The Queue: Twice more with feeling

Once, twice… maybe the third time’s the charm?

And I say this with feeling… Mitch no.

Once more with feeling: no.

I’m tired too, though at this point I think I’d be tired if we were dealing with daily quests or with world quests. Sure, world quests have more variety and rotate more often, but they’re very much the same idea as a rotating set of daily quests. They’re a chore that you must do every day, and they feel like a chore, too.

When flying was added to Legion and I was farming away at daily quests to earn reputation for it, I was tired, too. Because every day, for quite a few days, I would log on and do world quests in Argus until there weren’t any more to do. And then I’d log on and do it again. And again.

I will, however, grant that Nazjatar dailies, in particular, have a tendency towards “gather X of Y hard-to-find material” or “collect X thing that drops on a quarter of mob kills” tasks that are especially tedious. But the tedium of daily quests is  tedium added to something that’s already tedious.

Whether it’s daily quests or world quests, whenever I log on now I feel like I have to do dozens of quests in order to progress in the game. And then the same again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s not a game at this point: it’s a chore.

While Gnomes can be a wide variety of classes, they can’t be Demon Hunters, Druids, Paladins, or Shaman. In the just-finished Eternal Palace world first race, Holy Paladins were on every raid team (though Method only ran Discipline Priests for the final fight), and there was one Demon Hunter to buff the raid’s magic damage by a sweet 5%. That’s not to say an all-Gnome guild couldn’t be competitive in the world first race, but they would face some struggles that other guilds wouldn’t.

World first content is already brutally hard and intensely competitive. While watching an all-Gnome guild join the race would be a heck of a lot of fun, I don’t think they’d be in the running for top 10 because racial restrictions will always make them a little less flexible than other raid teams. And right now, in particular, Holy Paladins are a big deal when it comes to raid healing. A team without them is just going to struggle more.

I was really hoping Limit would pull this one off, just to shake things up. Limit always seems to put in such a good effort, and they often reach the last bosses well before Method. And while Limit does have a 24-hour head start on content, it can unfortunately seem like that means a 24-hour head start on dealing with bugs.

Looking at Azshara, Limit had around hundred more wipes on her than Method did — but the day before Method’s world first, Blizzard applied a hotfix nerfing the encounter. That let everyone finally make progress on the boss, but also meant the first guilds to get to her spent a day wiping and burning through raid resources to try to get her down, but by the time Europe and Asia gets into the game and to later, buggier bosses, balance problems have started to be fixed.

Method’s kill — running with just two Discipline Priest healers to keep DPS high — was incredible, and required a huge amount of technical precision to pull off. I enjoyed watching them work through the raid and particularly work to get down Azshara, and I love watching everyone stream their progress.

But this “race” is really just inherently unfair. North American realms have a day’s head-start on European realms which have a day’s head-start on Asian realms. Bugs can be fixed and nerfs can be made at any time, which can negate leads and even offer an advantage to guilds who don’t get to the earlier bosses first.

That’s part of the strategy at this point, really. But the more we’ve gotten to see of the world first race, the less it feels like an actual race. Because Blizzard makes no real effort to give players an even chance, even calling it a race feels odd.

I think this comes down to a really simple question: are you having fun?

There will always be more World of Warcraft to play. You’re very, very unlikely to ever earn every accomplishment or level every alt, so I’m not sure setting a goalpost of “I want to finish X and then I’ll stop” makes a lot of sense.

It’s a game, and the point of a game is to have fun. If you’re having fun… well, keep at it! But if you aren’t having fun and the game has become more work than play, it’s time to call it quits (or at least take a break).

We all only have so much free time, and life’s too short to spend it doing things you don’t enjoy.

Unfortunately, I doubt we’re going to get story advancement in 8.2.5. Worgen and Goblins will likely get something with their heritage armor, and the Alliance bee mount quest will probably be fun, but my guess is that we won’t see major story progress in the next patch.

And that is all I have for you today, dear friends. So go out and enjoy your Wednesday, in game or out, and I’ll catch you back here next week (when I will probably still be grinding through Nazjatar dailies).