We raised livestock on the farm, hogs and cattle mostly, and that too was a cycle. Farrowing, weaning the young, growing them out, loading them up, hauling them off to be sold. At the hog processor where we sold ours was where I first remember stopping to really think about what routine meant for some people. As the pigs are unloaded off the trailer they are routed down corridors and led to where they are either electrocuted or otherwise rendered unconscious. I know it sounds barbaric, but in truth the animals experience only the momentary shock or carbon dioxide stun. They do not consciously experience their death.
Then they are bled out. Meaning, their throats are slit. It occurred to me that that is someone's job, to slit throats all day. And I can tell you, a pig is full of a lot of blood and they don't bleed gently. I thought about how someone does this all day, as a part of their daily routine, over and over. I later heard that company regulations prevented any employee from being the slitter for more than two weeks at a time before rotating off as a measure of protecting their mental stability, as if the company was afraid that after work down at the bar an employee might...you know. Take their work home with them. I don't know if that's true or rural legend, but if you've ever seen a grown pig in its thrashing, wailing death throes, it's not hard to believe. Even when unconscious the autonomic reactions are not pleasant to watch, and I can see how being the agent of an animal's pretty gruesome death, no matter how humane the process was supposed to be, over and over hour after hour could unhinge someone over time.
The closest thing to mental-imbalance-inducing repetition I ever experienced was working in a factory for several months in the middle of my college years. It was a truck body plant, building cargo boxes onto frames for Ryder, UPS or whoever needed a giant box body married to a new frame for the fleet. Tab A into Slot B. The work itself was easy, and there were a few different things I did such as checking vehicle registration, bulkhead plate cap install, final inspection. Tab A, meet Slot B. The money was ridiculously good. Tab A, welcome to Slot B. First shift jobs are great, I was home by 3:30 in the afternoon. Tab A, meet your new friend Slot B. A few months and I'll be back on campus. Tab A, goddamn Slot B.
I left that job and swore I would never return to such mind-killing, numbing monotony again. And then, World of Warcraft.
I've played WoW for years and it's in my pantheon of all-time great games, but one significant aspect of the game has always been difficult to accept. I started playing back in the early Burning Crusade days and then came back during The Wrath of the Lich King. The new content was great, the lore was wonderfully written and it was exciting to see the story unfolding as we progressed toward assaulting Icecrown Citadel. The Argent Tournament grounds promised us fantasy warriors (and Mages and Rogues and nine million billion Death Knights) the combat training and weapons we would need to face Arthas himself.
But first, we needed practice jousting.
"Why are those quests blue?"
"Those are dailies."
"What are dailies?"
"Quests."
"Daily quests?"
Daily quests. When my guildmate explained the concept of a quest you have to do every day and what purpose they were serving in the game I didn't like the concept. The Lich King content had impressed me and hooked me like never before; the story line was great and the phased areas helped the immersion by making you feel like your character was impacting the world in a material way. The WoW experience was more engaging, entertaining and addicting than ever before.
Then I discovered that at maximum level you start doing things that no longer matter in the world. I've always enjoyed questing, but suddenly doing them didn't matter because I would just do the exact same thing again the next day. Dailies were sold to players as a way to help build the Argent Tournament together to help your faction and all of Northrend prepare to battle the Lich King himself, but I saw it for what it really was: Nothing more than a timer system, another progression gate before Icecrown Citadel was ready for launch. It seemed artificial and contrary to the overall quality of the game that had improved so much since I had been away.
Then I discovered the dailies you could do to gain faction rep as well and I got sucked in like most other players. I thought the Wyrmrest Accord was cool, and then I realized that if I did enough dailies I could become Exalted and have a red dragon mount of my own. So I embarked on my weeks-long schedule. This was before talbard championing and Random Dungeon Finder, so I was on my own with nothing but a measly few dailies to give me a pittance of 750 rep points per day on my way to 42,000. Destabilize the Azure Shrine and help defend the dragons. Tab A, Slot B. Harpooning the dragon hatchling doesn't take so long. Tab A, Slot B. Just a couple more Scalesworn Elites and I'm done for today. Tab A, goddamn Slot B.
Dailies weren't new to Lich King, and once in a while some grizzled old veteran in Trade Chat gripes about how back in their day it was actually an accomplishment to have a Netherwing Drake. But since Lich King, there are dailies scattered all over the continents. Now they're not just a pursuit of the completionists or obsessives anymore. They aren't a means to an end that's a component of some other progression; now they are a gameplay destination in themselves for every player.
Every quester knows what to expect of the quest givers in WoW. Bring me 8 of these, kill 6 of those. Go here, interact with this thing, come back. At their core most quests share a basic formula, but Blizzard has improved the context of the quests and areas. Dailies, however, strip that context away and leave the objectives with no real meaning other than the arbitrary numbers their completion requires. Bring me 8 of these. Exactly 8, because over the course of the next 24 hours I will eat 1/3 of one every hour. So when you come back at this time tomorrow, I will need 8 more.
Stop the arbitrary numbers! Why don't I need to kill the other four monsters patrolling by withing spitting distance or gather the other seven flowers I can see? Why can't I bring you all the wood you need to build the Argent Tournament at once? Why can't I rescue all the wounded soldiers, kill all the char hounds, why can't I punt ALL the turtles? And why is that tower rebuilt every day and you morons don't remember that I helped you destroy it just last night? Again? For the sixth time since last Monday?
These arbitrary numbers and the moronic, scripted NPCs don't remember you because the daily quests in themselves are irrelevant. Like many components in an RPG and WoW in particular, it's an element of the game designed to slow down player progression. If the quest objective numbers weren't capped and larger total quantities were available from the start in order to accomplish a larger world goal, most players would power through it as fast as possible and run out of things to do even faster than we already do. So there's a cap on how much players can earn, and even a cap as to how many dailies players can do. The Blizzard developers have already accelerated new content creation because Cataclysm endgamers have burned through it, despite the uneven and sometimes punishing difficulty early in the expansion. Now that most of that content has been made easier, the Firelands dailies have an even stronger presence in endgame play and it's another symptom of ills in a tiring game that continues to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers by each quarterly earnings report.
WoW's tone has always combined middle-high fantasy drama and clever whimsy, but there's only so many times you can vanquish the same creatures for the same NPCs or rescue the same bear cubs before realizing that it's just not very much fun to do. Again. It's not satisfying to kill the same creatures every day, because despite the game's insistence, it's pretty obvious they aren't actually a threat to the world or I'd need to kill more than 6 today. So much for story immersion. And it's no longer amusing to climb trees to toss stranded bear cubs onto the trampoline below, it's an annoyance. So much for the levity of a tonal shift in the story.
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| I am Vaeas the all-powerful, vanquisher of limitless evil, the Arcane Forsworn, the Second of North and First of the Great Red West. Fear me and tremble! For I am also the attendant of bear cub trampolines. Care for a bouncy bounce? |
Blizzard repeated the exact same pattern of progression in Cataclysm that they used for the Argent Tournament in Wrath of the Lich King, with only a couple changes. Instead of an entire faction or server changing the world, your stage of progression through the Firelands dailies is phased like many other quest areas, which gives players the choice to progress the story line at their own pace. It's a nice tweak to the formula for players who want to do the dailies in irregular doses and not log in a month later to find the rest of the server has power-injected the World Tree with Daily Quest Miracle Gro and there's nothing left to contribute in the world.
The Firelands dailies are also quite easy and can be done in a very short amount of time each day. Maybe this is another attempt by Blizzard to ease the daily suffering of players, but like a Lava Burster spewing molten streams of irony, this makes the quests more irrelevant and more of a non-event. There is no challenge and they require no engagement or need to even pay attention. Take quest, Arcane Blast a few times, keep watching baseball, plant a vine, read another Slashdot article, destroy a rune-whatever-thingee, finish crossword puzzle. They're all done in about twenty minutes, which is convenient, but it's also a greater waste of time. Like a Dalaran sewer rat in a cage pulling a lever, daily quests are just pellet dispensers that don't give players the satisfaction of having earned anything. And when players lack a sense of accomplishment, they get bored. And when players get bored, they stop logging in.
Blizzard has far more talent, creativity and resources than to leave endgame to a shallow combination of throat-slitting insanity with Tab-A-Slot-B inanity. It's lazy, stopgap gameplay band-aiding a lack of content that has become the standard. That's a crime, because on the way to 85, World of Warcraft still offers more to the player than any other MMO in gaming history.
Blizzard can do better than this.
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