When WoW announced that you could buy a flying epic mount in the Burning Crusades for 5K gold (up from 100g to get your original mount at level 40), a lot of people predicted that WoW’s economy would have some significant problems. But it was the opposite problem that you might expect – it turns out that there wasn’t ENOUGH gold in the system.

The problem is that the primary way for new gold to enter the system in a fun and interesting way was via questing. Once you are level 70, quests can give 10-25 gold on completion of the quest (once you’re 70, experience you would have earned if not maxed out is converted to gold). The problem, of course, is that quests are a finite resource. You run out of them.

Most players run out of quest content without their 5K epic mount being within any sort of concievable reach. At this point, players had only one alternative- grind NPCs to get loot that can be sold for gold (either to NPCs or other players). Or, for a surprisingly large number of players, find some kid in China willing to do it for you.

On top of all this, high level players were being drained of their cash at an alarming rate. The primary drain: death. Death in WoW applies a durability hit to all of a player’s gear, effectively making the cost of death a monetary one, and one that increases as the gear you wear increases in quality. For most low level and solo players, this death penalty is fairly negligable – their gear isn’t that good, and they don’t die that often. By contrast, raiders trying to learn a new boss fight may die a dozen times in an evening. Oftentimes, guilds have to send the whole raid out to repair halfway through. My guild is currently attempting to learn the Lady Vashj fight. The general cost for four hours of attempts? About 30g.

Raiders have other expenses as well. If you can’t make your own potions, flasks, oils, gems, enchantments or food, you’ll
need to buy ‘em, and/or get hold of the reagents for ‘em. Having the whole raid be ‘buffed and potted’ can often be the difference between wipe and ph4t l007. But it’s pricey.

For a while, grinding gold was the only way to get any cash on hand. The problem was that this disproportionately sucks for different classes. For a warlock, grinding is repetitive but almost fun – they frequently can be fighting 5 things at a time, in a constant orgy of cash and loot. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the healers and tanks: Holy Priests, Protection Warriors, etc. These classes typically could only take on one enemy at a time, and the killing happened at a pace best described as ‘glacial’. As an added bonus, clothie priests with 7K hit points have the added satisfaction of knowing that a single add or unforeseen patrol was likely to kill them, adding to repair costs.

The problem, of course, is that Tanks and Healers are the most important classes for the raid game, and grinding was burning them out.

A few patches ago, Blizzard made an attempt to correct this problem with the addition of Daily Quests. A Daily Quest is a quest you can do once per day, with most giving 9-12 gold as a reward. Most players have access to 6 of them, and can take home about 60g per day. The Daily Quests made a big difference in solving the cash flow for raiders problem, and done so quite neatly. All that being said, I’m not a fan. Mostly, because the quests SUCK. In short, the quests are:

  • A ‘Simon Says’ mini-game, only with a tediously slow, laborious UI.
  • A quest requiring you to lasso a creature at 20% health, effectively punishing players for using DoTs or Crit builds.
  • A bombing run quest that is flat-out impossible unless you cheese it by bombing them while standing on the ground.
  • A passable ‘kill 15 demons’ quest.
  • Another bombing run quest, where you are frequently attacked by surprisingly vicious birds who, if they kill you, will leave your corpse in midair where you can’t rez.
  • An escort quest, which above and beyond the normal suck associated with escort quests, also requires you to fight giant birds who frequently get in a glitchy Line of Sight state where they can hit you, but you can’t hit them.

So these quests are all, by Blizzard standards, below average, in my opinion (and to whoever tried to tell the healer boards that these were ‘healer friendly’ – go die in a car fire). But even if they weren’t, I’d still say the daily quest solution isn’t ideal because, well, they disincentivize FUN.

The best description of fun as it pertains to video games, in my opinion, is Raph’s. In A Theory of Fun, he describes fun in games as (a) learning a pattern, (b) improving and mastering a pattern and (c) applying that pattern to new situations. (His description is better, in that it involves cartoons).

One of the things that Raph’s description brings home is the value of the repeatability of an activity. For example, Civilization has a highly repeatable core gameplay loop. It’s fun because the core pattern can be improved and applied to different random maps, further modified by random enemy placement. By contrast, Myst isn’t very repeatable. Once you’ve beaten a point-and-click puzzle in an adventure game, you can’t really improve on it on subsequent plays. It doesn’t offer bonuses for clicking faster. It doesn’t change. The fun in Myst suffers from repeatability, whereas in Civilization, it actually improves.

MMO designers are (or at least, should be) very concerned with repeatability, since we are trying to provide a lot of gameplay hours. We want strong, stable communities in our game. Players want to spend time with their friends – but they want something to do. They want to make progress with their characters, and ideally, they want to have fun doing so. (Tragically, many players and too many designers put more emphasis on the former than the latter) So we want gameplay activities that have a high level of repeatable fun.

Some activities in MMOs are, by Raph’s lens, fun, in that they are interesting when repeated. Instance running is one example. An instance is something that can be optimized – you can learn the pulls and strategies for boss fights and get better at the whole experience. WoW encourages this by offering ‘heroic’ versions of their highest level dungeons, where you can really prove yourself. Instances also maintain their fun because they play very differently based on the makeup of your party. Battlegrounds also maintain their repeatability well.

Quests, on the other hand, are only interesting in repetition in one respect – it’s vaguely interesting to replay a tricky quest with different classes, since they’ll have to approach the same problem in different ways. But in terms of replaying the same quest over and over again – it’s no fun. There’s little you can do to optimize your performance running a daily quest, and minimal benefit for doing so. It’s just dreadfully boring.

By comparison, grinding at least provides strategic options for optimization- you can find better locations to kill, improve your methods for grinding, or find places to grind where you recieve other benefits, such as crafting materials, factional quest items or items with value on the auction house. This is not to say that grinding is fun. The salient takeaway is that daily quests is less fun, via Raph’s theory, than straight-up grinding. Which, since we can agree that grinding really does suck, is a real indictment of daily quests.

So back to our tanks and healers – they desperately need cash to run raid content, but they aren’t built either to grind OR to do dailies. The end result being tanks and healers logging on, doing pointless and stupid daily quests made increasingly tedious by their gear and advancement choices. The result I’ve witnessed, perversely, is a lot fewer people running instances.

Why? Because the tanks and healers try to do their dailies, end up hating the experience of feeling worthless and impotent (also, NOT FUN), and start levelling up warlock or mage alts that can act as their cash generators by doing dailies or grinding. Or they just burn out and quit. Which means that, if you’re trying to put together a pickup group, it’s becoming increasingly harder to pick up a tank or a healer. And it wasn’t that easy to start with. And you can’t run without ‘em.

Apparently, Blizzard’s having the same general thoughts. In the next patch (currently slotted for Tuesday), they are adding a new kind of daily quest. Every day, 2 dungeon instances (one normal, one heroic) will be chosen randomly, and players who complete them will get gold and other rewards above what is already found in those instances. Battleground quests will also be added. This is good: first off, because tanks and healers can play the game they actually wanted to when they built the characters. Secondly, players are incentivized for doing activities that most players agree are still fun when repeated.

There’s still room for improvement, though. Early reports put the benefits of the instance quests at only 25g, or less than half the cash reward of doing all your dailies, for an activity that takes at least twice as long. The way the game is currently balanced, players attempting to get those 5K epic mounts are still being subtly incentivized to bore themselves to death.

Original comments thread is here.