Daily Quests and similar content that require “daily attendance” in WoW are outdated – at least that’s what Cortyn from MeinMMO thinks.
Currently, due to the ongoing world situation with the coronavirus, almost all of us have more time to game. This is particularly noticeable in World of Warcraft, where many players are currently taking advantage of the huge XP bonus to level their Twinks – the game world is more vibrant than it has been in a long time.
However, as much as the free time helps level Twinks, the content that is distributed in an outdated manner becomes increasingly annoying to me – I’m talking about Daily Quests, especially those in Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.
Daily Quests have become my personal torment over the past few days. In the first weeks, I diligently completed the quests with my priestess and later my Demon Hunter (who is still ridiculously fun), but that has completely stopped in recent weeks.
I don’t find Daily Quests boring in principle. I enjoy them when I’m in the mood for it. However, what annoys me is the “Daily” in the name. If you want to play with maximum efficiency, you have to carve out a bit of time for it every day. But I don’t want that at all. I certainly have a lot of time for World of Warcraft during the week, but usually only on one or two days and not every day.
The bottom line is that I hardly do Daily Quests anymore or only once a week on the day when I actually feel like engaging with that kind of content.
Daily Quests are a type of content that works wonderfully if you as a gamer only actively play a single game and that is your fulfilling pastime every evening. In a world with many games (after all, people also want to be killed in Dead by Daylight) or other hobbies, it’s an artificial limitation that tends to lead to frustration and annoyance. At least for me.
WoW has other solutions already in place
In other areas, Blizzard has already solved this better. World quests change every few hours, but the overarching “Emissary Quest” is valid for 3 days. So, if you want to grab the “big bonuses,” you only have to complete a set of 11-12 quests every 3 days. This has worked excellently since Legion and ensures that you can set WoW aside for 1-2 days without having the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you’re missing out on one of the bigger rewards.
Especially, this limitation is also peculiar. Imagine if a similar limitation existed in other areas of the game:
- “You played 2 Battlegrounds today, tomorrow there will be new ones.”
- “Sorry, that was your “Mythic+” dungeon for today, you can do another one tomorrow.”
Sure, these contents can’t be compared 1:1 with Daily Quests, but in terms of free time management, I find the comparison appropriate.
By the way, there is one place where I absolutely find Daily Quests acceptable – with prestige items like mounts, pets, or titles. I think it’s fine to have to nurture an egg in Uldum for a month until a mount comes out at the end. I find this type of dailies, which only have cosmetic rewards, completely acceptable. They should convey a “commitment” to a certain task and be tied to an investment of time.
However, in all other cases, I would find a weekly cap much better, which says: “You can complete 30 Daily Quests in Uldum per week, when you complete them is entirely up to you.”
Is Blizzard protecting us from ourselves?
However, I also know that Blizzard always has an argument in hand, which is often played as the killer argument, and that is the extreme players. Blizzard tries (sometimes more, sometimes less) to protect players from themselves. If players had the opportunity to complete, for example, 28 Daily Quests in one evening instead of 4 quests over 7 days, then that would also be used. This could possibly lead to a “quest burnout” where players exert themselves and would also simultaneously provoke the loud voices who would have already completed everything by Wednesday evening and then complain that there’s “nothing to do in WoW.”
However, these two groups (which often overlap) are extremes. The game shouldn’t cater to extreme cases, but rather to the broad mass of players.
I’ll take the liberty of claiming that the broad mass of players would prefer a more flexible organization of tasks in World of Warcraft and would find something like a weekly cap more sensible than a daily cap, as it currently stands with Daily Quests. Because as much as I still enjoy playing World of Warcraft after nearly 15 years, I wish for more freedom in completing my progression-related tasks.
What would you think about that? Do you still find the principle of Daily Quests contemporary or do you actually like it? Or should Blizzard try new things that allow players to manage their time more freely?
Maybe this is a thing of the past with the release of Shadowlands…
