Is it me, or have a lot of games become Chore Lists? (Not Just WoW)

Community General Discussion
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I’ve been seeing folks complain about how WoW feels like nothing more than logging in to do the Weekly or Daily chores, and if you have alts, doing it on all of them as well, and then that’s it ya move on. It’s not just WoW though, almost every game that has that live service/mmo component is doing it and I know WHY it is, it gets people to come back, and keep doing the same thing over and over to optimize their gameplay etc… it’s just to keep people in the ecosystem.

But like… it didn’t used to be that way. Most used to play the game just to play it. Sure of course, some did come back each week to do the raids again which were the old versions of weekly grinds as they reset every Tuesday, and that was all they did, but now it’s just SO MUCH more. Every zone has 3-4 blue quest markers taunting you, making you feel this need to do them. And many of them are rather dull, specially the 5th+ time. “Yay… I get to throw bombs at a target while moving around on an auto moving object… I’ve only been doing that since The Burning Crusade…”

FFXIV does the same thing with it’s Daily rewards, and Weekly rewards, the daily Tribe Quests etc… And the annoying thing is, it works, but also… doesn’t work.

This is a small sample size sure, but I know that when games have a list of dailies to do, that’s all people tend to do. They log in, do the list, then log out because now that it’s done, any playtime that isn’t done doing these chores is less optimal and less rewarding even if it’s the same game you’re playing. I see it all the time. Specially in FFXIV oddly enough. “wanna run a dungeon roulette?” “Nah, already did it today. Maybe tomorrow.” Heck I see it in Marvel Rivals. Once the quests are done for the day, they done.

So why does it keep going? Remove the dailies, remove the weeklys, remove the list of never ending chores and let the gameplay speak for itself. Shift things around, let us play the game as much, or as little, as we want. Remove the time-gating aspects of it all. If we want to run 100 delves in a week and max out a character… let us. Most of us will probably make an alt and do it all again anyway. If the only goal is sub numbers, then maybe I’m incredibly Naive but making a better game that we WANT to log into and just exist in… is a better route, IMO.

To anyone playing, I offer a challenge. Stop doing quests for the sake of them. Stop doing content you don’t enjoy just because a little blue ! told you to do so. Try to simply… enjoy the game. If you can’t, or find it dull, then ask yourself if the only reason you’re coming back is some strange desire to complete arbitrary tasks that don’t really give you anything.

If you’re already playing the game just for the fun of it. Awesome! Keep going. I recognize that this is a long winded way of saying “Stop Optimizing the fun out of the game.” But Blizzard, and other companies, Also need to stop steering players into the direction of making it worse to NOT optimize the fun out of the game. Make your own quests, make your own challenge or goal.

Apologies for the rant, has just been on my mind lately. I’m sure people will disagree, I know folks that can’t play a game without quests and I respect that as well, we all play for different reasons. I just wish that the games themselves weren’t so… in your face about the repeatable content. I want to blame mobile games. But I really can’t because it’s been going on before those even existed. Instead, I’ll blame Microsoft Xbox Gamer Score Points. Stupid Microsoft Xbox Gamer score points.

Happy Hunting all!

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most games were like that take monster hunter need to farm the monster for parts to make armor and weapons.
but on pc we got mods but still need to get the items first thought

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Oh I’m not saying games can’t be grindy.

But in MH, a game I love, we hunt for the hunt, it’s part of the normal gameplay loop. We don’t log in get told “Today you should hunt 10 Anjanath!”

We just go after what we are seeking.

Yes, I Know even MH added daily quests with the Bounties which… I’ll be honest I forget are ever there in Wilds, but they didn’t need those either, and they are not in your face like WoW’s are.

If the hunts aren’t fun in MH, most of us will stop playing it. Doens’t seem to happen in WoW or other MMOs

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Because games are designed moreso with metrics than player feedback these days. Chores push metrics up. Metrics push stock price up. All goes back to the shareholders man

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gotcha but in a way i am use to the chore list in games now but its nothing new its just showing up more and more

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I know… I just… ugh.

I know I’m an old vulperan yelling at clouds pointlessly. And before anyone says “Go play classic.” I happen to like modern WoW for the most part! It’s got a lot of cool stuff, and I love delves and the feel of it. I just want it to be the best it could be, but maybe I’m wrong about what would make it better. I’m but a cog in the gameplay grind hehe

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I feel you man. I feel you.

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Well, you can just log in to play raids. The rest is all cosmetics. I joke a little bit but it is kind of true.

As to the endless stuff to play, like World Quests, we have to be given something to do! And, Blizzard took the edge off by making many rewards simple cosmetics.

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without resets we burn through content too fast then complain there isn’t more. And there should be more! but making stuff dailies is a cheap fix to “increase metrics” but also give us more chances for that dopamine of getting loot

if we were done with all the quests and there were no dailies and delves were weekly lockouts too, what would you do? RP? touch grass irl? I’m not sure myself

There are so many dailies I can’t do them all, and that’s the idea. Ideally someone should do around 10 at most, like the old tbc limit. The extra ones are just for variety, so it’s not just 1 zone’s dailies we’re stuck with, we have options.

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The weekly quests give more than cosmetics. It’s a primary way to get Keys for Delves, and gear as well. The keys are the only real reason I do them anymore. I would rather them just increase the base reward for doing the activity at the end of the activity (Say 10% more Valorstones and some key fragments if I did a delve), then provide me with a quest for it.

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I agree with the OP on this in the present Undermine situation. In season 1 it was probably 5-6 chores you needed to do on a character a week. Now Undermine with its added tasks adds around that same number.
I note myself thinking on any given character I have to do around 1 hour of tasks just to get my weekly keys to then do the Delves that I actually came to play. And with the absolutely HORRIBLE range issues it has been common to already get NO upgrades for the week, even with the addition of more Hero gear via Bounty Maps.
Do the work, get the reward should be the design. I think if Blizzard continue down their present path they will loose more people with simple task burn out frustration versus not liking the game.

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Let them burn through it, it’s their choice to do so. They can make an alt, they can slow the heck down.

I would personally level an alt or gear up an existing alt. Learn a new spec, go around gathering. I would continue to run delves to get more key pieces to run more delves. They would have to reconfigure the reward structure if they removed the quests for sure.

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I don’t really treat this game as a list of chores. I log in, get keys, do delves, and that’s it for me, mostly. Guild Wars 2 dailies can take me maybe twenty minutes, and I’m free to do whatever I feel like. City of Heroes doesn’t have dailies, so I can do whatever I want to.

If it wasn’t for Delves, specifically, I probably wouldn’t be playing the game at all. And even with those, I’m probably going to get sick of doing that eventually. Once I’m done gearing X amount of alts, I’m done for the season. I get what I want, grind or not, and that’s it. I’m not beholden to anyone else’s time.

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yeah I’m here for Delves too, I just have to do the chores to get the keys x.x I would rather just run delves and get the keys from the delves, ya know?

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A lot of today’s games are developed by people who do not like/play video games.

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They care more about how much you play, not about how good you do while you play or what you do. That way they can report to private investors that a game is more popular. So now everything in every game has a massive grind to it.

Oh and Edit… sounds cruel to do such a thing that they do… but were any of us to be running this company, we might end up doing the same or similar. Game needs to make money after all. Plus I buy 100% of everything they ever release ever when I see it in store.

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Isn’t that what games are? Go there, kill this guy, get a reward, repeat.

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Not saying that isn’t what the game is, but tacking on a quest to do things you don’t want to do, but makes it the only way to get a thing to do the thing you WANT to do… is odd. To me, anyway.

Plus as I said, once people do the big quest, they will log out and not keep playing because it’s now less optimal unless there IS that extra quest.

Like I stated, I know why this is. It’s for Player Retention metrics for reporting numbers. It’s dumb, but it’s reality.

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If I could fully max gear a character in a week and then do it on an alt the next week… I’d never quit! They’d have me so hooked on this game!

What happens with me is that I push past 3k io, kinda burn out on my main, and quit because I know I have no chance of really playing an alt seriously without weeks or months of catch-up

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I meant every game. In FF7 i want to kill Sephiroth but first comes the chase. In XCOM i want to kill aliens but with it comes building this or that.
They all can be reduced to check lists with little effort.

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