I have no idea why you would put yourself through this. It was the same piece of content hundreds and hundreds of times - all of it trivially easy and overgeared.
And now you’re telling me there’s nothing to do? I mean seriously - you could earn more power now than you ever could doing that by just herbing or mining (because back then professions were useless).
When I look at what you did there, I would call that nothing to do - and yet simultaneously something I have to do. It’s exhausting. It’s just getting in the way of the fun stuff. If you can come to me with some quests that can actually challenge my well geared character and reward some interesting things I’m all ears, but this was not it. It’s basically a scuffed experience bar that encourages me to spam gray quests - or even worse something like the research where it’s a daily capped scuffed experience bar that compels me to spam gray quests, but not too many and not too few, and every day. I don’t wanna do it.
I was, though. In fact, I led one.
In both expansions. This problem came over me twice, though thankfully by the second time I’d settled the guild into being more chill by having kicked all the people who weren’t and inviting for chill.
Sure, but even if we ignore that it’s still a bad mechanic - and I’ll explain why now:
No, that would make it even worse…
Let me tell you about the egg timer problem.
This is a problem that occurs when players are optimising not for having fun, and not even for how much to play, but for when to play.
The term originated from Ultima Online where they did a server where you had a 100% chance to gain a skill the first time you hit anything with a 30 minute cooldown. So what do you do? Well, you log in, you hit a mob once, you log off, you set an egg timer for 30 minutes, and you repeat.
This can come in the daily form. You have to log in for your dailies once a day or you fall behind permanently - don’t forget the egg timer! And you can’t do any more than once a day - the egg timer is on.
So what happens is people start running around doing chores. And then they have to do them many times on different alts as well, and they can’t ever just finish something. If they’re late to a patch they literally can’t catch up - there’s just no way to do it.
So now you’re optimising your reward for time - using the IRL wall time - your clock, to determine when and how to play, instead of just logging in one a character and immersing yourself.
At this point most people just straight up stop having fun.
And again I’ll refer back to what I said at the top - I don’t want to do chores. I don’t want to deal with this cap of power where I have to fly somewhere and beat up 6 wolves with a beehive on a stick once every two days - I just don’t care. I don’t want to do it. I don’t care what your cap is, it’s trivial content. Give me something that actually means something to me. Something to discover - something to actually play. Not do, but play.
The reason the original game only had lockouts on raids (which had the best items available, notably) is that Blizzard at the time understood this problem and they didn’t want their players to ever fail to be rewarded when they didn’t raid, so they put in a bunch of expensive items to farm and consumables to use while not raiding and then the raiding itself was expected to be a weekly agreement with friends anyway and it wasn’t a chore since it was the hardest content anyway, so there it was okay. There were no dailies. Not a single one. And when they finally did add them in tBC, it was cosmetics only. It’s amazing to me that it took Blizzard 15 years to rediscover this after WotLK.
Of course they messed up by doing world buffs anyway, but this was nevertheless their reasoning. They didn’t want the exact thing you’re going on about here because it just ruins the fun for alts or just players who like playing multiple characters or even just players who like to not play trivial content with a cap on it. That’s all it is. I just don’t wanna do it - and if you reward it equally from literally everywhere and put a cap on it that grows then you’re not doing anything - we already have mechanics that cap on a weekly basis plus tons of things to farm, why do we need an extra one?
In simpler terms: The game should never tell you either of these things:
- You must log in now, and not later, to keep up
- You have kept up, you can do no more for now, you should log out
I want the game to be fun when I launch it, and go away when I’m done.