Flawed (aka majorly dumbass) Quests

Before I get into the game master's side of the social contract I have to get the issue of majorly dumbass quests off my chest. I've been playing WoW a lot lately; perhaps a bit too much. And when you are really into the game a majorly dumbass quest is a major turd in the punch bowl. In fact, I have held off writing this piece in an attempt to get some perspective on it. I was going to go on a rant about the World of Majorly Dumbass Quests. But, thankfully, I have managed to get some perspective on the issue.

First, I am going to refer to these quests by the more civil and descriptive name of Flawed Quests. Second, I am going to attempt to articulate just what it is that makes a quest flawed. This will vary from one quest to another. But, I suspect, that the list of potential flaws is not all that great. And, I think it is useful for game designers to understand flawed quests as well as well designed quests. And, finally, I am going to defend Blizzard for having flawed quests so that my observations on flawed quests does not appear as an unfair attack on the game designers.

There are good reasons and not quite as good reasons for the appearance for flawed quests in World of Warcraft. First the good reasons. World of Warcraft has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of quests. Further, there is a fair amount of variety in these quests. In order to avoid flawed quests they would have to have fewer quests and less variety. While flawed quests interfere (sometimes seriously) with the player's enjoyment, this is always a short term problem.  Too much sameness would result in boredom which would be a major long term problem. Hence, erring on the side of variety instead of consistency is probably a good decision. Another good reason is that new quest types are introduced into the game and debugged through usage. If you did not allow for a period of debugging it would not be possible to introduce these new types. Most of the new types do get worked out over time and do increase the player's enjoyment. So, we have to be patient with the designers as they try out new ideas.  

There are also a couple not quite as good (although, perhaps forgivable) reasons. First, there are superstar designers and mediocre designers. When you are designing thousands of quests, not every designer will be a superstar. And when you are on a quest created by a mediocre designer, you know it. Second, the quality assurance group should be testing every quest. Perhaps they do and it takes time to fix some of the errors. I don't know. But, I do know that, on some quests, I have the feeling that QA just dropped the ball.

Well, having gotten that off of my chest, I feel much better. Now I can continue with what I was doing.