The Daily Imperative

A flurry of activity descended with the holiday as we mingled with family from near and far. My wife and I were happy to host my immediate family for Christmas Eve dinner, and over the course of the next several days our holiday activities took us away from home often. Consequently, I have had little time to play games and have not spent any of it with Torchlight, which may be the most potent argument yet that Torchlight is no true heir to the Diablo franchise. However, fault may lie not chiefly with that game, but with another.

I long ago chastised myself to ignore the compulsion to complete daily quests in WoW, but it seems that I am unable to heed my own warnings. Their design is ingenious, providing a multitude of benefits to the game, but I find their pull to be insidious as well. It is as though each day is a window of opportunity forever lost should I fail to complete the appropriate daily quests. And while, certainly, the same quests will be waiting there tomorrow and each day thereafter nigh unto eternity, yesterday's rewards will remain forever lost to me; two Emblems of Frost, one Cooking Badge, one Jewelcrafter's Token, and a small mountain of gold which I allowed to slip through my fingers. These treasures will be available again tomorrow, it is true, but they have value only in their accumulation, and their accumulation is, by necessity, quantized by the daily system. Relative to the player who performs these duties diligently, I will have fallen behind.

The result is that when I have time enough only to play one game, that game is WoW by default.

To many, this system may seem a cruel marketing ploy to hook players and keep them coming back, but I do not believe that this is so. The opposite is more likely true: only a player already dedicated to continuing to patronize the service finds any value in the regular pursuit of daily quest rewards.

This dedication is itself the necessity that birthed this damned invention. In any game that provides content updates from ongoing development, there exists an underlying inequity: content is consumed hundreds of times faster than it is created. A new dungeon that can be completed in 45 minutes likely requires thousands of man-hours to create, test, and deploy. In order to combat this, MMO developers create repetitive content: items with low drop rates, high cost purchasable items, and rare currencies. These obstacles may be frustrating for the average player, but an even larger dilemma arises when one considers the most dedicated players. Such a person will simply repeat the new content until they have all the desired rewards. Historically, players have in one or two days obsoleted content that was months in development, farming new instances, enemies, and repeatable quests in a single marathon session, after which they are left with no challenges for the period of months it will take to create more content.

The ubiquitous reaction to this behavior is indifference. Indeed, early in the life of World of Warcraft, I believe that developers did not concern themselves with this phenomenon. But regardless of who is to blame for this behavior, it does have troubling consequences for Blizzard. MMOs are, by their nature, often competitive games. Even when direct competition is not involved, there are economies of many sorts which tie all players together. In order to make new rewards desirable, new content grants greater bonuses to the player's power. Massive inequities in gear result in substantial advantages in player-versus-player competition, as well as increasing economic dominance, and both work to the detriment of the enjoyment of the majority of players. It does not make good financial sense to alienate 95% of your customers to please the top 5%, and this goes double when one considers that the top 5%, having completed all the available challenges, quickly grow bored and quit the game for greener pastures. To make matters worse, this hardcore community offers more than direct subscription revenue: they are also the most effective and least expensive form of advertising available.

The solution is a design concept referred to as "gated content". Gated content is arbitrarily restricted in order to limit the maximum pace at which players may proceed. The daily quest is perhaps the most visible example of this concept, but this design can be seen in raid and heroic dungeon locks as well as deliberately delayed rollouts, as we have experienced with Icecrown Citadel. The trouble with gated content is that it establishes a pace at which the game will run, and those who do not keep up will be forever behind the pack. There is no making up lost daily quests, and so, when I have only one hour of free time, I feel compelled to log into WoW and race to finish my dailies.