The limitations of our measurement of success

I have not yet had time to log in to see phase four of the elemental invasion, but something else has captured my attention lately; namely, a comment on MMO-Champion's post about phase four of the elemental invasion starting. 'Tis but a simple comment, but the implications it had for my reflections were many:

any FoS for killing them, tabard, etc? if not what the point?

Larisa of Pink Pigtail Inn wasn't pleased upon reading such a comment, for she saw it as a sign that WoW has become nothing more than a game where we play just for the stimuli, for the objective rewards. I have talked about the differences between playing for objective rewards and playing for subjective rewards before, but in that post, I didn't realize the implications of said differences. This comment, though, has made me realize just what those implications are: which rewards we play for changes how we measure our success, and how we measure our success changes how we play.

Success might not be the best word to describe what I am writing about; productivity might describe it better, for I am talking about the general sensation that our play has been fruitful, that some good came out of it. For someone focused on objective rewards, successful play might be defined by the gear he gets or the rank he achieves in arenas or the pets he collects. For someone focused on the more subjective aspects of play, successful play might be defined by whether he had fun or how deeply he was able to immerse himself in his playing or how much of the story of WoW he was able to experience. For someone like our MMO-Champion commenter above, it appears that fruitful play is defined by some sort of tangible reminder of his actions; it seems he cannot be satisfied with his experiences in-game if there is not some visible indicator of what he has done, and thus those objective rewards are his measure of success.

As tempting as it might be to claim that it is somehow better to play for those subjective rewards than to play for objective rewards, both motivators have their drawbacks. Someone who plays for objective rewards will miss out on content that they might otherwise enjoy if that content doesn't give them some sort of tangible reward, and they might continue to play content they don't enjoy for the sake of those tangible rewards. Still, even in that latter case, at least they find the acquisition of those rewards fun, even if they don't find the process enjoyable, and considering how many parts of this game do give some sort of objective reward, it's rare that someone motivated by objective rewards won't find something in an experience to convince them to play. Phase 4 of the elemental invasion just happens to be one of those rare cases.

But what drawbacks could there be to playing for subjective rewards? Self-limitation. Someone who plays the game to have fun, for example, might avoid parts of the game he doesn't think he'll find fun. He might avoid PvP because he enjoys the relaxed pace of questing, potentially missing out on something that he'd find quite enjoyable if he just gave it a try. Someone who plays for deep immersion might not go back and do old quests because he feels that killing enemies easily kills the immersion for him, when he might enjoy the lore he discovers by doing those quests he skipped while leveling. Someone who plays for the lore might skip out on raiding because he doesn't find it to be very story-heavy compared to other parts of the game, which prevents him from seeing the evolving lore to be found in raids and from experiencing a part of the game he might enjoy if he gave it a shot. In all those cases, it is the player himself that is responsible for his measure of success limiting how much he can enjoy the game, and it is the assumptions he makes that hold him back.

From this perspective, whether playing for one kind of reward is better than playing for the other kind depends on whether you think it is better to be limited by the game's design or by your own inhibitions. Now, if players didn't have hesitation about getting into a part of the game they haven't tried yet, then playing for subjective rewards would be the best way to go, without a doubt. But players are human, and one of the many flaws some people have is an unwillingness to go outside of their comfort zone, to try new things that they don't know for a fact will give them satisfaction. For someone like this, it could be better to be motivated by the objective rewards of the game. Sure, it means they can't overcome the limitations on what they play by willpower alone, as someone limited by their own assumptions might be able to, but there are enough objective rewards within the game to motivate someone to try something they might not try otherwise. So, though our intrepid commenter up there might not have wanted to partake in phase four of the elemental invasion because it didn't give him any objective rewards like feats of strength or a tabard, perhaps those rewards have motivated him to try other parts of the game he might not have tried otherwise. Is that so bad?

Now, again, in an ideal world, players would be willing to try all parts of the game, regardless of the objective rewards they receive for doing so and regardless of their own reservations about trying something that they don't think will be fun for them. But again, we don't live in an ideal world, and humans are flawed, and though the two situations I have presented here (avoiding parts of the game without objective rewards and avoid parts of the game that won't reward you with the subjective reward you seek) represent only two possibilities in a sea of ways to WoW, all I mean to say is that given the choice between the two of them, playing for objective rewards doesn't seem as bad as people make it out to be, for it might motivate you to try more parts of the game that playing for subjective rewards might. Whether playing for subjective rewards will allow you to have more fun, though... well, the jury is out on that one.

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.

Thoughts on the doomsday cultists

As short as the questline concerning the doomsday cults that have recently started appearing in Azeroth may be, it has given me quite a bit of food for philosophical thought (good thing, too; my reservoir was starting to run dry). If you haven't done said quests, I invite you to go to Ogrimmar or Stormwind and do the questline before you read this post, so I don't bore the people who have already done the questline with a summary of what goes down.

What struck me the most about these questlines was the irony in the situation: we as players know the cultists are right when they prophesize the "end of the world", for we know about the coming Cataclysm. Yet, as our avatars, we fight against them, trying to stifle their message and prevent it from spreading. It was an interesting experience for me, doing the questline, for that reason; if the cultists are technically right, how can I be ok with silencing them? The justification I came up with for myself was that their attitude about it was too pessimistic, and that if we are going to survive the Cataclysm, we can't take a "the worst will happen" attitude about it, and that's exactly what the doomsday cults were promoting. If my interpretation is correct, they seem to plan to die during the Cataclysm, but they are sugar coating that fact by saying they are "ascending to a higher plane of existence". Yeah, not the best message to be sending around.

Of course, my druid's reason for wanting to stop the cultists probably wasn't that complex. In the midst of earthquakes and elemental turmoil, these people were causing unrest, both by preaching the end of the world and by stealing citizens away into their ranks. Our characters just want to do what they consider right (unless you roleplay them as otherwise, that is), and keeping the peace is probably considered a good thing. Even though we as players know these cultists are right, with the way the game is set up, our characters can only fight against them. We, in spite of our foreknowledge, are the misled ones here, not the cultists.

There's a good reason for that, though, and a simple reason, too: our avatars are characters within the WoW universe. Just like the leaders we fight for, just like the enemies we fight against, they are limited in their knowledge of what is going on by what they have found out through their experiences. We may know the other faction is comprised of just as many good and bad people as our own, and that we have no reason to not cooperate with them, but our avatars don't; all they know about the opposite faction is their experiences in battle with them and what they have heard from their leaders. We may know that Drakaru is an agent of the scourge as we help him in Grizzly Hills, but our characters think he is an ally. Most significantly, we may know the Cataclysm is coming, but our avatars won't know until they see it, unless they're crazy enough to believe the doomsday cultists.

And in the end, this is Blizzard's game, so they decide how much our avatars know and what course of action they take in response to that knowledge. Just as we lack the power to influence how the plot changes, we lack the power to impart our own meta-knowledge to our avatar. We may know what we know, but they only know what Blizzard decides they can know, so they are the unwitting pawns of a larger plot being written for them. We can do nothing to alter this plot; all we can do is experience it, in spite of knowing what wrongs may be wrought as a result. In the end, all we can do is go with the flow, for WoW is an evolving story, ones whose plot points and conclusion are not ours to decide.