Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The More Things Change

Remember queuing up for battlegrounds in WoW? You would have to trudge to the nearest city and talk to the battlemasters there. And since they deposited you back to the battlemaster afterwards, most chose to just hang around the NPC to queue up again. The war rooms in the cities would be thick with loiterers who had nothing better to do than just stare aimlessly off into space while waiting on their queue to pop.

Mythic promised an innovative way to queue for their scenarios, which are the WAR equivalent of the WoW battlegrounds. A handy dandy button allowed you to queue from anywhere in their world and it would deposit you back in relatively one piece afterwards to where you accepted the queue pop from. This innovation was hailed as a welcome one to PVP'ers everywhere and even led Blizzard to shamelessly steal it for their upcoming WoTLK expansion. No longer would we have packs of players hunched around the NPC like a bunch of aimless drifters.


Or maybe not. Don't these people know about the innovative feature Mythic put in that allows you to queue anywhere? Yes, they do. But the fact is that, oftentimes in some servers, some scenarios pop almost instantly. In this case, it is the Tor Anroc scenario for Averheim Order. When that happens, the most efficient way to gain Renown and XP is by camping the quest NPC's that give the repeatable scenario quests and turn them in after every scenario. So much for innovation.

Something really needs to be done about this. I can't imagine Mythic would be okay with this considering they went to the trouble of providing us with the means to free ourselves from this sort of behavior. I don't know exactly what needs to be done and I'll leave that up to Mythic themselves to decide. Whether removing the repeatable scenarios altogether is a good move or not is debatable but removing NPC loitering is not in my opinion.

3 comments:

  1. I don't see this as a problem. Min/Maxers who are racing to cap as soon as they can will stand around and grind scenario after scenario, cashing in the quest experience. Same old WoW gameplay.

    Those of us who play for fun will grab the quests when we're in the area and not fret over losing the extra experience when we don't happen to have the quests.

    Does it change in higher tiers? At lower tiers the experience from the quests becomes pretty trivial as you reach the higher levels of the bracket.

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  2. You might think that but how much motivation would there be to stand around the NPC if they simply removed the repeatable quests from the game altogether?

    At the higher levels the rewards totally skew in favor of scenarios over everything else. Enough so that, even if you are not a min/maxer, you have to wonder sometimes if it's worth doing anything else.

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  3. Gotcha. In low tiers the XP becomes so trivial... I think at rank 11 the tier 1 scenario quests give something like 200 exp when you repeat them.

    Sounds like I'm not going to be enjoying the higher levels as much as I am the lower tiers. :(

    And once again, my apologies if I came off snarky in my first comment. I was rushing and not really thinking before opening my big mouth.

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