I had a bit of a revelation over the weekend, and now I understand a little better some of my motivations. I hate daily quests, and I understand WHY I hate them, but first I guess we should probably talk a bit about the daily quest construct as a whole. If you are one of my readers that has not played a ton of MMORPGs, then maybe you have escaped the sirens call of them. Essentially they started their life as an optional method of creating repeatable quest turn-ins and have become widely signified as having a blue exclamation icon to signify that status. The very first repeatable quests I ever experienced were in Everquest, as I turned copious amounts of bone chips to the dude in the Kaladim Paladin guild.
World of Warcraft however had a more formal questing infrastructure and as a result they had to make a specific version of questing in order to support the repeatable nature. I am honestly not exactly certain when I first encountered them, but I know for certain that by the time we reached Silithis they were the backbone of the quests leading up to the opening of Ahn’Qiraj. At that point they served a very distinct purpose and were pretty straight forward in nature allowing you to gain favor with a faction for repeatedly turning in the same items over and over. They were more construct than feature at that point and served as a means to an end.
With Burning Crusade a number of optional faction grinds were put in place, and with them a series of limited daily quests were introduced. Each faction would give you a number of quests each day with additional options opening up as you increased your standing. The first of these that I participated in was Ogri’la, which required a flying mount so absolutely nothing you even saw prior to dinging the level cap in that expansion. These were time wasters more than anything, and if you decide to completely skip a week it didn’t feel terribly bad because it didn’t feel like you were really missing anything other than some incremental progress.
The problem is that as we have moved further from that original mission of simply facilitating multiple turn-ins they have spread more and more from something that felt like optional content, to something that is absolutely a requirement in order to function within the game. Now exists a tapestry of daily quests, world quests and weekly objectives that all feel like they need to be observed for fear of your character falling terribly behind the curve. In Shadowlands for example there are a number of things that can only be obtained while a certain World Quest is up, which only serves to add a fear of missing out on potential rewards by not logging in every single day.
This unfortunately isn’t a World of Warcraft problem, but a larger MMORPG problem. Every game has some version of this infrastructure of giving you limited rewards for logging in each day and doing some things… all in an attempt to make you appear to be “active”. This becomes important because in the free to play economy… no one reports subscription numbers at investor calls anymore. They instead report on MAU or Monthly Active Users, and if they can keep you logging in it gives the appearance of the game having a healthy ecosystem. However none of this is really compelling content and I’ve reached a point where I find it harder and harder to swallow as such.
In general I do pretty well with completing dailies for maybe a week at a time, but eventually I find I lack the desire to log in. I’ve reached this point with so many games now that I started to wonder why exactly I reject this construct so much. Now comes the realization part. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my day to day existence, and my life is basically a series of repeated rituals at this point. I am the primary caretaker in my household and when I get up I start running through a list of little daily activates that are required to make sure the household is running smoothly. Everything in my life has been ritualized in order to make sure it happens and to also try and make it as efficient as humanly possible so I can move on to more enjoyable things.
So for example this morning my list of rituals looked a little something like this:
- get up and turn off the alarm clock
- check email for any critical alerts overnight
- turn on the morning news so wife can wake up slowly while listening to it
- hop in the shower
- get dressed
- make sure wife is actually waking up
- prepare Kenzie’s insulin shot and coax her into letting me give it to her
- give the cats wet food and a little dry food
- gather and take out the trash
- feed the outdoor cats
- sit down and consume caffeine while writing a blog post
There is a similar evening sequence of events that plays out in order pretty much every night, and if anything gets out of order there is a high chance of forgetting to do something. My life is so ritualized that daily quests don’t feel like an escape. They feel like converting what is supposed to be enjoyable relaxation and exploration time… into doing more “Wizard Chores” as my friend Grace calls them. I said before that I can seem to do them for about a week, and that seems to be the point at which I begin to realize exactly what I am doing. Then I start to wonder… why exactly am I logging in? I mean I don’t find the daily quest construct enjoyable in the least, and it is only out of that fear of missing out on something that I start doing them in the first place. Eventually I realize that I am probably better off finding something I actually do enjoy instead.
The problem however is that as more titles have shifted to the “Games as a Service” model, with it comes a “dailyquestification” of content. I mean I get it from the development standpoint. If you can create content that is largely just a ticking of boxes, make it repeatable and it has a positive hit on the MAU… then it absolutely makes sense. As a player however I look out upon a sea of task lists that are really no more enjoyable than doing the laundry. My daily rituals in the real world I have to do in order to maintain a quality of life that I have come to expect. In the game world… I can just log the hell out and go find something else to play instead. Unfortunately my buffer of willingness to deal with these systems has been full for quite some time.
That said I am still just as susceptible to them as anyone. For a period of time I can forget what exactly I am doing as I chase making gear numbers go up. However I always end up back where I started in realizing that I am just doing busy work, and that busy work isn’t fun. I hit Shadowlands hard and heavy for a few weeks until I realized that I wasn’t actually enjoying myself, and now have not logged in since before Christmas. I feel bad that I have not been logging in, but I am actually enjoying myself playing other games so I am mostly ignoring that guilt. I am not sure what the answer is to make repeating content more enjoyable. It isn’t like games have the budgets or hours to create fresh content every week for us to consume like the locusts that we are.
I am wondering if I am just outgrowing MMORPGs in general. Diablo 3 is a grind I do over and over, but it is a self paced grind that allows me to commit as much time as I want to it when I want to… and then bugger the fuck off and forget it exists when I don’t. I crave more experiences like that, but those seem to be fewer and further between. Being artificially gated when I am having one of my periods where I want to binge a game… also feels horrible and will similarly inspire me to bounce. I think maybe the real answer is to break down the lie that is Monthly Active Users… because if you are just logging in to clear your mailbox are you really active? That is a discussion for another day, but I think I now better understand why I hate daily quests.
