Terminally Incoherent

Hey, have you heard about that world. That world of war and craft? Yeah, I’m sick of that world. I’m getting out. I seriously haven’t launched WoW in probably over a month now and I feel no urge to. I think my adventure with that game is over. Damn it, I’m an antisocial beast. I have no clue what made me think I could play a game populated by millions of other human beings and not wish they would all die and rot in hell, and get the fuck of my game. I mean there were times I had fun teaming up with other people but usually I was just hoping that all these friendly people just fuck off.

Often if someone wanted to talk to me I would pretend that I didn’t speak Orkish and just type stuff in the Troll language, then use the /confused emote when they responded, wave, bow and run off to do my thing. I’m being social at work, then I come home and I’m being social with my family, and then I sit down at my desk to be social with some random assholes in WoW? I think not. My brain gets totally pissed off if it doesn’t get it’s daily quota of sweet solitude. It was plain to see that I was not getting all out of WoW because my general dislike of chatty online strangers who want to team up and run instances all the time. If you take the social aspect out of WoW the game essentially turns into a Diablo like running game that involves running around and killing things. There are some plesant diversions such as collectibles, minigames, achievements and etc. But in the end, your daily grind usually boils down too running from one area to the other and killing X of Y. There is nothing wrong with that, but I have been spoiled by RPG games with real depth to them.

You know, games which will actually allow you to play a thief and level up by stealing, fencing and trading, without really needing to commit any bloodshed. I’m talking about Morrowind of course - that one game that keeps drawing me back in over and over again due to it’s immense replay value. The great thing about Morrowind is the sheer variety of quests you will get just by doing side missions unrelated to the main storyline. One day you are spying on someone, next day you are stealing secret documents, later you are sent to negotiate trade agreement and etc.. You can easily level up and advance your character without ever needing to kill anything.

Yes, you can play a pacifist in WoW too but it is not easy. It is actually quite difficult, if not impossible to achieve without serious commitment to the cause. If you are doing it, you might as well start a blog about it and people will read it because it is such an unusual (and strangely awesome) thing to do. In games such as Morrowind and Oblivion, a semi-pacifistic life style can simply a logical outcome of you choosing your character class. If you rolled a thief or a rogue you will be doing missions that require stealth, good speechcraft and security skills (stealing, extortion, burglary, pick pocketing) rather than the heavily combat oriented stuff. And there is nothing unusual or blog-worthy in that. It’s just how that game works.

Part of it is of course the fact that Morrowind and Oblivion have fairly complex system of rules that allow you to train in pick-pocketing, or lock picking and then use these skills in the game. This complex system of attributes, skills, racial/class feats and special abilities is the legacy of the western single player RPG tradition. Computer RPG games inherited it from pen and paper games like D&D which (out of necessity) had to include rules for all this non combat stuff.

Funny thing is that MMO’s break with this tradition. If you are a gamer you know that this is true. And yet someone looking from the outside would be surprised. D&D is social affair isn’t it? You get together with bunch of friends, you drink a gallon of Mountain Dew, eat a bag of Doritos an tell inappropriate jokes while the GM is trying to build tension or whatever. You could almost say that D&D is a multi-player game, could you not? WoW is a multi-player game too. Massively! Sounds like a match too me. But it’s not. Playing WoW is probably as far from playing an actual pen & paper game as you can get. In WoW your stats are limited to bare bones minimum that is required for calculating how hard your character can hit stuff. When you level up, you get almost no choice as to how you can upgrade your character. The skills you learn are mostly special attacks of varying range and/or damage output. You can’t learn lock picking in this game because there are no locks to pick. You can’t use your superior charisma or speachcraft skill to talk your way out of sticky situations because you never actually talk to anyone in this game. Your interaction with NPC’s is limited to taking or turning in quests and not much more.

WoW does have a limited crafting system but you can’t just play a craftsman. In order to excel at your craft (be it smiting, engineering or leather working) you need to go out and kill large quantities of “things” to gain the necessary levels and XP. The crafting system is meant to be a diversion you engage in between missions. The kill X of Y thing seems to be a MMO thing rather than a WoW thing though. It is like a MMO questing paradigm that almost defines the genre.

Is it always like that though? Are there MMO games out there that do not follow this pattern and offer you alternate ways to advance? I know of two counter examples. One of them is Eve Online which I have tried and got bored with pretty quickly. But then again I wouldn’t really call Eve a conventional MMO. I’d probably classify it as a hybrid between Microsoft Excel and Progress Quest - the only other game I can think of, that rewards you for not playing it. But that’s just my opinion and you have to keep in mind that I’m a people hating introvert and when I play MMO’s I actually run away from people that want to team up with me more often than not. If you are a social person, Eve like any other MMO offers you tons of entertainment in the form of guilds (or corporations) and player driven drama.

The other game that used an approach that was closer to single-player games (and thus the pen & paper roots) was Star Wars Galaxies where you used to be able to pick a merchant or an exotic dancer as a class. I never played that game, but I heard both good and bad things about it. All I know is that at some point they decided to overhaul the whole game engine and nerfed it down to the point where it became almost a WoW clone.

Everything else seems to follow the WoW lead, simplifying the stats and game mechanics to the bare bones minimum, and reducing the game play down to a controlled genocide. I can see why this is happening. The “kill X of Y” type missions are easy to write, script and deploy (so you can make them in bulk). Players can easily team up and accomplish these missions together as a team, and the missions are easily repeatable (ie. large mobs do not deplete easily, so players are not sitting around waiting for them to re-spawn all the time). But I can’t help to think that the MMO genre would be richer and deeper if it went back to it’s roots, and added bit more complexity to it’s system in order to allow for some more variety. But that’s me.

I just wanted to say that I’m officially bored with WoW. I predicted that this will happen, but it took a bit longer than I expected. Remember all these posts I made in which I said how the game continues being interesting despite repetitive game play? Yeah, I’m over that now. Repetition has just became tedious. At this point I’m seriously considering canceling my account. I’m having second thoughts of course. I mean I leveled up this character up to 40 so I don’t really want to just toss him. Blizzard says it will probably save my character for all eternity when I cancel, but they don’t guarantee it. So it’s different from a normal single player RPG game where I can just abandon it for 6 months and as long as I don’t lose my saved game files I can come back to it with no problems. My “saved game” is on Blizzard’s server, and as soon as I stop paying them they don’t really have any incentives to keep it around. I know they usually don’t purge cancelled accounts and their characters because there is always a chance that a former subscriber will come back when a new expansion rolls out. But again, I can’t really bank on that.

Don’t get me wrong - I think that WoW is probably still the best MMO on the market right now. It is definitely the best one that I played. I tried Guild Wars, Eve Online, and Anarchy Online and WoW is the only one that actually made me fork over the money for the monthly fee. The game is immense, it runs great on my crappy old computer, and the art direction gives it a unique look and feel that sets it apart from everything else out there. The world is immense and the level of detail put into the design of each location is breathtaking. If you never played an MMO and you want to check one out, WoW is the way to go. That said, I’m bored with it. Here is my post mortem report on what probably killed the fun for me in the end. I will make it a point to log into the game few more times before I hit that cancel button and see if I can locate the fun again but I’m not very optimistic.

Repetitive Game Play

I have said it before, but I’ll repeat it here once again. 99% of WoW missions are a variation of the classic RPG staple known as “kill 10 rats”. They mix it up a bit of course. It’s not always rats. In fact, when I say rats, I really mean a generic monster or humanoid mob that spawns in an area. But it’s all the same - your task is always to exterminate them. Like rats. It’s not always killing exactly 10 rats either. Sometimes you have to kill 15, 20 or just 5 of them. But every mission involves you going somewhere and killing things. Even when the quest doesn’t mention killing of any rats, you can safely assume that it will end up being an implicit requirement. For example, if a quest require you to to find 15 shiny doodads you can bet your sweet ass that these doodads will be either dropped by some sort of rats (or other creatures) at a very low rate, or will be located in an area that spawns new rat mobs every few minutes.

No matter what you do and where you go, you will eventually end up killing rats (or some other sort of local vermin). You are a hunter? Great, go hunt some rats! You are a rogue? Go assassinate me some rats. You’re a spell casting class? Go exterminate some rats with magic! There is very little variation. Once in a blue moon you will stumble upon a currier mission which requires you to take an item to a distant point on the map but those are rare, and far between. Invariably each of these currier runs starts a chain of missions which sooner or later culminate in killing some rats.

There are different modes of game play of course. For example there are instances, where you team up with a group of people and enter specific enclosed area to kill things. The area is instanced, which means that each group of players that enters it gets their own unique copy all for themselves. The enemies are harder and, and the loot is better. They can be an interesting experience if you can find a good group of people to play with. Unfortunately it is not that easy. See my next point about the social aspect of the game. I had one awesome Scarlett Monastery run in which we were all lv. 30-40 and had to work together not to wipe. People had their assigned responsibilities, the leader marked the targets for aggro, and for crowd control and we were hacking away like a well oiled machine. It was great experience, and one that I was never able to replicate again in any of the medium level instances with a rag-tag groups of random players.

Typical approach to running instances such as Scarlett Monastery is to bring a lv 70 alt with you who will plow through the enemies while the rest of the group runs up as swipes the loot from the fallen bodies (always voting need for everything of course). This is not much fun, since all you do is to follow the high level character and bicker over the drops with other players. Supposedly this issue goes away in the end game (since by that time everyone is level 70 and you just have to work together to survive), but I’m nowhere even near that point yet and I’m already sick of these type of instance runs.

There is always PVP but it doesn’t really do anything for me. I guess I’m just not that interested in pwning other players or anything even remotely related to that. Every duel, and PVP brawl I have fought ended with me being raped by a higher level close combat oriented player who could avoid my ice trap ignore the concussion shot, close in, and then end me with less than 4 close combat attacks. I do understand that people love this aspect of the game, but I never really was big into PvP in MMO setting. I can’t imagine playing on a PvP server where ganking n00bs is just a part of the experience.

Social Aspect of WoW

I know that many people play this game because all their IRL friends do, and they get to hang out and do things together in a virtual world. My WoW experience was a lonely one. I basically only know the following 5 kinds of people:

1. People who don’t play MMO’s and/or video games in general
2. People who don’t play WoW (at all/anymore)
3. People who do play WoW but on a different server (usually a PVP one)
4. People who do play WoW but are hard core alliance players and don’t want to create Horde character
5. People who do Play WoW but are never online when I am

The fact that the WoW world is so fractured into servers, and that you actually have to pay for server transfer does not really help. It means that if you pick the wrong server you either have to pay, or start a new character if you want to join up with a friend who is on another one. Mostly though it is scheduling - I play at odd irregular hours and my style is very much touch and go. I pop in for an hour, do few quests and sign off. I usually have clear objectives in my mind when I log in (finish quests A and B, go to a town, unload, visit trainer, see if I can level, etc..) and I rarely actually have time to “hang out” and chat.

So without close friends to hang out with in the game world, and no work/school/online buddies with similar schedules or preferences I was left to play with complete strangers. This is not the end of the world, but it is sometimes hard to find decent people in this game. And by that I mean people who do not fall into one of the two extremes: immature wow-tards, and hardcre wow-tards. The line between the two is fuzzy but it usually boils down to this: and immature wow-tard will call you a “fag” for tanking without a shield. A hard-core wow-tard will kick you out of the guild for it.

That is not to say there are no nice people in the game. There are, but they come and go and I’m not the most social person when I’m playing. As I said, I’m on a schedule and I want to accomplish certain things before I sign off. So while I may meet some kind and helpful stranger every once in a I usually don’t hang around long enough to “get to know them”. Sometimes you luck out and you hook up with a really great group of people. Most of the time you run around with bunch of idiots or assholes trying to convince you that they totally “need” every single item drop.

Running solo missions gets boring after a while for the reasons I stated above. Grouping up with complete strangers can get annoying unless you luck out and find some decent folks. Obvious answer to this problem is to join a guild but once again, not all guilds are created equal. I need a slacker guild which consists of people like me - casual players who are just looking for non-idiots to play with at weird hours. I really don’t want to have a schedule, I do not want responsibilities and another job. I don’t want a hard core riding guild!

At some point I actually did join a loosely organized guild like that but it did not deliver what I hoped for - a sense of community. Out of 60+ members I never see more than 4-5 online at the same time. The guild message board is a ghost town, and the guild chat is silent 80% of the time. This seems to be a common problem for small, non-riding guilds. Folks like me join up hoping to meet new people and form alliances but without responsibilities, common goals, perks, strong leadership and organization everyone just drifts apart and keeps doing whatever they were doing before. I don’t really know anyone from my guild. A lv 70 guild mate once ran me through the Scarlett Monastery and sent me some low level loot that was sitting in their bank for months which was nice. We never really met in-game after that.

Here is a request - if you are a regular/casual reader, you play Horde on Kirin Tor and you are happy with your guild let me know! I want in!

Anyway, let me know what draws you in? What makes you keep playing this game? At this point I’m a bit bored. I’m not sure if I’ll ever reach lv. 60. I will probably never get to 70 and venture into Outland because why should I invest in a game that already bores me. Is there a lot of interesting stuff to look forward to in the expansion and the endgame? Did I reach some sort of boring plateau that happens between levels 40 and 60? Let me know if I will miss out of some great fun if I cancel right now, but keep in mind the comments above.

In the meantime I think I might take a break and fire up Morrowind once again.

Recently I realized that traditionally evil races such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and etc. in RPG games rarely have fleshed out social backgrounds, or detailed descriptions of daily lives. It’s as if every member of each respective evil race was a male warrior, whose only desire in life is to wander around in the wilderness hoping to bump into a party of adventurers he could fight. The have no other ambitions, goals, dreams - they do not form families, they do not raise children, hunt or grow crops. All they ever do is raiding human villages, looting, pillaging and raping innocent women (I mean, that’s where you get all these Half-Orcs, no?).

I touched upon this subject before when I talked about my experiences playing Horde character in World of Warcraft. As I said in that post, both Horde and the Alliance are good guys in this game. They are enemies because of their history, and their beliefs. Orcs are not some feral beasts in this game - just tribal people with a war-like culture. As you run around Kalimdor however you will see that war is not all they are about. In several places you can see Orcish kids running around and playing. Somewhere there is a house and inside there is an Orc woman preparing a meal for her husband and son. There is a dude in Crossroads who hires adventurers to search for his lost wife. You quickly get the picture that these green skinned creatures are not some bloodthirsty monsters - they form families, they love, they hate, they play with their kids and etc.

In that aspect WoW portrays Orcs in much more detail and in much kinder light than most RPG’s out there, including the pen and paper ones. Apparently I’m not the only person who noticed this. Go check out David’s post Orcs are not just Orcs at the Verbing Noun blog. He makes some excellent suggestions for fleshing out the traditional antagonist races in your RPG campaigns, and how to subtly subvert your traditional “go kill all the Orcs in the Orc camp” quest into something entirely different. Instead of a simple hack and slash, your company is faced with a moral conundrum.

The PC’s know that if they do nothing Orcs will continue raiding nearby villages. But can a good aligned company justify a preemptive raid on an Orc camp/village full of women, children and elderly non-combatants? How will a lawful good paladin feel about looting Orc war-chief’s body for that +2 Awesome Mace of Awesomeness if his an Orc woman is crying and pleading to take her husbands body and give him a proper burial?

Perhaps if the players stopped, and looked at how the Orcs live they would realize they are not just some barbaric, evil monsters. They are a race with it’s own culture, traditions, oral history, and a deeply rooted morality system which may seem alien to us because it is based on a different alignment.

It is a deliciously insidious idea - to start with a very traditional setup, and then flip it around and make the PC’s realize that perhaps they can’t become heroes without becoming monsters. They can feel the same way Robert Neville felt in Mathesons’ I am Legend (the short story not the movie). Humans will hail them as heroes, and saviors but amongst Orcs and their allies they will be despised and known known as ruthless butchers - a living proof of human cruelty and destructive drive that is causing the conflict between the two races.

In fact, if you think about it this seemingly random, one-off encounter may be spun into a lengthy campaign in which the PC’s must deal with the fallout and repercussions of their reckless raid. For example their legendary cruelty was a catalyst that helps to unite local tribes under one banner and an all out war is about to break out? How can they prevent it? Will they negotiate? Will they try to assassinate the leaders and instigators driving the Orc war machine? Will they be willing to give themselves up and accept punishment for their deeds in the name of peace? It could be interesting stuff.

Thanks to WoW and David’s article I will never look at evil humanoids such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and the like the same way again. I will now always wonder what are their reasons for doing what they do. What are their daily lives like. How are their families structured. What values are important to them. And how can I make the PC’s feel like shit for killing them.

Of course there is the opposite approach. If you don’t want to deal with these moral quandaries, you can simply say that Orcs, Goblins and the like are inhuman, supernatural beasts who do not reproduce, do not form families and exists solely to participate in random encounters.

Yes, this is going to be another WoW post. You may see couple more popping up in the next few weeks but I’ll try to space them out so this blog doesn’t look like some fanboy love fest. I have to admit that there is something very strange about this game that makes me keep playing it even after several weeks since I first installed it. Usually my relationship with video games ends in 3 ways:

1. I finish the game, write a review and forget about it
2. I get stuck somewhere due to DIAS gameplay, get frustrated, hurl the CD across the room, kick it in the nuts, strangle it, bury it in my back yard and then piss on it’s grave
3. I get bored and stop playing, then I revisit it in 2-3 months and play some more, then get bored again and etc..

So far WoW kept me interested which is unusual. It is even more unusual, because this is a game where you essentially run around like an idiot all day trying to kill X creatures of specific kind for the next quest which is exactly the same as the 10 previous quests. WTF? Why do I keep playing this?

I think this is illustrates why this game is so incredibly popular. Blizzard just got it - they figured out the mystical formula that just work. I think it must have something to do with the pace at which it dispenses instant rewards in the form of the three L’s: Loot, Levels and Locations.

It seems that every time I sit down and play for an hour or two my experience bar fills up at least half way. So depending on how many quests I take, and how many mobs I fight with I can reliably gain a level every other day or three - and that’s with just casual playing for 2-3 hours per evening. The speed at which I’m gaining levels has been pretty much consistent since I hit the double digits. In other words, nearly every time I exit the game I feel that I made some progress and unlocked some new options for myself.

Being higher level means that I get to move to more difficult areas which is rewarding in itself. Since this is my first time through the game, I really enjoy exploring the world (of Warcraft) and every time I begin think I’ve seen it all, I end up in an area that surprises me. For example, I recommend checking out the Shimmering Flats in the Thousand Needles area. It is essentially a race track where Gnomes and Goblins build custom vechicles and compete with each other. And it is not just for show - they actually race on that track. Check this out:

click to enlarge

The carts actually line up, and a human girl waves them off just like in the movies. It is pretty amusing the first time you see it. Little things like that make me want to continue playing because I never know what is just around the corner.

And finally there is the loot. Specifically I want to talk about the collectible items. I don’t mean the matching sets of armor which when combined give you awesome powers of awesomeness. WoW has those too, but there is tons of absolutely useless shit in the game that you just have to have. These things range from very rare and cool looking clothing items which offer no bonuses whatsoever, to stuff like non-combat pets. I just discovered this aspect recently, and I blew a wad of gold on a chicken, an parrot and a cockroach. Yes, there is some dude in Undercity who sells cockroach pets and I immediately felt compelled to have one.

click to… Well, you know what to do.

These pets do absolutely nothing in terms of game mechanic - they offer no bonuses or buffs. They simply follow you around and get in the way when you try to click on something. But you can buy them - and chances are you will want to have at least one. Too bad they get soulbound after use and you can’t trade them after you get bored with them - which is yet another dimension along which they are a complete waste of gold and silver but damn it, I could not resist. I mean I never got the whole Pokemon plague, but somehow Blizzard managed to infect me with a strain of the same damn virus which is quite disturbing.

And of course there are the mounts. When I was level 29 I was like “I need to get me one of them things as soon as I hit level 30″ cause that’s the level when you can learn the apprentice riding skill. Of course it turned out that it would actually be cheaper to get a hand job from the queen of the fucking universe than to get riding lessons in this game. The skill costs 35 gold which is probably meaningless to someone who haven’t played the game so I will put it in perspective for you. At level 30 my character had 3 gold and 20 silver to his name (quick reference: 1 gold = 100 silver = 1000 copper) - and it wasn’t like I was splurging on luxuries either. Most mobs you can fight at that level will drop 20-30 copper if anything. Average quest may pay 10-30 silver. Most of your class and profession skills at that point cost between 20 and 70 silver. On average it may cost you close to 1-2 gold to restock your ammo, repair your gear, buy some food for the pet (well, if you are a hunter at least), and maybe learn a new skill every time you visit a major city with the intent of replenishing supplies.

In other words, if you want to learn how to ride at level 30 you really have to work for it. And thus I was introduced to the grind in WoW. Before I decided I wanted to have a mount the game was relatively grind free. I would take quests, complete them and move on. Granted, the quests usually involve grinding anyway, but it was limited in scope and localized. I never really stood in a single spot and farmed a single mob for an hours.

I realized that if I want to afford the god damned overpriced lessons I need money fast. And there was just one way to do this - sell my sexual services to rich, and horny ladies! I’d use a Pizza delivery job as a cover where ordering “extra anchovies” from the menu would be the code word for “sexy time” with yours truly. Oh wait, no! No! That was that stupid movie. What I meant to say, is that the only way to make money reliably fast that I could think of was to sell leather at the auction house.

You see, it goes like this. Most of people playing this game right now are seasoned user who have at least one level 70 alt in the game and few lower level alts they are slowly leveling up to reach the endgame. They basically use huge stockpiles of cash their high level character got from the endgame instances and mail it to their low level characters so that they can buy decent gear at the auction house from the get-go. Similarly, the low level alts usually take crafting professions (such as leather working) instead of gathering professions (such as skinning). Instead of running around skinning low level beasts to obtain the leather to practice their leather working skill they just buy it at the auction house. This creates a niche for me, and other n00bs to specialize in gathering professions. Since I run around slaughtering low level mobs anyway I might as well rip their hides of and sell them to these lazy fucks at a premium. I noticed that I could reliably put 20 pieces of thick leather at the auction house with the buyout price of ~80 silver and some bugger would buy it every single time. Same goes for wool, and silk many mobs drop at high rates. A good advice to a beginner WoW player is to take at least one gathering profession for this very reason. Mining, and herbalism may take a lot of inventory though, and will require you to run around a lot. Skinning on the other hand goes hand in hand with grinding mobs. If you find a good mob that produces high quality leather, and drops you can just sit there and grind for a while.

That’s what I did. I went to the Yeti cave near Tarren Mills planted myself there and started methodical genocide of the residing mob. The respawn rate there is so high, that as I cleared one room, the other one was full of Yeti again so I could just run around in circles killing, and skinning until I run out of ammo. As a rule I would not go back to town until my bags were full of leather and nothing but leather. Doing that for 4-5 days (and remember - I’m playing casually, 2-3 hours a day) with short interludes for trips to town and doing few quests in the area when I got sick of skinning yeti allowed me to raise enough cash for my riding lesson, and a mount leaving me totally broke but sort of happy that I can go back to exploring, roaming around at random and doing quests instead of farming for cash and leather.

It wasn’t that bad though. I think that during my tenure in the cave, I helped 3 or 4 different groups of people and a dozen of individuals to complete one of the 2 different quests that take place in it and gained 2 levels. As soon as I was starting to get bored I would run out and do a quest, chat with people and etc. I was still having fun more or less - and when I wasn’t I would just shut down WoW and go do something else.

Now I have my mount and I want the faster one. Damn this game. I may need to do some more grinding before I hit level 60 so that I can get that Swift Raptor that will make me move even faster.

To summarize, I’m amazed I’m not bored with this game yet! It keeps giving me incentives to play at every turn which despite some of it’s obvious flaws really shows that it is an excellent product doing what it was designed for with extreme efficiency. And in case you didn’t know it was designed to incrementally separate you from your hard earned cash - and it is almost flawless at doing that. But it’s also fun so I’m not complaining.

A while ago Shamus posted a list of his WoW Nitpicks. Since I agree with most of them I’m not going to repeat them here. I just wanted to add few little nitpicks of my own. I still like the game, and I still enjoy playing it and I’m currently hoarding money so that I can afford my first mount as soon as I hit lvl 30 which makes it exciting. Having that mount will make the game play experience so much better and I’ll tell you why.

For the most part WoW is a running game. You run to a location, you kill bunch of things, you run back to the town, and then you run right back. Here is a very common multi-stage quest scheme that you encounter over, over and over again:

1. Go to the location 10 minutes of running away from the closest town accessible by flight path and kill 10 Creatures and get back to me
2. Great! Now that you killed 10 of the creatures I want you to go back and collect Greater Creature Claws. These are only dropped by 1 in 20 Greater Creatures which spawn in the same area you just came back from. Oh, and I know that when you were there you killed like 600 of them, but they never dropped the claws. That’s because I didn’t give you this quest yet.
3. Excellent! Now that you exterminated that spawning point 6 times over we are well on our way of eliminating the creature threat altogether. I just need you to run back to that spawn point once again and this time destroy 20 Creature Eggs for me.
4. Splendid! The last thing I want you to do is to run back to that location kill the Big Creature Boss. I know you killed him 5 times already but it didn’t count yet. This time it will though.

Can you see the pattern here? The game loves to send you to a distant area, have you come back to a town to turn in the quest, only to be told to get right back where you came from. Sometimes you can take these quests in parallel but that’s usually more of an exception to the rule rather than the norm. There are multiple quests like that in the Barrens, in Stonetalon and in Thousand Needles - essentially all over the place in the 15-30 level zones.

A bit repetitive, isn’t it? If the creatures in question are beasts that can be skinned I actually don’t mind grinding the same spot over and over because then I’m actually turning profit. However most of the time these missions make you kill some sort of humanoid creatures that drops 20-40 copper and stupid gray items. Ok, sometimes they drop linen which I can sell with profit to low level alts of high level players. Still, not the best use of my day.

My second nitpick which is directly related to the first one is the fact that 98% of low level missions are variations on the same old theme known in the MMO circles as “kill 10 rats”. Only that rats become increasingly powerful mobs which force you to come up with new strategies. But you are still just killing assigned number of specific creature in just about every mission. There is just little variety. Sometimes you will get an escort quest where you have to defend someone and deliver them securely to some location. Sometimes you just get simple courier quests where you just need to deliver a package to a location, and collect quests where you have to find certain items and deliver them to someone. These are rare though. Most of the time you are just slaughtering your way through horde after horde of enemies.

The repetitive kill 10 rats style quests are a staple of MMO’s of course so WoW can’t be really faulted for it. And perhaps some of the higher level content, the instances and the Burning Crusade/Lich King stuff will be much more varied.

Anyway, these are the two aspects of the game that have been slightly annoying to me lately, on top of what Shamus already covered. The add-ins are there to help alleviate some of these annoyances - for example the Quest Helper like tools do a great job eliminating the frustration with vague quest directions. But the two things I mentioned above can’t really be fixed by a plugin - they are essentially core game mechanic that is a bit repetitive at least at the stage I’m at. I’m hopeful for the future though.