on their plate for the next few content patches, but the Faire itself is due for an update, too, and it'd be nice to see it included in the larger storyline somehow.
The next level of questing
Elnia at the Pink Pigtail Inn has some excellent and interesting advice for Blizzard's quest designers (or whoever they hire for the current position). As big a component as quests are in the game, they haven't been innovated on much since the game's release. Blizzard has played around a little bit with allowing us to repeat certain quests, and they've streamlined the group questing mechanic, but other than that, quests are pretty much the same: pick up a task, do it, and bring it back for a reward.So how can it be done differently? Elnia has some great ideas: she asks for quests that span a little farther, that push players through a storyline that might even follow them all the way up to 80 (of course, there are quests like that, though they're few and far between -- and not all players have the patience to finish them). Rewards could be mixed up, too -- instead of the old gold and XP, how about some profession skill, or a tradeoff of badges based on certain quests done. Finally, Elnia suggests that every quest in the game become repeatable. Questing is paced to keep us interested in from 1-60, but we all know how the game works now -- why not let us do some of our favorite quests over more than once?I'd suggest we go even farther -- Warhammer Online offers Public Quests that are an interesting twist on the usual "go kill boars" mechanic. I'd like to see branching quests with more than one outcome -- maybe a moral choice to make that affects the storyline of the quest you're doing. And talking real pie-in-the-sky here, I'd like to see questgivers treat you different based on the way you look or maybe what title you've got equipped. If you've got "Jenkins," they might not expect you to do much, but with "Champion of Ulduar" over your head, they should probably be groveling at your feet.
Exploring Azeroth with quest icons on the map
We've heard this argument before, and every time Blizzard makes a change to help players complete quests more quickly, it comes up again. And with the recent announcement that Blizzard will actually be adding quest targets to the ingame maps (again replicating another function of the popular Questhelper addon), players have again brought up the old argument: is the game too dumbed-down? Originally, when the game began (though I don't know anyone that didn't still use Wowhead to find quest coordinates even back then), you were sent "east" to find a tiny little brown backpack to click on, and in the next patch, not only will you see that brown backpack sparkling with flares as you get close, but you'll have it marked on your map the entire time.Larisa waxes nostalgic over at the Pink Pigtail Inn, and says that this is just farther down a sliding slope that leads to a ravine where we all just have two spells and need to kill three boars to level to 100. Kinless Chronicles straight out says "Patch 3.2 will play for you" with some funny tongue-in-cheek analysis. But since I do it so much anyway, I'll play the Devil's advocate here: let's face it, we all used the addons and coordinates while leveling up alts, if not even while leveling mains. It's easy to be nostalgic, but I never did like hunting around for that little pixel of brown you had to click on to finish a quest, and if you really do want to stumble around in the dark the old way, just don't look at your map and/or close the minimap down. I've recently played two other console games, Fable 2 and Dead Space, that also offer glowing line navigation straight to your quest targets, and I did feel a sense of exploration in both -- if I wanted to wander off the path, I was welcome to (and usually rewarded for it), while if I just wanted to get to where I was going, I could do that, too.
You break it, you bought it
Larisa over at The Pink Pigtail Inn mused on an interesting question the other day: Should you pay for the wipes you cause? Her feeling is not only that you shouldn't, but that the mere fact of offering to pay is offensive to her, like offering hush-money or a bribe. Instead, she says, apologize quickly and confess what you did so that others can learn from your mistakes.I agree with the idea of the mistake-maker apologizing and confessing immediately. This technique also works in real life situations. (I wish it was heeded more often in politics, too.) Further, I vigorously disapprove of ham-fisted reactions from over-zealous raid leaders or guild leaders. Overreacting by /gkicking people (as one of the commenters related) in normal guilds is completely ridiculous. (If you joined a guild who wants to make world's firsts or server-firsts, then you know what you're getting into.) If you are the raid leader then you need to take responsibility for the team you put on the floor. In life, work, politics, and gaming, the buck stops with leadership. Leaders need to pick the right team and remind people who they know are not as experienced or strong in the particular raid situation about tactics, strategy, and common mistakes. Or else they need to chill the heck out. In fact, from a certain point of view, it's not the person who caused the wipe who should pay repair bills: it's the raid leader.Other commenters on Larisa's post offered different payment plan ideas. One suggested a tax on all the loot acquired in the raid. Another suggested that before the raid even begins, raiders should pay an ante to participate, thereby socializing the costs of what might happen. Of course, there is the ever-popular solution of letting the guild pay for repairs afterwards, too. But as another commenter pointed out, repair bills and buff flasks for a 25-man raid can run a guild nearly 400G per run. My feeling is that as long as everyone goes into the raid knowing those taxes are being imposed, it sounds like a fine idea. Or, realizing that mistakes are going to be made, even by the most experienced and savvy players, we could all act like we realize that raising gold is as much a part of the game as raiding, questing, or grinding, and suck up our own repair bills, regardless of who caused the wipe.[Via The Pink Pigtail Inn]
