Two things before I go

1. The "wowphilosophized.com" domain name will expire on March 2nd and you will need to use "wowphilosophized.blogspot.com" to get to my blog, so if you have my blog or any of my posts bookmarked, please edit the bookmarks accordingly.

2. Thanks to the greater-than-anticipated number of requests by individual commenter to notify them if I start blogging again, if I do start blogging again, I will post a post here letting you know. I can't guarantee it will happen within the next few months or even years, or that it will happen at all, but if I do start blogging again, I will post a post here, on my humble beginnings, to let you know.

And now, I truly leave you for good. Goodbye, faithful readers; you were the ones who made it worth it.

The end of the blog

This is my last post. After today, I will be writing no more posts for WoW Philosophized, because I have canceled my subscription to World of Warcraft. I have written a farewell letter to my guildmaster, removed my authenticator, uninstalled WoW on my laptop, removed all WoW-related bookmarks from Firefox, and now, only this last goodbye remains: the farewell post. Oh god, this is going to be difficult.

I could have put this off. I spent a lot of time in the latter days of Wrath of the Lich King not playing at all, yet still blogging consistently, relying on other WoW websites for sources of inspiration when the game could give me none. Had I so desired, I could have done the same thing for a few months, possibly even longer, before anyone caught on that I wasn't basing my posts on any in-game experience. It's a tempting thing to do, too, because I really do enjoy blogging about WoW, possibly more than playing it. But I have decided to quit WoW cold turkey by dissociating myself with everything regarding the game, short of my faded druid t-shit I still have in my bureau. As part of doing that, I won't be reading any WoW blogs now that I have stopped playing, and I certainly can't write about it. So I am bringing this blog down with my account, as I think it will help prevent me from regretting this decision.

I could turn this post into an excuse to complain about everything I think is wrong with the game, but I'm not quitting because I believe WoW has become a subpar game. I may be a vanilla baby (though the fact that I really came of age as a player during Burning Crusade probably makes me more of Burning Crusade teenager than a vanilla baby), but I was never the type to claim the game had been "ruined forever" by any change that was made to it. I have stayed with WoW as it has evolved through its various phases, and though I enjoyed some more than others, the fact that I have stuck with this game for five and a half years is testament to how much I enjoyed it. WoW has been a major part of my gaming hobby ever since I began playing it, and I do not leave now because I have suddenly gone from liking the game to thinking it is awful.

No, my reason for quitting now is because, thanks in no small part to the introspection brought about by writing for this blog, I have realized that WoW is just no longer made for players like me: the loners, the soloists, the people who play WoW as a largely solo venture because its solo content is (or was) good enough to keep us entertained. You would think that I would have taken the hint from the fact that it is an MMORPG, but the gameplay was enough to draw me in and bait me into playing a game that I didn't fully realized when I started playing that I was expected to play with others. And I tried to like this game, I really did. I tried battlegrounds, heroics, raids, auction house PvP, but nothing other than the solo content could keep my interest. And now, though I enjoyed Cataclysm's 80-85 quests thoroughly, having finished those and moved back to the "daily grind", I've realized that I just can't bring myself to keep playing WoW's solo content anymore. I used to enjoy the daily quests. Outland had some of the best dailies WoW has ever seen, but they have become less and less inspired with each expansion pack. And I finally realized that I was only doing the Cataclysm dailies for the prospect of gear. Yep, I had fallen into the trap of playing for the objective rewards, but the fact that I had managed to switch out of that mode of play not long before made it easy to find my way out.

I'm reminded of what Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation said in his review of Cataclysm, when commenting about player's motivation for doing end-game content.

I asked someone who raids, "Why do you raid?" "To get the best items," they said. "What do you use the best items for?" I asked, to which they could only answer "To raid with." But it's not about items, is it? You don't honestly care if your new Crystal Nethersword is going to clash with your elite boss clogs. It's about the numbers. You want the items with the best numbers so you can use your numbers to decrease the enemy numbers until your numbers are the best in the land and all the other guilds flock to regard your numbers with jealous awe. And before you argue that lots of games are about numbers when you get down to it, no one ever ruined their lives to get 100% items in Super Metroid!

The whole review made me realize that there was less to my enjoyment of WoW than I had initially believed, but that particular passage made me really realize that it really was about the numbers. I was trying to get better gear (numbers) so that I could go into heroics with a bit of a buffer, but why was I trying to go into heroics in the first place? Yes, I enjoy taking, as doing the Crucible of Carnage reminded me, but if I only did heroics for their own sake, I would probably grow tired of them as quickly as I grew tired of daily quests (which means I would have grown tired of them after about two weeks, maybe a month because of the added group dynamic... no, the group dynamic would probably bring it down to a day). So what's left to sustain my interest in heroics after I have stopped enjoying running them? Why, the gear (numbers), of course! Yeah, sorry, I can't do it anymore.

But the biggest reason that I have given up on WoW (that's really a more accurate description than "quitting") is because I have realized that the only reason I continued playing was out of familiarity. The game was familiar to me, and having tried unsuccessfully to get into other RPGs (Fallout 3 and Fable 2, to be exact), I resigned myself to continue playing WoW to get my fantasy RPG fix. The fact that I had already accomplished so much also motivated me to stick with the game rather than trying something new, perhaps out of a hobby-related version of the sunk cost fallacy. But once I stopped valuing the objective rewards I had already obtained and started to value the process of obtaining those rewards more than the rewards themselves, I realized that I just didn't enjoy the game much anymore, in spite of all of the things I had earned (lesson learned: "things" will not make you happy). I have now realized that WoW and I are like a brontosaurus: recognized as a mistaken combination long ago, lingering only out of misplaced affection for an imagined past.

Well, that affection just isn't enough to sustain my playing anymore. My enjoyment of the game isn't going through a burn-out phase, it's passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to motivate me to play other games. It is a late enjoyment. It's a stiff. Bereft of exuberance, it rests in peace. If I hadn't insisted on continuing to play, my WoW folder would have been in my computer's trash can. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-WoW-player.

And this is an ex-WoW-blogger, as well. But will the blogging itch strike me again? It very well might, and I very well might start blogging about something else on a different blog. But if I do, I will do it the same way I started this blog: I will start from nothing and earn my readership again. Whatever my new blog--if, indeed, I do start blogging again, which isn't a guarantee--is about, it will likely have nothing to do with WoW, so though I may be tempted to say, "Hey guys, come check out my new blog!", I won't do that unless someone likes my writing enough to ask me to keep them updated if I decide to write again. And as for this blog, I will leave it up as long as blogger decides its worth keeping up, and since I have it set to e-mail when I get a comment, I will still respond to any comments I get that I feel are worth as response. However, the "wowphilosophized.com" domain name will likely expire at some point, at which point you'll need to go back to typing in "wowphilosophized.blogspot.com" if you're still coming back for some reason.

So there it is. This is the end of my time as a WoW player, and there are no hard feelings on my part. This game has given me an amazing five and a half years, as well as an amazing year and a half of writing this blog. I never thought this blog would get as far as it has, and it's something that has made my time spent playing WoW better in many ways. I've had the opportunity to communicate with some truly wonderful individuals as a result of this blog, as well as be a part of the larger WoW community (the online part of which really isn't so bad), and without it, I might not have realized just how much I like writing. Thanks for reading; it has truly been a blast.

Adieu, adiue; parting is such sweet sorrow.

And yes, I'm still bitter over the removal of Tree of Life as a permanent form.

Oh dear, Vashj'ir: Redux

I had a lot on my plate when I wrote Wednesday's post due to my claiming that Hyjal was a better zone than Vashj'ir and the fact that two of the currently three comments on that last post disagree with me. Fidjit claimed "Hyjal felt very 'been there, done that' to me," and Neverender agreed with Fidjit and added, "But all in all, I appreciate what Blizzard tried to do and applaud them for making Vash'jir such a beautiful zone to quest in." I appreciate their comments and can see where they are coming from, but one little blurb in Neverender's comment gave me insight into why I dislike Vashj'ir so much: "...I appreciate what Blizzard tried to do..." [emphasis is my own]. If you look at what Blizzard was trying to do with Vashj'ir, it is indeed a very praise-worthy zone, for their aspirations for this zone were clearly very high (why else would they make it so long?). This much I agree with.

The trouble in considering what Blizzard was trying to do with Vashj'ir is that when we quest in Vashj'ir, we are not playing in the zone that Blizzard tried to create; we are playing in the zone they did create. Considering that both Fidjit and Neverender agreed that my complaints about the zone were legitimate, I supposed that whether you think Vashj'ir is a praise-worthy zone ultimately comes down to whether you want to praise Blizzard for their efforts or their results. Which brings us to the question I ask today: in choosing to praise or criticizing Vashj'ir, should we choose to praise or criticize Blizzard for their ambition or for the end product? Should we praise the potential and innovation of a venture, or the actual quality of the venture when it ships?

To look at Vashj'ir again, the zone was most definitely a step away from familiar territory for Blizzard. It was innovative because the entire zone took place underwater, and Blizzard took quite a few risks is designing the zone that way. I find it telling that most of my complaints about Vashj'ir had little to do with the fact that the zone was underwater, because that means that Blizzard averted all of those risks. My complaints about Vashj'ir were that it was too large and its questline too lengthy,that it lacked a grounding location that allowed us to better comprehend our position within the zone, that creating the kind of tension that Vashj'ir was trying to create was simply impossible due to the game's mechanics, and that the ending was underwhelming and abrupt. Every single one of these flaws could just as easily have been made in the process of designing a land-based zone, though the underwater setting does make it more tempting to try to create the kind of mood Blizzard was trying to create with Vashj'ir. So really, Vashj'ir is a case where the innovation and potential of the zone do shine through, and it's its other flaws that bring it down. Thus it is perfectly reasonable to praise the zone for its innovation.

But that doesn't excuse the zone for having these flaws. In fact, it's all the more reason to criticize the zone, because the fact that these flaws could just as easily show up in any zone means that Blizzard should have known better. Blizzard has had years of practice designing zones, and these are flaws that those years of practice should have prevented. But no one is perfect, and the developers are going to make a few mistakes from time to time; they just so happened to make these mistakes while designing their most ambitious zone yet. It's almost a shame that they did manage to avoid the potential flaws that were directly related to that ambition (i.e. the typical pratfalls of most water levels), because those flaws would have been forgivable due to Blizzard's inexperience with designing entirely-underwater levels. But there's no reason that the kind of flaws that did show up in Vashj'ir should be any more excusable just because Vashj'ir was a water level.

So in the end, Vashj'ir deserves both praise for its successful innovation and criticism for its definite flaws. I guess whichever you prefer to focus on comes down to just how much the innovation amazed you (I was less than amazed once all the environments started to blend together) and was thus able to distract you from the zone's flaws, and how influential those flaws were in detracting from your enjoyment of the zone.

Hyjal won't appall

Having already given my opinions on Vashj'ir as a questing zone, I feel it's time I turn my eye towards the other Cataclysm starting-zone: Mount Hyjal (the fact that I promised I would do so in my last post might also have something to do with why I'm looking at it now). Now, Mount Hyjal wasn't my favorite zone of the expansion, but if I were to rank the zones in order of how much I enjoyed them, Mount Hyjal would definitely be in the middle (Twilight Highlands > Deepholm > Mount Hyjal > Uldum > Vashj'ir, if you're interested). I agree with the commenters on my Vashj'ir post that Mount Hyjal wasn't exactly innovating or ground-breaking, but overall, I felt that the zone worked well, and that's where its strength was.

As I said in my last post, Mount Hyjal was similar to Vashj'ir in many ways, but overall, I felt that Mount Hyjal worked in many ways that Vashj'ir didn't. To wit, Hyjal has the enemy that we need to face right on our doorstep in plain view, a pattern done right from the beginning with the earth elementals attacking Nordrassil, and the sense of urgency created by the mountain being on fire could not be mitigated by leaving the zone, creating suspense that remained taut even if you left the zone and came back later (which could not be said for Vashj'ir). It was also not of unreasonable length, which certainly didn't hurt its overall quality.

So what do I have to say about Mount Hyjal that I didn't say in my last post? One thing I was appreciative of about the zone was its liberal use of phasing, allowing the player to have a very real sense of having an impact on the zone. This was another way that I felt Vashj'ir was lacking: it didn't feel like our actions changed the zone at all, even though they would occasionally cause NPCs to spawn where they hadn't been before. There was also a sense that Mount Hyjal was unfolding before our eyes, what with its almost spiral-ish structure and fairly linear physical progression path, giving a real sense of progress, something I feel is lacking in many of WoW's zones. What I mean by "progress" is that was had a sense of how far we were in completing the zone. Most zones send you running around the zone in a seemingly orderless fashion, making it difficult to tell how far you have to go before you have solved that zone's problems. Sure you could check how far you are in the quest achievements to figure that out, but where's the fun in that? With Hyjal, you traversed through the zone in a fairly linear fashion, making it easier to tell how close you were to the end.

As for flaws? One of the major things about Cataclysm that bugs me is how most of the new factions have little to no representation outside of their respective zones, and the Guardians of Hyjal are no exception. Sure, their name may preclude them from doing much outside of the zone, but they are still a very one-dimensional organization. Their tabard claims that, by wearing it, I am "championing their cause", but how can I do that when their sole purpose is to save Hyjal, and I'm running around in an instance that has nothing to do with the zone? I felt this was a problem with many of the factions, but it's especially bad for the Guardians of Hyjal, since their purpose is so obviously one-dimensional and they were my introduction to just how self-contained Cataclysm's factions are.

But that's clearly not a criticism of the quests themselves, and I really don't have many negative things to say about Mount Hyjal as a questing zone, because Blizzard just played it really safe with this zone. There wasn't much innovation, but because it's familiar territory, they were able to pull it off quite well. So overall, my thoughts on Mount Hyjal could be summed up as, very well executed, but not very ambitious. It's nothing new, but that's why it's not so bad; as I said in the title, it "won't appall" because we've seen much of it before. And perhaps my disagreements with the Vashj'ir camp in the Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir debate stem from my prioritizing execution over ambition; in other words, I judge a zone more by what it is than what it could have been. But more on that on Friday.

Oh dear, Vashj'ir

This post contains spoilers about the storyline of Vashj'ir, as well as a plethora of negative opinions. If you haven't finished Vashj'ir or you prefer to read optimistic and constructive posts, you have been warned.

Apparently, overly opinionated posts criticizing Cataclysm's content are all the rage in the blogosphere these days. Of course, I'm in no position to judge Cataclysm as a whole, which presents a bit of a problem when writing one of those total review posts. I have yet to experience the 5-man content and will probably never experience the raid content, and PvP hasn't interested me in years, so I haven't experienced fighting in Tol Barad, The Battle for Gilneas, or Twin Peaks. What I have experienced is every zone's one-time quests and all of the daily quests (Alliance side, anyway), as well as Archeology, but being that I have already given my thoughts on the latter (though I have taken a decidedly more neutral view on it since then), it is the former to which I shall turn my discerning eye this week. And by discerning, I mean incredibly subjective and opinionated, so get your grain of salt ready before you start reading today.

Got it? Good. Now, I was originally going to write a post about all of the zones, including the daily quests in their own section, but I had so much to say about Vashj'ir that I had to give the zone it's own post, so I plan to put the other zones under the lens on Wednesday. Without further ado, let's get to my very opinionated review of Cataclysm's underwater zone.

It's something of a tradition in video games that if a game contains a water-based level, it's going to be the least fun level in the game. There are many reasons for this: if swimming isn't an integral part of the game otherwise, a physics engine for swimming may need to be thrown together for just that level, which will likely lead to that engine being sub-par due the limited amount of use it will actually get. Breath gauges are also a nuisance, as is the often low visibility in water levels. Blizzard managed to avoid these common pratfalls when they designed Vashj'ir thanks to the fact that WoW has always had swimming, so we are used to navigating water, and thanks to the sea legs buff, which does away with the breath gauge, and the Abyssal Seahorse mount, which largely does away with the limited mobility typical of a virtual aquatic environment. Which is why it's such a shame that Vashj'ir was the zone I liked least out of all of Cataclysm's zones.

Maybe it's the zone's size. Vashj'ir is the only zone in Cataclysm's high level content that had to be split into multiple subzones--and three of them, at that--and moving around in these huge zones became tiresome at times (especially the latter quests in Darkbreak Cove). Maybe it was the lack of any grounding aspect of the zone's storyline. Moving from shelter to shelter without any constant base that could be considered the main outpost of the zone made the whole zone feel very disconnected. Vashj'ir is the only Cataclysm zone (to my knowledge) that will send you to a different part of the zone, depending on where you are in the quest lines, when you use its portal in the capital cities, and that becomes disorienting, especially since the caves all look the same, as do many of the environments, beautiful though they may be. This leads to the zone not having many landmarks that give us a definite sense of where we are, which doesn't help things.

But maybe, just maybe, what makes Vashj'ir so unenjoyable is the impossibility of creating the mood that Vashj'ir is trying to create. From the moment the boat sinks on the ride over, it's clear that Blizzard's intention with Vashj'ir was to create a zone where we are constantly on the run, ducking for cover in an environment where we are out of our element, while being constantly surrounded by foes who would love nothing more than to rip us to shreds. And yet, as they are trying to create that mood, there is nothing preventing me from swimming to the land in the zone, mounting up, and flying out of there, or better yet, hearthstoning back to Stormwind. Was I supposed to be in danger or something?

Now, Mount Hyjal is similar to Vashj'ir in a lot of ways, in that we are constantly moving throughout the zone and the zone tries to create a sense of urgency on the part of the player. I'll go over this zone more in another post, but the reason the creation of tension works in Mount Hyjal and not in Vashj'ir is that Mount Hyjal's tension is much more feasible to maintain. In both zones, the enemy is supposedly right on our doorstep, a threat we need to face immediately. In Mount Hyjal, there are earth elementals right in the front lawn of the zone's main hub, so this sense is created successfully. In Vashj'ir, these enemies are often far away, and though their numbers are supposedly imposing and dangerous, they rarely are if we actually go an have a look at them. In other words, in Mount Hyjal, Blizzard successfully followed the mantra of "show, don't tell", whereas in Vashj'ir, that was not the case.

And as for the sense of urgency, in Hyjal, that sense of urgency is created by the fact that the mountain is on fire. If we leave the zone, it will continue to burn, though we may now be safe. As such, though we can leave the zone and its problems with little difficulty, its conflict still remains. As for Vashj'ir, I get the distinct feeling that the zone is trying to create tension by implying that you yourself are in danger by being stranded in the zone, but if you hearth or fly out, oh look, problem solved! Sure, the soldiers of your faction and the Earthen Ring might still be in trouble, but again, the zone depends too heavily on telling us that our allies are in danger without ever showing us how they are in danger. Do these naga that we need to be afraid of ever storm the caves we get our quests from? Do they send out scouting parties to see if we have become a threat yet? Nope, they just leave us alone, and whatever tension that could be drawn from this situation is diffused by the fact that the zone just tries too hard to create it, breaking the tension by exceeding the capabilities of text-based tension creation.

Then there's the zone's length. It's bad enough that the zone doesn't create the kind of tension that can keep me interested in the storyline, but it then drags me through that tension-less chore for longer than any other zone in the game expects me to stay within its boarders. If Cataclysm's one-time quests werre like a novel with five chapters, the only one that wouldn't have any kind of suspense or tension would also happen to be the longest one. A lack of tension compared to other parts of the story can make anything seem to drag on, even if it isn't longer than the other parts of the work in question, but Vashj'ir has the double wammy of seeming to drag on due to its lack of tension and actually dragging on because it is so much longer than the other zones. For members of the Horde to get the quest achievement for Vashj'ir, they need to do 25 more quests than they need to to get the achievement for the next longest zone. The Alliance have it even worse, needing to do thirty five more quests to get their achievement, making Vashj'ir almost a third longer than any other zone in Cataclysm for the Alliance. Unbearably long, and boring, to boot. Oy vey.

And then there's the ending of the zone's storyline. I'm not even going to bother talking about that submarine ride that made Crime and Punishment feel like a haiku and forced you to watch the battle as your sub-mates narrated the fact that you were losing because the battle itself was so uninspired in its design that you really can't tell who's winning and who's losing (there's that "telling instead of showing" problem again). Or the inexplicable hole in the bottom of that submarine (or maybe it was a different one; I can't differentiate between the submarines when I remember them) that invites you by its very presence to go for a swim, only to deposit you in the ocean if you should swim too deep, with the submarine moving too quickly for you to catch up and get back in. No, let's just get right to the ending.

After losing the battle, Erunak is pulled into the breach by a mysterious tentacle and your commander follows. Without actually giving you a definite prompt to follow your commander into the Abyssal Maw, the quest simply leaves you outside of the rift, with no one around, abandoning you in the deepest, most desolate part of the most disconnected-from-the-rest-of-the-world zone in the game. It's about as lonely as WoW can possibly make you feel, and that's how this chore of a zone ends: an empty ending to a tension-less story. And if you do follow your commander into the Maw, you have to enter an instance to continue the story. So you are left with an exceptionally unsatisfying ending: you have been defeated in battle, your allies are nowhere to be found, and you have to do an instance to finish the story. If you wanted to move on to the next zone's quests after finishing Vashj'ir, too bad; go into that dungeon and find out what happens!

And speaking of moving on to the next zone, I think I should do that mentally, because all of this accentuating the negative isn't good for my psyche. So let me conclude by saying that if you are still working through Northrend, Outland, or even the remade vanilla content and you still have to make the "Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir" choice, choose Hyjal. The only reason to go to Vashj'ir is for the extra gold, Earthen Ring rep, and quest rewards to disenchant. On Wednesday, shall I move on to Mount Hyjal, and perhaps another zone or two if I don't have enough to say about Mount Hyjal alone.

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.

Zone replay in WoW?

I was hit by a sudden realization today regarding WoW's solo content. In contemplating the "daily grind" I have returned to (a term I coined a bit over a year ago to describe the repetitive ritual of doing the same daily quests every day), I thought about methods that other games have used to remain interesting after being completed out of hopes that the lessons learned from these other games could be applied to WoW. Thinking about this took some time, for my stingy-ness regarding buying new games and my recent penchant for open-ended games (the last four games that have held my attention for any extended period of time were WoW, Rock Band 3, Minecraft, and Rock Band 2) means it has been some time since I played a typical game that could be "beaten" in any conventional sense. But when I looked back upon the games I have played which I was able to "beat" and continued playing, I realized that most of the time, I was simply playing these games multiple times all the way through, occasionally with some sort of "New Game Plus" bonus.

Thinking back, I realized that this was how I milked most of my old games for more play time once I had finished them; I simply played them again. Yet when I looked at WoW, I realized that there is no such simple "play the game again" feature. There is no way to replay entire zones that you enjoyed, unless you level an alt and do the whole level grind over again, a daunting thought for such a huge game (especially when some zones are horribly behind others in terms of their design philosophy). Outside of rolling a new alt, there is simply no way to experience WoW's solo content more than once.

And the truth is, I see the option to roll and alt and experience the whole game again as a less-than-optimal way to give players the option to replay the game. Why? An argument for this method would say that it is equivalent to starting a new save file in a console game, but that analogy doesn't really work, because WoW is no longer equivalent to one game. It is now equivalent to several, and forcing players to start from the beginning if they wish to re-experience a part of the game is equivalent to making them play multiple games in order to replay the one they like. Let me elaborate. In the beginning, there was vanilla WoW, which was equivalent to one game (we'll call that game WoW 1). Then Burning Crusade was released. Because we had to pay extra money for Burning Crusade, it was equivalent to another game (WoW 2), and ditto for Wrath of the Lich King (WoW 3). Cataclysm is an interesting case, because we got all of the new 80-85 content (WoW 4), as well as the remake of old-world Azeroth (a remake of WoW 1).

To provide an analogy, look at the side-scrolling Metroid Games. You had Metroid, released in 1986 on the NES; Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, released in 1991 on the Game Boy; Super Metroid, released in 1994 on the SNES, and Metroid Fusion, released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, all of which were chronologically related to each other in terms of story and all of which were great technological improvements over their predecessors, much like WoW and its expansion packs. But after Metroid Fusion was released, a game called Metroid: Zero Mission was released, which was a remake of the original Metroid that brought it up to speed with the technological advancements made after the original Metroid was released. Cataclysm is the equivalent of a game that packages Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission together, in that we have an advances fourth entry in the series, as well as an advanced remake of the first entry, while the second and third are still behind the other two in terms of how technologically advanced they are.

Why do I make this analogy? I make it because I think forcing WoW players to play through the updated Vanilla content, Burning Crusade's content, and Wrath of the Lich King's content before they can replay Cataclysm's content is equivalent to forcing a Metroid fan to play through Metroid: Zero Mission, Metroid 2: The Return of Samus, and Super Metroid before being able to replay Metroid Fusion, which just wouldn't be fair. Now, when you apply this analogy practically, it makes it seem like I am suggesting that people should be able to skip entire expansion packs when they roll a new character, which is not what I mean to suggest at all (although Death Knights can already do that, but they start out right in the least-advanced content, which is hardly an ideal skip). What I am saying is that the precedent set by other games makes it seem unfair that we should have to play through all of that old content just to replay the new content we enjoy.

It was at this part in my thought that I was hit with an idea: what if we could replay entire zones? What if we could go through a zone again and play through it's one-time quests a second, third, maybe even fourth time, and the longevity of the solo content could be extended that way? The precedent for it exists with the Caverns of Time; major villains could be replaced with members of the Infinite Dragonflight with similar abilities, and occasionally, a quest giver could be replaced by a member of the Keepers of Time. Or perhaps there could be one quest-giver from the Keepers of Time who gives a bread-crumb quest that starts you off in each zone. These quest-givers could be set up near the portals in Stormwind and Ogrimmar, and they could get their own portals that would lead to past versions of each zone. Thus these "replay zones" would be their own separate zones, allowing Blizzard to put in quests that wouldn't award items (to avoid flooding the dust/essence/shard market) or reputation (to avoid making faction rep too easy to farm), both of which would make sense due to the fact that you aren't actually doing anything to help any of the zones you play through again. To keep the sense of shared questing, the game could also show other players replaying the zones alongside you, preventing it from becoming a lonely experience.

What purpose would these replay zones fulfill? Aside from allowing players to play through a zone again without needing to level a character through old content, the quests in these zones could also award money, making them an alternative to the "daily grind" we have now. Because there are countless more one-time quests than there are dailies, this would probably be a more interesting experience than the dailies we have now, and would make it take longer for players to get bored with Cataclysm's high-level solo content (of course, the dailies would stay around to help players earn reputation). Perhaps they could also award reputation with a new faction comprised of members of the Keepers of Time, giving solo players something else to work towards. They would also allow players to re-experience key moments in the evolving storyline of WoW (in case they missed them the first time around), as well as give Blizzard an idea of what works in questing and what doesn't by allowing them to see which zones players replay the most.

But really, the important point is that these replay zones would allow players to experience the best of currently available content without needing to replay the old content. Raiders who roll a new character don't need to run Molten Core, Black Temple, Ulduar, etc. with that character before they can run Cataclysm's raid content, so it seems a bit silly to force us to experience old solo content more than once when we just want to re-experience the relevant, not-behind-the-times-in-design-philosophy content.