The WQ “A Dangerous Harvest” used to be a nice, quick little WQ with the anima cones being personal. Now it’s everyone fighting over them and it’s a total grind to the point of not even worth doing anymore.
Low spawn rates, too few spawn points and too many people = not fun!
I did that quest this morning and it took way, way longer. They nerfed it hard.
Gotta boost those average session and time played metrics.
Ideas like, “fun” and “customer satisfaction” is wibbly wobbly subjective nothing - the spreadsheet bots can’t judge that. Time played, however, is a concrete number you can measure, you can count on, and you can leverage bonuses of off.
Time played makes the soulless corpos happy, and since they’re the ones in charge, guess what the developers are motivated to accommodate.
Did they change it though? I noticed a change too but I can’t honestly be sure if I just didn’t have much competition the last times I did that quest.
I do wish they would be consistent. Sometimes wq collectables are lootable by everyone sometimes they aren’t. I don’t like stealing something from someone because the wq this day decided to switch it up.
Oh, another sadistic change. At this point you can’t be surprised by this behavior from these Game makers.
Crossfit paid wow to piss off subs so people will go back to Crossfit.
lol, That’s funny, I and a bunch of other people in Ardenweald noticed that the other day too. Incredibly disappointing change, I won’t ever do that WQ ever again regardless of whatever reward they put on it.
My list of avoided WQ’s continues to grow, it seems. At nearly a dozen now, I’m curious how much higher it’s going to go… 
I just completely stopped doing WQ all together lol. I see no value in them outside of rep and anima and I cant be bothered to grind Anima since it all gives us mounts and transmogs lol.
At a point where I just log on do a few mount runs and just log on to raid lol.
On the bright side, Pupa trooper no longer plummets one to their dizzying demise…
I don’t really view WQs as chores. They’re quests and I do the ones that award me the things I want. Same thing with Torghast. I needed soul ash for my legos, so I did it. I wanted the Corridor Creeper, so I did TC.
I don’t get this thinking. Making a game less fun and more of a chore doesn’t help the company make money. It means less money because less subscribers. If they made it that you don’t have any gear unless you play 100 hours a week do you think they’d be making more money?
Personally I tend to begin to view WQs as chores if/when I get “above” them, or when the time:reward ratio is off.
35 Anima for a 15-20 minute multi-step WQ simply isn’t worth my time, and it would be a chore if I decided to do it. Which would really only happen if, say, I was 50-100 Anima away from something and wanted to grind out the last bits, I’d see those WQs as chores.
As an aside I’d point out that I don’t consider the presence of a reward as changing the nature of whether something is a chore or not. Chores, in general, always have some benefit (doing the dishes means not eating off dirty plates, doing your laundry means having clean clothes that don’t smell, etc). Just because the WQ offers me 50g, 35 anima, or a pet charm, does not mean it’s not a chore. It’s still an activity I don’t want to do, something that I view as tedium, that I choose to do because I want the end result.
That’s a good question. The answer is so that they can minimize your actual time spent playing the game and doing anything of consequence and maximize your incentive to pay to skip it. They want to have a somewhat high time played amount so they put boring filler content in, but they don’t want too many on at once (that’s why it isn’t made to be fun). They want to minimize server load, so the boring content pushes people toward raid/dungeon stuff instead so they can remain regularly subbed. And they make that stuff quite difficult and time consuming so that you will want to pay a carry to skip. It’s all very calculated.
There is also a psychological aspect to grind and addiction.
How does putting boring filler content in to maximize server load and making stuff time consuming so you’ll pay a carry to skip help them make money? Let’s stop theorizing how making the game less fun is making them more money because it isn’t, that doesn’t make any sense. I think that they are doing it because they are trying to kill the game. It has just become so big that it requires too many of their resources to keep up considering how few subscribers they have.
It clearly is though. They made record profits off of SL. Whales and carries end up funding more of their revenue than subs. They don’t want to kill WoW. They just want to maximize their profitability. Think about it from the point of view of the devs. If you were trying to maximize profitability, how would you engineer your game? If you made it just incredibly fun, people would all be logged in and your servers would be under tremendous load. It would cost you a lot. On the flip side, if you make it too boring and awful, nobody will play. So you make it just awful enough to keep engagement metrics high while also causing enough users to not want to do the chores to keep server load low. And you incentivize them to do harder repeatable content, such as dungeons and raids. Here, by punishing them with difficulty for rewards and using FOMO and keeping up with the Jones’ effects, you can incentivize token purchases. As long as they keep putting out 6 month sub bonuses and some new carrot each time that runs out, they can retain subs while maximizing profit. They can also use the psychological need to complete things to tie into the chore system for further addiction.
Again, it’s all very cleverly engineered. They hire psychologists to help design this. It’s all on purpose, and the purpose is $.
As a company, you want the maximum amount of profit for the minimum amount of investment and expenditure. In the case of WoW, you want to provide as little WoW as possible while maintaining the maximum amount of profit.
There is, in essence, a Goldie Locks zone where you max out the profit you reap while minimizing the development time and effort, resulting in the highest possible return on investment. Basically, Activision-Blizzard does everything it can to push towards the minimum investment while maintaining a certain level of profitability.
The more gametime they can squeeze out of every drop of content, the more “profitable” that content and thus their investment is. They’re absolutely desperate to make sure you never “run out of content” and cheapest way to do that is to make that content take longer.
Why would Ihop add sawdust to their pancakes? Because it’s cheaper than flour. Why would Activision add grind to their World Quests? Because it’s cheaper and easier than novel development.
I think you’re way overthinking this. Which would make a company more money 100 million subscribers or 1 million subscribers?
They know they can’t get 100M subs though. In fact, WOTLK was likely the peak saturated number of subs they could ever expect to have. Almost everyone they care to reach has heard of and tried WoW. They also do not have the infrastructure to sustain 100M actively playing subs. There is a sweet spot they target. They want subs, of course, but that doesn’t translate to wanting everyone to actually log on and play their game.
It is puzzling how much of this philosophy permeates SL design.
“Chore” captures far more of what you are expected to do in SL than “fun”, and alot of it has to do with lack of rewards.
I loled when I saw there was a wq which literally required u to do chores. The devs are fully aware of what is happening. I think it’s a cry for help. The activision finance team has them by the throat.