Should we have competition for quest items/kills?

Whilst doing part 2 of the elemental invasion quests today, I was hit by a sudden thought, a thought which came out of nowhere, yet was blindingly obvious when it came to me. I starting to think about one specific aspect of the design philosophy behind the solo-ing part of WoW. It is something so integral to the MMO landscape (or WoW's landscape, at least) that I have never even thought to consider whether it might really be necessary. As I was looking around for elementals to subdue, a hunter was doing the quest in the same area as me, subduing elementals before I could get to them. It was a manifestation of something very basic to WoW's design: competition in questing. This facet of WoW's questing design manifests itself all the time in ways we barely notice. When a quest requires you to kill a specific enemy, there will be other players in the same area killing that enemy. When a quest requires you to collect an item off the ground, there will be other players around collecting that item. And every time another player does one of the above things, questing becomes a bit harder for you. Maybe it's because of the break I've taken from the game, but when I saw that hunter subdue an elemental I had my eye on, I didn't dismiss it as something that's to be expected, nor did I get annoyed at him, but instead, I asked myself: should quest credit be a limited resource? Should we need to compete with other players while questing?

It's a difficult question for me to ponder, for it is something so integral to the way questing works in WoW that in the more than five years I have played, I have never considered it until today. I suppose the best way to start thinking about it would be to think about it from a realism standpoint, and from such a standpoint, it makes sense that having competition while doing a quest should make that quest harder to do. If there are other people in a forest killing wolves, there will be fewer wolves for you to kill; it's basic math. But then again, many quests often imply that, by doing what you are doing, you are taking care of the problem for good; by killing those wolves, you have solved the wolf problem completely, yet wolves still spawn for other players to kill. Sure, some quests acknowledge that you are just culling the threat a bit, but then, how do you explain the quests that ask you to kill a specific enemy? From a realism standpoint, once that enemy is dead, he's dead for good, and no one else can kill him; of course, this isn't the case. What this means is that we can't examine the issue of competition in questing from the perspective of realism, since any realism-based justifying of WoW's quest design falls apart pretty quickly.

With realism out of the question, the next simplest perspective I can think of to look at this issue from is that of practicality; is it practical for us to need to compete with other players for quests? From the players' perspective, it seems like it isn't; after all, wouldn't questing be faster, and thus more fun, if we had our own enemies to kill, our own items to collect, and other players had their own enemies to kill and items to collect? Archeology is a good example of this kind of game design in action, for everyone who takes archeology will have their own set of phased dig sites to find and explore. From the players perspective, it seems like the game would be better it quests, too, were designed this way.

But there must be reasons that Blizzard hasn't adopted a style of quest design similar to the way players look for artifacts with archeology. Perhaps it has something to do with system limitations. After all, as Wintergrasp showed us, putting a lot of players in one area can reek havoc on WoW's servers. Now think of what would happen if we had a lot of players in one area--say, in Mount Hyjal or Vashj'ir after Cataclysm launches--as well as individual enemies, quest items, and phases for all of those players. Though I don't know much about the hardware behind WoW's servers, I can imagine this would be a huge load for them to bear, probably more than they could.

Pacing also factors into this issue, for having competition for quest objectives works well to adjust the pace of the game to an appropriate pace for different players. When Cataclysm comes out, players are probably going to be rushing to the level cap, flooding those zones as they try to gain experience as quickly as possible. But Blizzard put a lot of effort into designing those zones, and they probably don't want players rushing through it as quickly as possible, which will not only prevent them from appreciating Blizzard's work, but also cause them to get to, play, and exhaust the raid content Blizzard has added at launch, reducing the longevity of the expansion. Artificial as it may be, having quest competition slow down players while playing through solo content does increase the game's longevity. But now, suppose someone has started leveling through the new Cataclysm zones after everyone else is already at the end-game, or someone decided to level an alt to raid with. Both of these players will find themselves with much less competition than the players who quested through those zones at launch found themselves with, and they'll be able to level faster for that reason. Thus the lack of competition will give them an edge in catching up with everyone else.

But perhaps the most important reason for there to be competition for quest credits--and also easiest to overlook--is that this is, in the end, an MMO. We are supposed to inhabit a living, breathing world, but considering how stagnant WoW really is, the only way for that world to be living and breathing is through the players. It is our interactions with other players and the way they influence our play that brings WoW to life. In group content, this influence is easy to achieve, for players' cooperation is necessary to make such content work. But how to bring that influence to solo content? Group quests help, but there can only be so many of them, and once there aren't as many players leveling through a zone as there used to be, they become more of an annoyance than anything. So how can players influence one another's playing if they are off doing their own thing? If they aren't working together to make their questing easier, then the only option left is to have one player's actions have consequences for another player in a way that the first player might not be consciously aware of. And that's exactly what the competition inherent in solo questing accomplishes.

So, in short, annoying as it may be from time to time, the competitive aspect of questing has a reason for being there. To remove it would take some of the second M out of what makes WoW an MMO, and would effectively go one step towards making it a very different game. While change isn't always a bad thing, change in that direction would not be good for the social dynamical that helps keep WoW interesting and alive, that puts it firmly in the MMO genre, and that probably drew many people to the game in the first place.