There are no words to describe how white I am really. Maybe John Tesh white? Perry Como perhaps. It's sad in a lot of ways.

I would be offended that you disliked the last fifteen minutes if I didn't agree with you. Seems like somehow Steve and I derive our power from our anger and disillusionment with odious examples of crud games. Sorry about the petering out, and I'll do my best to keep the energy up towards the end.

I'm still quite incredibly jealous that you got to meet Tim Cain. I guess you can call me a fan boy, but you could have at least invited me along. :P

Well I'll be ... It actually was Goblins and Worgen.

I guess it's a good thing I'm not employed as a psychic, or I would be broke faster than you can say "Resubscribe".

I suppose it was inevitable that I was going back to WoW with the new expansion. Every time I think I'm out ...

I fully agree that the simple act of killing mobs isn't the grind, I just use that example as it's the most prevalent example of the repetitive and tedious kind of play that "grinding" describes.

You're entirely right also that traditional and current quest models are a fairly faithful recreation of the same play style. In your last paragraph there I totally agree with you that when you term tasks "quests" you should treat them as the same quests that characters in epic narratives undertake.

My own humble opinion is that killing things should not be an explicit goal unless the way that you go about the slaughter is interesting in it's own right, and it should rather be ancillary to the completion of a larger and more epic goal. The same goes for any simple and repetitive task, these should only be a means to a more satisfying end.

You're right, I did gloss over those rare gems that showcase what you can do with a well done quest, but for good reason. They are so few and far between that to argue that we are doing it right from that point would do more harm than good.

It's almost universal that for any rule there are going to be exceptions, but they aren't usually the best place to make a point from because they are not a representation of the general case, and it's the general case that we need to improve.

I'm glad that we get some really good quests, and I hope they continue, but I stand behind my opinion that we need to do something about the majority of quests being more tedious than anything else.

I also personally would not call the tradeskilling quests much of an improvement, because though you are right they are granting a character experience for something other than killing, they remain in the same spirit of the other quests in that they tend to be "Build x number of y items, with a specific level of quality".

I do grant you the exception though, and I'm glad to have it pointed out that everything isn't completely horrible.

It's very true that necessity is the mother of all invention, and that working within constraints can certainly provide one with a great deal of inspiration, but that being said there is no actual choice involved here. You let deadlines slip instead of releasing a non-functioning product, that's the case with every industry, you can buy a toy that is intentionally missing parts. For some reason online software vendors have forgotten this and gotten it into their heads that it's okay to "just patch it in later". you patch improvements in later, not core features.

That's just me going on at this point, but I honestly don't think that there is really a choice, your deadlines are less important than having a working product.

It's definitely true that there are some genuinely good posts made on game design on these forums, I was largely trying to point out that they happen to be few and far between. I think that they most difficult part about this debate is that there is a certain degree of subjectivity in the whole topic. How much weight do you put in design decisions from the community who are clearly splintered in what they prefer, and how much of each groups preferences can you safely implement before you create something unplayable. At what point can you say to a group of players "Perhaps this isn't the game you want to play"? I'm of the opinion that it's not simply a numbers game, and you end up doing what the largest group wants, but that's just me and I think that designers are free to make certain decisions based on their artistic vision of where the game should go.

You do make a very solid point in that last paragraph about the Ivory Tower of game designers, but I think it's probably more likely to end up with something playable than if you were to listen to even a tenth of the suggestions from the WoW forums. Perhaps WoW is a separate case though, since it's population puts it in a whole different league than any other game at this time. Like I said, I'm pretty forgiving of designers, but you're probably right, compromise is likely to be the most successful tactic. :)

Ah yes, the inevitable "The devs obviously play X class" posts. Those are almost a whole other topic on their own. It is rather strange that people would consider that such outright bias is not only possible but apparently frequent.

It's true that there are creative uses of game mechanics. Sadly some of those do fall under the banner of bugs. There's a lot of different ways to make that distinction, but I can't think of any particularly foolproof way to make the right decision. It's like software engineers sometimes say. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!".

The idea of goons at a software development studio amuses me greatly.

They must be rolling in lunch money though.

You know, that's actually a really good illustration of how this could be a problem. I didn't think about it because I went out looking for the boat, and thinking about it now, the marketing for the new continent is probably the only reason most people went and explored the new continent. And that's an entire new zone, and the focus of an entire expansion. Granted there was a HUGE amount of work put into the things that were there, so this might have been an oversight, but still.

I must admit some ignorance to the story of Matrix online, as I never really managed to get into it. My personal opinion on the third movie might have had something to do with that, but if they did try that then I applaud the effort. Monthly event type things are actually a really good addition to games I found, or even infrequent one time things (think the Zombie Invasion before WotLK). The problem with my dream game is that players are ravenous for content, and I can understand how it might even sound impossible to create it as fast as players go through it, but it's exactly events like that, which break things up, that make me realize how much fun it would be.