Long quest or short?

From the 5 minute Daily-quest to the several weeks long Legendary Cloak quest-line. Having spent multiple hours in World of Warcraft these last few months I can readily say that I have been doing my share of both, and I have found a few elements that I have been experiencing as hindrances rather than entertaining.

Lets start with Daily-quests as these are often how a gaming session would start out, and all in all I do not mind pursuing a few of these to earn some gold, harvest some reputation and scrape together some crafting goods along the way. Saying hi to friends that are online and checking around for events or activities for the evening. Its a good way to kick off the game session, but there are a few drawbacks. First off its the pure number of such quests and elements of the game that are considered obligatory to be able to enter into the more challenging parts of the end game (game activities after hitting the maximum attainable level in the game). Second its the feeling of work where it stops being ‘blissful productivity’ and become repetitive ‘waste’ of time I would have rather spent doing something more fun. My solution in the end has been to pick up a few very quick such quests along with a very limited amount of those that are considered ‘obligatory’ (often needed to be able to enjoy other parts of the game or as parts of longer quest-lines). Problem in my situation is progress as completing important combinations or sequences of such quests takes me much longer than someone spending most of their time online or spending more time grinding their way through these quests in larger scale.

Next is the longer quest-lines that require weeks of work to complete. I mostly enjoy this method of storytelling with one important hindrance. Game play to me is more like a good movie or a great book and less like an ongoing TV-series, so when I am forced to ‘put away the book’ or hit ‘pause’ on my movie I become really annoyed. There are presently two types of game mechanics like this where one is connected to item drops and the other to a virtual currency where there is a limit to how much of this currency you are allowed to earn every week. Going through end game instances hunting for these drops also earns me the possibility for item upgrades and is part of the end game I would be pursuing anyway. So this version of blocking my story I can live with. Its the virtual currency I have trouble with. To fill my weekly quota it is not enough to go through the end game raid instances, you also need to push through a number of Daily-quests and/or heroic dungeons/scenarios. So I grind my way through to reach the cap only to have to repeat the same grind the following week and then again the week after. It is not the first time this type of game mechanics have been introduced into World of Warcraft, but I really hope they can find better and more relevant game activities for us to pursue when working our way through some of the best end game story-lines. Not to mention the feeling of having completed an epic achievement when completing them.

Finally; do not mix PvE and PvP. These are two completely different types of game play and forcing non-PvP gamers to fail their way through numerous PvP-grinds facing massively superior and motivated PvP-players destroys my evening. Many PvE-players might enjoy some PvP to add diversity to the game, but its by choice. I found the solution for the Throne of Thunder where the players could chose to earn their reputation and progress through either PvE- or PvP-quests perfect, but being forced to do PvP as part of the Legendary quest-line was a massive game destroyer for me an I would end up dreading to have to go online to play at all.