Gnomebliteration as a daily? Not so fast.

Suffice it to say that Gnomebliteration has become one of the most popular one-time quests in Cataclysm's content, and due to other fun quests being made dailies or repeatable quests, many have asked that Gnomebliteration receive the same treatment and be made either a daily quest or a repeatable quest. I myself also had a lot of fun with this quest, (though I had even more fun with the game that probably inspired it, which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't done so) and would love to jump on the "Gnomebliteration for daily!" bandwagon, but I could never let myself do that without really looking at the issue first and deciding whether becoming a daily quest really is the best fate for Gnomebliteration.

Let's get the obvious concern out of the way immediately. Gnomebliteration is a fun quest because there are often large crowds of gnomes or mechanoids to pick up or obliterate. If you had to go around looking for enemies to obliterate, it would not be nearly as fun of a quest. And if the quest were a daily or repeatable quest, you can bet that many people would be doing it at the same time. With a lot of people doing this quest, the number of gnomes and mechanoids to pick up or obliterate would go down significantly, and there goes the fun you might have had otherwise. Now, there are two ways to remedy this issue. One is to make the respawn rate on the gnomes and mechanoids dynamic, making it go up as more people are doing the daily. Considering how many people would probably do this daily at any one time, that would likely result in groups of gnomes spawning ludicrously frequently, with you obliterating some groups more by accident than intentionally when they happened to spawn right in front of you. That would ruin some of the fun of the quest, since the intentional rolling destruction of numerous gnomes is what makes this quest so fun.

The only other option is to give players their own phased environment through which to roll their fusion core. That way, we wouldn't have to compete with anyone else for gnomes to obliterate. Of course, this option is not without its own issues. Part of the fun of Gnomebliteration is seeing other people rolling their fusion cores around and sharing that sense of, "Isn't this so fun?" as you roll past them. And considering how popular this daily would be, I could see it putting a real strain on the servers to maintain that many "instanced" versions of the zone. Perhaps a limit would need to be put on how many people can do the quest as once.

But the biggest risk to making Gnomebliteration a daily is that it would risk losing its appeal. I don't think I need to expend too many words to convince you that, if you do something over and over again, it begins to lose its appeal. The fact that we expect Blizzard to make new content for us, rather than being satisfied with what we had at launch, is proof enough of that fact. And though this quest is without a doubt a cut above the rest, it, too, will begin to lose its appeal if we play it enough times. That is the fate of anything we play too much, not matter how much it may be a cut above the rest of what we play; "Embedded" by Job for a Cowboy is, in my opinion, Rock Band's funnest songs on guitar, and yet I don't play it as often as I used to because, like everything else, familiarity makes it lose its appeal. And if this quest is made into a daily or a repeatable quest, it, too, will lose its appeal.

Of course, you might say, this is all well and good; if players want to replay a quest until they are sick of it, that should be their right. I am inclined to agree, but I don't think Blizzard is, and I can see why. As it stands, if we want to level a new character, we have to go through all of the quests we have already played on our previous character without much deviation. The path we take on our first character won't be much different from the path we take on our second character, and these fun quests provide the high points that make the leveling worth it. If we were able to play them repeatedly, the leveling process would lose those high points that make it bearable for those who don't enjoy leveling new characters all that much, and that would make leveling a new character that much less fun.

So in the end, I say make Gnomebliteration a repeatable quest a la Return to the Abyssal Shelf: one that can be repeated several times a day, but provides no reward of any kind. This way, players can get to replay what is clearly one of the quests they enjoy the most in the whole game, but they'll have no incentive to keep playing it once it stops being completely enjoyable, which means they'll still enjoy when they come to it on a new character. Will Blizzard do it? Probably not, but hope is a free resource.