Reply With QuoteDo you want someone to say 'stop' for you..?
I've just finished another day of Firelands dailies. I've done several hundred daily quests since the 4.2 patch was launched, between 6 and 15 a day when I have time to play. I'm still 11 full days of quests away from the end point, which is three vendors with some epic upgrades, a tailoring pattern and some pets. I'm not really sure why I'm doing it - I have no time to raid so I don't really need the upgrades, I already have lots of pets and gold is very easy to come by and not that useful in the end.
I guess the best answer is what's been given for climbing Mount Everest - because it's there. I do the dailies and plant my flag at the end, having "won" that part of the game. I guess then I can level an alt, or try to run a few more 5 mans without falling asleep, or just wait for the next content patch.
I hope something comes along soon that returns MMOs to something more interesting.
Do you want someone to say 'stop' for you..?
I've walked away, and come back, to many MMO's. Walking away from that daily grind was the best thing I ever did. What I did not realize was that it was the replacement of fun with something compelling. Compelling things play upon the addictiveness of MMO's, and in the case of daily quest grind, give little fun value in return. I can't begin to tell you how many quit because of WoW's daily quests, but I would wager it is not a trivial number.
Alistair is spot on. Take a break. There are a ton of fun games to fill time if you need them.
My personal method for dealing with this is to define winning a game to suit myself. Fuck the designers if they can't handle that.
In an MMO or adventure game context, "winning" is properly defined as "Saw all the (major) areas". Once you've visited every place in the world, you're done. You won. Stop playing.
I am playing other games, and I play WoW far less than I did in the raiding days. I still come back for the dailies though, even as they make irritable as I'm doing them. Must be some sort of inner compulsion, heh.
Once I got to the second tier of the Firelands dailies and saw how stupid they were (at least to me) I unsubbed. The only joy I get in the game now is trying to make the most gold with the least amount of effort.
Have to admit, I don't know what dailies are in an MMO but they sound pretty terrible :)
Dailies are, like they sound, a small group of quests that you can repeat every day...usually for a token that you collect until you have enough to turn in for a piece of gear. They're a blatant timesink, used by MMO designers to keep you pressing the button to get the treat...and they work, of course (see also: Box, Skinner).Originally Posted by Alistair
If you can let go of your developed characters head over to the Rift thread and pick up one of the free copies some folks have to offer and check it out. It's probably the same at the top end, but it's a new world with familiar yet new mechanics and classes to learn. If you can't let go of your WoW guys, though (or you still have friends you're trying to keep in touch with) then may I suggest rerolling a new character and moving from scratch. The dailies aren't content, they're very thinly veiled Skinner boxes to keep people who have nothing else to do with their time going. Surely your time is worth more than that?
WoW was getting so boring to me as it was. That was with the normal quest lines in the last expansion. I couldn't even imagine going through another area of dailies.
More info on what Mouselock is saying. I apologize the link is from Cracked ...
Ways that video games addict you.
Yeah, I stopped at that point, too. Though I didn't unsub, since I still raid with my Guild... I just don't log on except for those few hours.
It's still worth my money. Raiding is fun! I like killing internet dragons of various shapes and sizes. :)
What would you suggest they put in the game for people who don't want to raid and don't want to do any daily quests? This isn't meant as snark, I'm just curious what you think would be better to keep people interested for any RPG with a level cap. Every MMO I've played has had the same issue. City of Heroes, for instance, had virtually no endgame for the longest time, so once you got a character to the cap there really wasn't much else to do. They've since added a system of running weekly Task Forces to gain different forms of currency and materials for crafting things that will advance your character beyond what you could previously. WoW fills their content out with raids and dungeons, but if you aren't interested in those, it's pretty much in the same boat for level capped players.
corsair pvp's all the time in the BG's. It's different enough to keep him entertained because he likes the challenge as well as not being under pressure to have this or that gear. I keep saying I'm going to do pvp in BG's and then chickening out.
Stop while you still can.
I could never do dailies for this reason.
My whole fun in that game was running 5 mans (and occasional PUG raiding) and doing PvP.
I wonder how a business model where you made an MMO that was only designed to last for 6 months or so for the casual player, but wasn't designed in such a way that they tend to burn out, leave, and never come back, would actually work out. Imagine simply saying "You've reached the end of the current chapter of content for your type of play. We hope you enjoyed your time here, and hope you come back and check us out again when our next chapter releases."
There are periodic use spikes for MMOs now when a new update shows up, but in general those updates don't make things significantly different. I wonder if making new content expansions more frequently and not doing the "free patch" stuff thing in the middle would work. I especially wonder if coupling this with actual time-limited subscription plans ("Play only on the weekends for half the normal subscription fee") would lend itself to similar or even larger overall profits. The way the games run right now many people are encouraged to basically grind themselves to burnout, which seems a bit self-defeating. But they're generating revenue while they do it at an immense scale, so maybe that is the best business model out there.
(Personally, if I could play WoW 1 weekend a month, CoH one weekend a month, Rifts 1 weekend a month all for $15, I'd be all over that setup instead of like it is now when I pick one game for $15/month and keep on until I'm sick of it.)
Blizzard's response to Activision-Blizzard shareholders regarding the loss of 600K subs since Cataclysm was to promise more frequent expansions. Yet they have yet to announce any expansion plans at all, so I wonder if that was just bullshit to shut up the shareholders.
Yeah, our small part time raiding guild fell apart after the dailies, we maybe raided a few times a month, as most of us didnt have the time or inclination to keep raiding anymore.
We had maybe 25 members, most of us got to the second tier or dailies, and when i left our guild was down to just 4 of us.
I think im passed wanting to raid anymore, its just the same old same old, it takes too long, it takes to many raids day in day out to learn. I just dont WANT to spend the time anymore having to raid 2-4 times a week to learn the raids and get my carrot.
I'll hold out of some new super uber MMO whose endgame is 5 man dungeons that take an hour max, like 40 different dungeons - where i dont feel i have to devote a whole night away from the family to complete.
Why the fuck are you playing this monotonous, repetitive bullshit instead of finding something more interesting? And why do you hope that whatever else comes along is another stupid fucking MMO?
Uninstall and go play something that has an actual ending, something you can put down after finishing, and then maybe later you won't have the realization that you completely wasted months of your life to doing dailies in a game where it's actually pretty useless and meaningless.
Heh, well, I stocked up on games in the Steam sale and actually finished the original Splinter Cell. Now I'm working on Fallout 3, but something still calls me back to get those dailies. Stupid game.
Lorini - there was a post on MMO-Champion the other day about how their leaked spreadsheet of Blizzard timelines was exactly right about the WoW release date in Brazil. If it holds up, the next expansion will be in Q2 of next year, which is reasonable assuming they release two more major content patches for this expansion (ending with Deathwing).
In this case, the new dailies are meant to 'gate' new gear, so that people don't just kit themselves out in ilvl365/378 gear the day after the patch, and just roll all over the bosses in Firelands in first week the patch is out.
Still, 38 days to unlock all three vendors feels a little bit long. You get one vendor at a time, but I don't know if you can control which one.
Grinding out dailies in Cata on 6 level 85s is what finally burnt me out. I quit before Firelands, but I've read about those new dailies and it confirms that I made a very wise decision.
I totally get the 'hook' of dailies, it fills some sort of accomplishment need that many gamers have. WoW just taps into it very well. If you haven't been sucked in by it, you most likely won't get TMHs issue.
My solution was to quit WoW cold turkey. That also meant resigning as the Guild Leader of a Level 25 raid guild, but I'm still thrilled that I did.
@Dreamshadow: You do, and you can see what each vendor has before deciding which to unlock first. Thing is, you can't kit yourself out from just doing Firelands dailies. They offer some decent gear in various slots for people who didn't raid much last tier, but nothing they sell is necessary for going to Firelands. Basically, you can completely ignore them if you want, but if you don't mind doing them, the stuff you can eventually get isn't too bad. It won't make your character super-awesome either.
Thing is, people turn it into a grind without really knowing why they're grinding. The Firelands dailies are nice to fill some gear slots for alts you haven't raided with much with raid-quality gear, but for anyone who already raids it's completely unnecessary. And now that the tier 11 raids have been made much easier, if your goal is to get better gear, running those is a much quicker and much more enjoyable means of doing it. And if your goal isn't better gear and isn't raiding, then I have no idea why someone would choose to continue doing something they consider a grind in the first place.
This is very true. Completing the dailies gets you gold and a step closer to some tangible goals. They are pretty grindy, but very popular, at least from what I have seen on my server. The new dailies area is always crowded.
Blizz has gotten quite good at putting rewards at the end of these grinds to keep people busy. Some of the vendors sell recipes for equipment that sells for a pretty nice price. Of course, in a few more weeks when more people have access the price will plummet, so the reward goes to those who have maximized dailies from the start and got there first. But it's actually even simpler for Blizz, all they have to do is put some PETS at the end of the grind, and people will do it no matter the length.
They work for those that stick around. Thanks to dailies making me call it quits, I had more time for dev :)
I cancelled my WoW account three months ago. It had gotten to be too much like work due to all the dailies. It's a sad state of affairs when you have to do a daily quest every day for over a year in order to get all the recipes in a profession.
Then there are the other dailies just for experience and gold. By adding all the dailies together and multiplying by the number of toons I was actively using, the end result could not have been anything but burnout. So I quit.
Yea, although I still play actively, I have completely given up on keeping alts "up to date" with gear, rep, or dailies. It is just way too much. I'm still waiting for Blizz to make items like shoulder and head enchants Bind to Account, but I suppose they don't want to shorten the grind.
The other move they made this last patch, which I am pretty sure was a first, was introduce a new set of pvp gear purchasable with honor. So, instead of coming off the previous arena season with the best possible gear from conquest points, anyone who wanted to have the best gear possible for the new season had to grind an entire new set of honor gear. And then upgrade all that with conquest points as the season progress.
That's why I was surprised that they added an even more insidious daily set. I'm guessing dailies are a major source of burnout. While I did raid, I also wanted to gear up alts and dailies were the 'easiest' way to do it. That's also the pull of dailies.
Dailies are great. They typically signify it's time to go do something else with your life.
Posting Permissions