Everyone is singing the praises of Public Quests. They have to be in every traditional massively multiplayer game from now on. They are so much FUN! Well I’m not going to sing the praises of the system, I’m going to tear it limb from limb.

My hypothesis: Public Quests are antisocial.

And I have proof!

The fastest way to max out your Influence in a given Chapter is to find an empty Public Quest and kill things for 100 Influence a pop. This is easy because most Public Quests are, in fact, completely empty. It is boring and grindy if you allow yourself to do it, but it’s still the most efficient way to max your Influence out.

If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of taking part in a populated PQ, don’t relent. Sometimes you actually want to have fun doing one, or maybe you don’t know where to find one of the empty Public Quests in the area (clearly, they are empty, so nobody else has found them either). The best way to gain Influence when participating in a populated Public Quest is to actively screw other players.

If the current stage of the quest involves gathering something from a barrel that is guarded by a mob, wait for someone else to aggro the mob and steal the barrel from the player, because he can’t interact with it while being attacked. Don’t make the mistake of fighting the mob yourself, because you won’t gain Influence and you won’t get closer to Rank 1 in the PQ overall.

Oh, and this applies to people in your group, too. You don’t share Influence with party members when you gather any kind of node, so make sure you get your tank to go fight the mob while you pick up the object and gain more Influence. Suckers.

When a Champion mob comes out with a few solo guards and you attack it, ignore the adds if you’re the tank. Sure, they may go kill your healer, but you aren’t going to gain Influence by saving his life, so stick to the Champion and let the poor sod die. Especially because that poor healer will let you die in a heartbeat if it means more Influence for him, and it does.

When you get to the coveted Hero at the end, do everything in your power to get the tank killed (or if you are the tank, don’t make the mistake of taunting). That way, you can get more of the Influence yourself. And never, EVER, debuff the mob. If you reduce its armor level or resistances in any way, other people will be doing more damage to the mob, and you really don’t want that! Only use buffs and debuffs that affect you, and you alone.

Did I mention that there are quests that send players to the Public Quest area that involve killing mobs inside that same location? That’s an exercise in frustration for the person trying to do the quest, because everyone else will kill the mobs they’re after (they must not have read this handy guide, because they shouldn’t bother).

Did I also mention that nobody ever talks during a Public Quest? That’s because everyone is trying to screw each other as fast as possible to gain Influence and get the highest rank so they might possibly get a good loot bag in the end. And my rant about PQ rewards… that’s another post altogether.

So, in summary, I will give you the proof of my hypothesis that Public Quests are antisocial in simple bullet point fashion:

• The best way to grind Influence is in an empty PQ.
• But an empty PQ is incredibly boring.
• And most PQs are empty.
• If you find yourself in a populated PQ, you aren’t out of luck.
• Actively subvert the efforts of others.
• Even if they are your only healer.
• And only ever do anything that gains you Influence.
• Because everything else will handicap you.

This is my proof that Public Quests in WAR are antisocial. And, all this said, they are some of the most fun PvE game experiences I’ve had in an MMO in a very long time. They are, indeed, one of the greatest new ideas that Mythic brought to the table with Warhammer Online. Why am I criticizing them so much?

Because of their potential. It’s like when you know your kid is capable of getting straight As (or is it straight smiley faces these days?) or making the junior hockey team but they just aren’t quite reaching their full potential.

Public Quests can be better. They can be amazing. They are quite fixable. The only real problem with Public Quests is players. Players are a-holes, and they will game any system you put in place.

And, on a side note, Paul Barnett has officially surpassed Doctor Who as my favorite fictional British person, and I think I owe him a cupcake.

WAAAGH!

Update: I never expected this post to get linked all over the place, so there are a lot of people reading this who don’t know how I normally write. This is written in an exaggerated, overly cynical voice on purpose. I know PQs are not antisocial, and they were definitely not intended to be. Hopefully this will stave off a few of the angry responses, assuming any ever reads this far.

Love, me.

Pretty annoying, isn’t it? That’s because it’s not fun. What is more valuable than anything to a player? Time. What should designers not be wasting? Brain power on good quests. Oh wait, no. The correct answer was, “a player’s time.” Time is a player’s most valuable asset, and it’s our job as game designers not to waste it.

Now, I’m not saying that travel time should not exist. On the contrary, I quite like travel time. But it can and should be used in the right ways, such as to create a sense of scale in the world, help form micro-communities, and a few other reasons that I already talked about (so I won’t talk about them again here. Also, this is a rant, not a lesson).

Back to me being frustrated. I like to think that some things annoy me more as a gamer/game designer than a lot of other people. It pisses me off when I’m given a quest to go waste my time in a game, so that’s strike 1. But it also offends me as a game designer because it makes the rest of us look bad when other designers try to pass off time-wasters as quests, so that’s strike 2. What’s strike 3? Both of them combined annoy me one full extra time over for the final strike.

It’s not just quests that waste a player’s time. It’s raid instances that are full of 5 hours of fodder and 30 minutes of fun. Time is not gameplay. It’s making a player sit around for 10 minutes after they die before they can be effective again. Time is not gameplay. It’s making crafting a single item take a couple minutes of watching your screen before you get anything useful or even really interact. Time is not gameplay.

There’s a hell of a lot of time wasters in MMOs. I understand, it’s hard to fill a game up with a lot of fun for a lot of hours. I’ve been there. I am there. I’ll be there. But, I also believe that cherishing a player’s time is an important way to enable them to have fun in the game.

For you critics out there, time wasters aren’t in a game to keep players subscribed longer. You don’t have to waste a player’s time to keep them subscribed, they have to have fun, get connections with the community, and experience all of the good aspects of MMOs (not the time wasters).

Stop trying to pass off time as gameplay. It isn’t fun.

You might think that it’s because I’m scared that there will be too much competition since I’m working on an MMO myself. Yeah, I’m not. Sure, there are going to be some big time competitors out there outside of the WoW spectrum when our game comes out. That’s wonderful. I can’t wait to play them, and I can’t wait to make my game better than theirs.

Why is it starting to get to me? Well, a bunch of reasons. Every time a new one is announced, everyone takes every new announcement a little less seriously. They muddy the waters a little too much for me. And every time one comes out that sucks and bombs or is canceled during development, it becomes harder for serious developers to get funding or garner interest in their game. My company is lucky because of the people who are part of it, but it still makes me sad for the industry as a whole.

Another reason is that I personally have to play too freakin’ many of them. I try to play every moderately valid entry into the MMO space, and at this point if I want to try even all of those out, I pretty much have to use all of my game time doing so. But, I don’t want to stop looking at the games because most of them have something completely worthwhile to be learned from them, even if it’s because of the flaws.

I just hope players can spot the good from the bad even if they’ve never played an MMO, because it would suck if a new player decided to dive into the MMO realm only to try out a crappy MMO and conclude that they don’t like the genre (thanks to the folks at Actiblizzion, that tends not to happen and we get new players in the pool quite frequently).

As long as there are only a couple-few worthwhile MMOs per genre (fictionally speaking, like fantasy, sci-fi, etc.), I’ll be happy enough. Then I can keep focused on the games worth really digging into.

The MMO genre is maturing into a real live genre full of crappy games with a few gems here and there (see: FPSes. The plethora of great FPSes released this season alone is unprecedented, but there were still tons of crappy first-person shooters that came out throughout the year). That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Because you have fun grinding. Yeah, I said it. You enjoy grinding, whether you like it or not.

Any game that involves progression has a grind. What do all MMOs (worth a damn) have? Progression. Of any sort. No, not just levels. Not just skills. Not just items. Not just money. Anything that can be unlocked in any way. Removing levels and skills and gear and money from the game wouldn’t even get rid of the grind, unless the game is completely one-dimensional and boring (yes, I am oversimplifying things for the sake of my own rant. Deal with it).

The point is, what the heck do you expect developers to do? I’m sure many people who complain about “the grind” are simply talking about the time it takes to gain levels. Okay, so you make levels go faster. But you can still grind them. Grinding is self-imposed. It’s almost masochistic for some people. And, for almost every person who has ever complained about the grind, it’s inevitable.

So let’s go back to making levels go faster. How fast? How about 20 hours of play time to the max level? Okay, cool. Note: What follows is a dramatization performed in the head of one game designer. Use caution when reading.

Man, how long does it take to level in this stupid game? */ooc Hey noobs how long until I’m capped if I don’t suck like you?* Oh, well that’s cool, I guess. Just 20 hours. I’m gonna play 10 hours a day and grind those levels out.

The very next day… Wait, son of a b%&#@, I’m grinding! Take the grind out of this game! Damnit, this sucks. Can’t they come up with something better to do than give me a treadmill to run on or are these designers complete nincompoops?

Man, it takes so much effort to kill these things too. DING! Awww jyeeeah baby. Level 50. I’m halfway there. Wait, what’s this new ability I see here? “Death Touch.” Swiggity sweeeeet! Oh look a mob, die. Oh look, a DIE. Oh DIE DIE DIE. Yeaaaah. Man this is the best ability.

DING 75! New ability again. YES. “Gain Level.” Man this is the best ability evar. Genius devs. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING. Level 100! Phew, I made it after two hard days of grinding. Stupid devs.

Okay, I’m capped, now what? Wait, you want me to earn reputation with a bunch of different factions? GRIND!!1!1one! Screw this. Oh, okay, I only have to do like three quests to max that out. Hold the phone, what’s with these raids? I have to go through one to get to another? I have to get good enough gear to defeat the tougher ones? This is ridiculous! Oh, okay, I just have to solo one at a time and I will get fully geared out each time. I guess that’s cool. Even better! I can just summon the raid mobs to me and kill them all at once. I heart my AoE Death Touch I got at 60.

I wonder what other players are selling. I’ll head to the bazaar. You want HOW MUCH for that stupid cloak?! 8,000,000 Pomegranates?! Oh, okay, I just have to kill a couple mobs and I should be able to afford that. Alright cool. Man this game is way better than any MMO I’ve played, and I’ve played them all. There’s no grind at all, I can just get right into the fun.

2 days later… What. The. Deuce?! How many kill quests are there? How many stupid raid mobs are there? This is completely stupid. I already have all the best damn gear, why do you want me to keep killing all this other stuff? I’m max faction with everyone and their mother now and I give out loans to God on a regular basis. Do you seriously want me to defend your hapless village against Drilgars (which are obviously just copies of orcs, because they are humanoid, buff, and icky looking. Uncreative idiots)? I just defeated a dragon. By myself. With. My. Thumb.

This game is stupid. Seriously, there’s nothing cool to do. I’ve seen it all. I’m maxed out, I’m tired of the idiots in out-of-character chat, and the developers are uncreative dolts. I saw maybe like 50 pretty unique quests and then they all became repetitive. I bet my dog could come up with better quests than these guys, and he’s a lab. Screw you MMO Game Developer 01, I’m done with your game.

How do I log onto the forums? Username: leetsauce007. Password: leeroyjenkins. Nice. What’s the most popular forum? I’m posting there because people will want to read this. I must be heard. Okay, New Topic. Here we go. Subject: “Farewell Everyone”

First, a quick background. I have played more than a dozen MMO games in my gaming career, including all of the major ones. I’ve spent countless hours learning the ins and outs of the games I play, and have an intimate understanding of the mechanics and the implementation requirements for content, art, code, sound, and various other pipelines. I hope the devs read this, because I have been a long time fan of this game and have been posting on fansites for more than 3 years. Also, I am a scientist.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am going to be quitting this game. I’ve been playing since launch, and there just isn’t anything fun left for me to do. The endless grind finally got to me. It has been more than four days now, coming up on five, and I just don’t see where any of this is going. The lack of creativity in the content and glaring bugs like mispelling “demolition” are just annoying at this point.

I will really miss you guys, and hope to see you in other worlds. As of this posting, I have canceled my account. Goodbye, my friends.

Man they better read that. Refresh. Hmm, I’m getting a drink. Refresh. WTF?! I am NOT a n00b. Reply.

I am NOT a n00b. I will have you know that I have all the best gear, more than 19 Trillion Pomegranates, I have killed every boss, and my faction is maxed with everyone.

Refresh. I am NOT a catass! Reply. LOCKED?! I HATE these devs. I need a beer. Man I would so punch a dev in the face if I ever met one.

1 hour later… I wonder how much I could sell this sword for. Probably a lot. I guess I’ll log in and find out. Hey, I haven’t killed this demon naked yet. I’m gonna totally do that and post a screenshot on the forums. Idiots will probably think it’s a fake. Newbies are so stupid…

6 months later… They made it take SO LONG to get to level 200. Holy cow I can’t even believe I survived that long without breaking my monitor in frustration. Stupid grind. Can’t they come up with other ways to keep us entertained?

The very next month… This fan gathering is going to be the coolest week of my life for sure. I’m gonna get all the girls because I’m maxed out in EVERYTHING now. This will be so great. Man I can’t wait to meet Blackguard so I can punch him in the face. Whoa who are those nerds? Ha, they wish they were as cool as me. Hey that one has on my guild’s shirt too. He’s coming over… what did he say?

“HEY MAN! So awesome to meet you after more than 6 months. That was some awesome stuff in the raid last night man.” What a nerd. Am I really in this guy’s guild? I wonder where the devs are. Oh awesome they have the devs out front signing stuff and meeting people. Names on their shirts. Sweet, I can find Blackguard easy as pie. Time to rock.

“Blackguard! It’s Leetsauce Doubleoseven. You are so cool, I love this game. You are by far my favorite dev. I’ll buy you a drink later–Long Island Iced Tea, right?” Crap, close one. That dude was like eight feet tall. I can’t wait to get on the forums again; I’ll tear him a new one.

1 year later… DING! 400! I am officially so badass that the townsfolk cry tears of blood when I walk by. Yesssssssssssss… (And the saga continues for years to come until Leetsauce Doubleoseven moves on to another, less grindy game).

Note about topics I was going to cover but didn’t because I got carried away with the story of Leetsauce Doubleoseven:

• Do developers intentionally make things take time? Yes. Is it their fault? No. Players want to play these games for hundreds and even thousands of hours, which means you have to try to give them thousands of hours worth of things to do (or they’ll complain that there isn’t enough to do to keep them interested). It ain’t easy. The fault is when that content is not cohesive and/or sucks.
• Players will often stick with the familiar. Meaning, if they can either Kill 10 Rats or Search for the Buried Treasure after Discovering the Location of X, they are sometimes more likely to just kill stuff because they know how to do it and know that it’s quick. I firmly believe that MMOs NEED kill quests, and a lot of them, I just don’t think they should be the only quests (or even called “quests” for that matter).
• Most games do have a crapload of interesting things to do, there’s just less of it than what a lot of people call boring. It doesn’t take long to drop 25 mobs in the world. It does take long to create a scripted event. So, there will be some scripted events that are awesome, but a lot of mobs that just use their normal AI. If we just had the compelling content in the game, players would complain about the game having no content because resources are finite (and they’d kinda be right).
• What I and many other people REALLY complain about when referring to the grind is that we don’t have as much time as the next guy, or that we have wives and lives that prevent us from playing more than an hour a day and we can’t progress as quickly as we want. As I said in the post, grinding is usually self-imposed. You CAN play an MMO casually as long as you don’t expect yourself to advance quickly–you have to set realistic goals and expectations or the game will absolutely feel like a grind.

There it is, my commentary on The Grind. It’s one of the four-letter words of massively multiplayer games, and I’m pretty sure my stance on it is going to be controversial. Luckily, I don’t care.

I’m going to refrain from too many direct examples, at least in reference to specific games, because I don’t like making other developers angry when I rant. I’d rather embarrass them when they recognize that I’m talking about them without outright mentioning who they are.

My biggest complaint. Ever? Let me move my effing interface elements! Holy. Crap. Yes, this is a double “holy crap” post. You cannot predict where I want the elements of my interface. You are not a seer like me. Let me move the location of my damn health, and radar, and experience bar, and hotbar, and bags, and everything else that shows up on my interface. Wait, I have to download a UI mod to do it? You are a stupid game developer.

I understand the need for simplicity. I understand that you don’t want to overwhelm new players with options, and you don’t want them to be able to screw themselves over by moving things to places they shouldn’t move them. But I am not a newbie. I am an advanced user. Expose the ability for me to screw myself over, because I won’t. Let me put things in locations that seem illogical to you, because I want to put them there.

You can’t save the user from himself all the time. If the user wants to be able to screw himself, let him. Protect the newbies, and give the advanced users the power to ruin themselves. Don’t make them download a mod, no matter how powerful the mods can be.

Have you ever, my friendly developer, taken a gander at the UI mod site(s) for your game? If so, which ones are really popular? Which ones make the game more useable and less sucky? Identify them, and use them. The mod community won’t hate you for it. In fact, give the person credit who created the original version and they will love you for it.

Have you noticed that tons of your players have downloaded a mod that consolidates bag space into a single, convenient window instead of many? Integrate that into your UI.

Have you noticed that tons of your players have downloaded a mod that allows users to break apart and move individual pieces of your UI? Integrate it into your UI.

Have you noticed that tons of your players have downloaded a mod that allows players to see a map of an instance (that you already have a map for but only expose via the mini-map)? Integrate it into your UI.

This is not rocket science. Identifying popular UI modifications is as easy as going to a popular UI site and looking at how many people have downloaded a mod. Then you can look at how it was implemented and outright copy/paste it if you want. Amazing, isn’t it?

You should never, ever, require a UI mod for common convenience functionality in your interface. If you do, you are dumb.

I haven’t reached the max level in an MMO for years. I’ve been playing MMOs for more than a decade now (holy crap, can you believe it?), and have maxed out in a number of them, but for the past couple years, I have not capped out in any game legitimately.

Why? Mostly, because the mid game is crap. That’s the time between the “newbie” levels during which you learn how to play the game and your character matures and the “end game,” where the game tends to change to something completely different (read: endless raids or PvP in some games).

Now, the fact that by some mid level my character and game experience are essentially complete is only part of the problem. It does truly suck that I don’t actually have anything new to do between level 20 and 49 in a game that caps out at 50. It does suck that it is endlessly repetitious and boring for days on end while I soldier on toward the end game, where the game becomes completely different.

Okay, I think that’s actually about 75% of the reason I never get to the end. The game doesn’t change! I get slightly different abilities as I advance, but the challenges are all essentially identical. There are no new mechanics thrown in to make it truly interesting. A mount that makes me go a little faster when out of combat is only so interesting, and if it comes too late in the game I get so underwhelmed by it, I become more likely to quit.

Throw some freaking wrenches into my spokes. Make mobs do things that I wouldn’t expect, thus revealing some hidden usefulness of abilities I already have. Add in jump puzzles to some of the zones that actually require me to be good at playing the game to get through (of course, you must not require these to advance or you’ll lose the people who aren’t good at playing games). Give me SOMETHING to look forward to.

In most games, all I have to look forward to is cooler looking equipment and different looking zones. When everything plays identically, that isn’t going to draw me any further into the game. It’s not going to get me to continue playing, because there’s no point. Yes, I AM tired of killing bears and boars that have the same tactics they did when they were half their current level.

I only said that was 75% of the reason I don’t play through the mid game. The other 25% is polish and, more encompassing, attention not given. Developers work really hard at polishing the hell out of the early levels to get players into the game. They like to make great first impressions so players will really like the game. Unfortunately for them, I’m not willing to forgive future stupidity based solely on good first impressions.

They only ever make the beginning and end of the game super polished, and they only ever really update the end game. Give me some new options in the mid game so the second or third or eighth time I play it, I can take another path or at least see or do something different. Make the world more dynamic so things at least change a little bit, even if you don’t give me an entirely new zone.

Someday, the mid game will not suck. Someday, I’ll get new mechanics and new content types and new stuff along the way that will keep me playing. Someday the end game will not mean “different game,” and I might actually care about getting there. Someday the mid game will be as polished as the newbie experience and will have the variety and change of the end game. Someday, I’ll get through the mid game again, and I will max out a character in another MMO.

I know what you’re thinking… “OMG, Shwayder, why do you hate sliders? Sliders are the greatest thing to happen to character creation since eye tints! I can’t believe you think sliders are stupid. I think you’re stupid.”

I think you’re stupid, too. I don’t actually hate sliders, I hate the people who use them. The reliance on sliders as “good” customization makes my stomach hurt sometimes. Ook, you can make the nose longer, wider, move it up, left, right, and even make it look like it has been broken 100 times. How nice. 9 times out of 10, there is an extremely tight range in which that nose doesn’t look like a dumbass cartoon character. And 9 other times out of 10 other times, I can’t tell the difference in the game anyway.

You know what game has good character creation? I don’t know, either. Most of the times I’ve been able to identify friends in games, it has been based on the armor or clothing they wore rather than what their character customization was like. And games these days don’t seem to even have that luxury (the last games I really could say I recognized people based on their equipment were Ultima Online and EverQuest).

Anyway, back to character creation. Most character creation systems suck, especially if they rely on sliders. You either look like everyone else or you look like a giant dumbass. Then there are the ones that seem to be going in a better direction like WoW–you can swap out geometry completely and these options are created by artists so they don’t look completely stupid. But then there are usually too few options and there’s no additional cool factor, like eye color pickers, skin color pickers, size sliders (ACK I SAID SLIDERS!), etc.

Yeah, my ultimate character creation system would actually be a combination of choosing from predefined options and the sliders I claim to hate. The Wii actually does a pretty damn good job of it, in my opinion. Those of you who answered that to the question about “what game has good character creation” were close, but it’s a console, not a game. They have predefined options that you can tilt, resize, move up and down, tint, and do lots of neat little things to. You can pretty much make a Mii (the avatars created on the Wii) that looks like anyone on the planet, which is pretty awesome.

So there you have it, my ultimate character creation system is the Nintendo Wii’s Mii creation system translated into 3D MMO format. Add in some awesome equipment customization and I’m a very happy camper.

In the interest of maintaining this as a rant, screw all of you who rely on sliders for character customization if they look completely dumb, and screw all of you who rely on changing predefined options if you don’t make those options various and meaningful. I want to see real, better character creation in MMOs. Our avatars are our freaking identities in these games, and the social aspect is so blindingly important that more time should be spent making a sweet character creation system than saying that it’s better when it’s not.

P.S. If you answered City of Heroes or Villains to the question, you are wrong. It’s a great system for what they intended, but I don’t count it as good character creation if you can’t slap a bunch of other equipment on your character without harming the customization (and throwing a platemail armor set on my favorite CoH character, Digerati, would make him completely unidentifiable).

First, let me back up just a little bit: It is never okay for a normal rat, a tree snake, a sheep, a dove, or a doe to even be a threat to my life. NEVER. I play fantasy MMOs to be more of a badass than I am in real life, and if a normal freaking rat is a threat to my life in a game in which I’m supposed to be heroic, I’m going to stop playing the game and become an exterminator in real life instead–at least I’d get paid.

A rodent of unusual size, anaconda, ram, a disfigured radioactive carrion, or moose are perfectly fine alternatives to what I listed above. They are still less awesome than giants and dragons and elementals, but at least you don’t see me trying to take those creatures on in real life. I’m immediately slightly more of a badass in the game than I am in real life, so I haven’t quit the game just yet.

Where I decide the game is stupid and boring is the third or fourth time I see a wild boar that is somehow more threatening than the last ones I saw at level 25. What the deuce? Sometimes there is a little creativity involved–the boars have a different texture, are bigger, or have fire coming out of their arse and acid coming out of their eyeballs, but often I can hardly tell the difference between these boars and the last boars.

I know, you spent a lot of time on the model of the crazy mean boars. People like familiarity. You don’t have time to make more art assets. Whatever. I don’t care about the excuses anymore. At this point, it pisses me off what people get away with as “content,” and we need to see a shift from game designers for this crap to stop being churned out.

In Summary: Don’t you ever make anything that isn’t a threat to me in real life a threat to my character in any MMO in which I am supposed to be a hero; don’t make me fight the same animal mob more than a couple times, and certainly not for 30 effing levels; get creative and stop sticking your thumb up your ass looking for ideas, because they obviously aren’t up there.

Side Note: Don’t be surprised to see an area in some world I work on in the future with gigantic bunnies and other completely non-threatening crap blown out of proportion because I think it’s hilarious.

Love, Ryan.

I love killing 10 rats for stage 1 of a quest, then killing 10 rats for stage 2 of a quest, then killing 10 rats for stage 3 of the quest. After all of that immense fun, assuming my mind isn’t blown from the sheer awesomeness of it, I also love getting a reward that is worth 1/25th of all those kills and gives me two slabs of edible rat meat that recover my health by 1/25th of my total HP when consumed. Holy effing crap the fun is blowing my mind just writing about it!

Imagine my surprise when, after completing the kill 10×3 rats quest, I get something even more spectacular… SOMEHOW! Holy mother of all that is for seriously holy, I get to kill… !!! 10×3 boars! I haven’t killed boars since the last 10 level range (and by the way, I am in the last 10 levels of the game so by now I completely enjoy the comfort of killing the same mobs over and over… Ryan don’t go on a rant about that yet). Frick I can hardly keep my pants on this is so amazingly splendid.

Okay, calm down… calm down. I understand why those craptastic quests exist. I get it, but they suck. You know what, I’ll even allow them to exist as long as you just use those crappy quests as distractions and focus on making really good quests instead. For every 10 pieces of junk there is a gem, and make it obvious which ones are crappy. Make them all come from one place, label them differently, SOMETHING to tell me that I don’t actually want to do the quest.

Have you ever heard the phrase “quality over quantity?” Me too, and I don’t know what it means. Still, though, the quantity of quality quests is so low that I nearly stub my toe on purpose just to have a little fun while playing games. Learn to make good quests. Get inspired. As an artist here at 38 Studios once said, “this shit comes in waves.” Sure it does, but you’re paid to be creative (designers), so you should be able to come up with a few badass quests or you should stop working on games. Love, Ryan.

How many games have you seen launch with glaring errors in them? Buggy ass pieces of junk that should still be considered in beta and are played off as final products worth the discs they’re printed on. Haven’t we learned as an industry that we can’t get away with that anymore?

Sure, you could get away with it years ago when MMOs were babies and people didn’t have a dozen other viable options. People were more forgiving then.

How many games have you seen that incorporated heavy-handed mechanics that really don’t seem logical in the first place and end up creating far more player frustration than fun? Too many? I thought so. Sometimes it seems like companies are willing to sacrifice fun for their own control. Guess what players don’t want… you controlling everything and destroying their fun.

How many games have you seen with graphics that weren’t actually “good” but did require “uber machines of ultimate doom with optional sexbot mod” to even play at a respectable framerate? Technical requirements do not equal good graphics. Using new technologies the wrong way is a mistake that people have made so frequently it is starting to really cheese me off.

Learn to make a freaking game. Play other games. Play a lot of other games. Figure out what they did wrong and how to avoid doing so yourself. Holy crap, how novel. The next MMO company that I see making the same obvious mistakes as others before them will get a sticker from me that says, “Dumbass,” and a request that they stop making games that pollute the genre.