TL;DR Let’s brainstorm a different type of easily repeatable world content. The issue started with dailies, a necessary form of brainless content on an IV drip, upgraded to world-quests. Less boring, more variety than dailes, still brain-deadening.
Nobody, not a single soul playing this game finds world-quests fulfilling. If they don’t care about it though, it’s equally as failed as a system because it is a factor of the daily-monotony of WoW. It’s existence burns people out whether they know it or not.
Dailies > world quests > zone-invasions (hunts, primalist, dragonbane keep. It’s important to understand the evolution of an idea, to take from each something and come up with something new. All three of these are improvements on the last, but all fail to grip peoples attention for more than half a patch cycle, leading to people burning out more quickly, giving developers less time to make stuff, and when they do, make people burn through it because they’ve been content starved. Content is there, but starved. Like eating the same food, over and over. Nutritional value is gone.
The requirements:
- It has to be repeatable. You can section it off to a repeatable weekly thing, ontop of a repeatable daily thing.
- It can’t be entirely different each time. Impossible to develop a unique quest-chain or fill the bar on a weekly basis. The very concept of the quest and the fill the bar needs to be re-thought.
- It needs to provide a reason for completion that is general enough that all types of player want to complete it. PVP, PVE, Collecting/gold. Not I didn’t say “reward”. Nobody said that it needs to provide player power. Ilvl. Gold. It can provide satisfaction too, more players than anyone thinks enjoy completion for an intangible result.
- It needs to be simple enough to do that a majority of players can complete (A peg down from difficulty from mage tower) but not simple enough that you can complete it in microseconds. It cannot be your standard gather, kill, place, climb, fly.
- It requires specialization. Hold with me here for a sec; not every player should be able to complete every quest immediately. THAT is the problem. You need to have players specialize to UNLOCK certain quests that require skills. Climbing. Flying. Combat focused. Take the “unlock all quests at 70” out of the equation and you skyrocket your longevity. Make it so no, a player who solely does M+ can’t blast through a zones world quests. Some of them that require combat? Sure. But people need to be more than their ilvls. They need to become better at climbing, make it tough. Make it trainable. Better at gathering. Better at hunting monster-specific ingredients.
My idea from top to bottom; entirely remove world-quests as they are from the game. When you hit 70, you unlock NOTHING. No world-quests. However, you can unlock them. Zone completion is how. Let’s talk zone completion;
Let’s take Thaldraszus. To unlock world-quests, you need to complete the major questlines in the area. Not all of them, but within that zone, you unlock pockets of daily quests in the world depending on if you’ve completed that chain. So you don’t unlock 10+ quests in that zone at 70, you unlock 1 after the main questline you can complete. If you want the others, you need to fill out your world-journal in that zone. That journal contains:
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Monster-specific collectibles. Not a guaranteed drop, not uber rare, but you need to collect scraps from certain mobs in the area, be it weapons from enemies, scales from monsters.
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Side-quest lines. Complete them, on the way to doing them, defeating those mobs, you collect those monster-specific items. **Important. This FIXES the problem of those meaningless kill and fetch quests. Now you look forward to completing out your journal when you kill X for a quest, or grab X from the dirt. You have a chance at filling out a trophy-like section of the journal that unlocks things down the line. It gives players a reason to do side-quests, and DESIRE to do them, since they get extra stuffs. This fills out the combat requirement.
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Profession-specific collectibles. Skinning, herb, DISENCHANTING trash greens. In that zone, you can unlock extra world-quests or daily quests for your professions after spending time gathering in that zone, fill out that journal. This fills out the non-combat requirement.
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Achievements and treasure-finding. Throughout your way of completing the USED to be monotonous side-quests, world quests, which aren’t anymore because you’re filling out your adventure journal, you find stuff in the map. NOT simple chests you right click. Chests you right click if you complete a condition. Defeating a powerful enemy. Flying across the zone to buy a vendor item. Requiring a lockpick, or a profession-only item you need to buy. A PUZZLE. Not a fetch, not a walk there, a task to complete, a puzzle-box, a mini-game. Think ESO. Think Skyrim. Think any RPG; make loot accessible, but hard to open unless you apply player-skill. Players need to use their skills to be engaged. NOT torghast mini-chest puzzles. More like old school god of war puzzles. More like lockpicking. Requiring reaction, or caution. Danger. NOT something you can google; googling just tells you how to get there, it won’t help you traverse the spike-pit. Give people a challenge to overcome.
Notice something here? These are all ingredients that are already present in the game. They just need the priorities to be shifted. Blizzard, players, you are WRONG. The reason quests are boring are not because they’re unrewarding. Not plentiful enough, not the story involved, not the bugs not the anything. The content of said quests need to engage our not-childlike brains. Up the difficulty. Make things rarer. Make puzzles, puzzles. People have an intrinsic need to use their skills, and if they don’t, they will burnout and burn through your content that is made for 12 year olds, when we’re all above 20. We can do this.