Grinding something boring to reach the fun part

Damion of Zen of Design has an interesting article up on the economics of daily quests in WoW. The way he sees them, the quests aren't very good, and people grind through them to finance the "fun" activities like raiding. He has a very interesting point saying that the classes that are most needed for groups and raids, that is tanks and healers, have the most difficult and boring time grinding for money or doing daily quests. Quote: "So back to our tanks and healers - they desperately need cash to run raid content, but they aren’t built either to grind OR to do dailies. The end result being tanks and healers logging on, doing pointless and stupid daily quests made increasingly tedious by their gear and advancement choices. The result I’ve witnessed, perversely, is a lot fewer people running instances. Why? Because the tanks and healers try to do their dailies, end up hating the experience of feeling worthless and impotent (also, NOT FUN), and start levelling up warlock or mage alts that can act as their cash generators by doing dailies or grinding. Or they just burn out and quit. Which means that, if you’re trying to put together a pickup group, it’s becoming increasingly harder to pick up a tank or a healer. And it wasn’t that easy to start with. And you can’t run without ‘em."

I can't really confirm the opinion that the daily quests suck, I haven't done enough of them. Up to now I only did the Skettis egg bombing, which is very easy with my warrior who already has his epic flying mount, and still easy enough with my priest and his normal flying mount. I started to look into the Ogri'la daily quests, but didn't have the time to really start them. I only joined some guild mates in a repeatable Ogri'la event, where you kill four dragons, and combine their 4 scales into one random cloak. If you are lucky and get the random cloak which has the stats which are good for your class, then you get an item with quite decent stats. But obviously the chance for that to happen is low. I got a cloak I couldn't use on my priest, which I then could exchange for an Apexis Crystal at Sky Commander Keller. And I haven't got a clue yet for what I need the Apexis Crystal, the whole Ogri'la stuff appears to revolve around crystals and shards.

As I am currently not raiding (although I might have a look at Zul'Aman this weekend), getting 12 gold each from the Skettis egg daily quest for my two level 70s is more than enough gold to feed my level 21 mage. But I can see the basic truth in Damion's claim that grinding is less fun for the support classes you need for groups. Soloing my current mage is definitely more fun than soloing a holy priest or a protection warrior. And yes, I leveled them up as holy and protection, because I wanted to always be ready to join groups. But I always enjoyed playing my support characters in group. Damion's "feeling worthless and impotent" comment only applies to soloing, if like me you actually prefer groups a healer or tank is a good choice for being so needed. You don't feel worthless or impotent if nearly every LFG message you read tells you that you are needed so much in groups. The most unfun thing about my mage is the feeling that in my situation on an old, underpopulated server on the even more underpopulated Horde side where everybody is playing their level 70, I won't have the opportunity to group with players of my level for a dungeon run before I hit the Outlands. Nobody needs a level 21 mage, *that* is "feeling worthless and impotent".

But in the end the two situations of Damion and me are the same: Damion grinds boring daily quest to finance fun raids. I have to level up solo in spite of a preference for groups, to reach the level where groups exist. The common factor is needing to do something you don't enjoy that much to reach the part you actually want to play. And that seems to be a common malaise in all sorts of MMORPGs. Doing boring asteroid mining to be able to afford a good ship in EVE isn't any different. I'm not an expert of EVE Online, but I would assume that if you do a lot of PvP there you end up incurring lots of cost, which you would have to cover by doing mining or trading, which might not be your preferred forms of gameplay.

My personal solution to the problem is to not look at the final goals too hard, but to concentrate on finding the fun in whatever it is that I am doing. Okay, so my mage hasn't found a single good group yet in 21 levels. But doing the Ghostlands quests certainly was fun. And I can even imagine finding fun doing quests I already did with my previous characters, because approaching the same quest with a mage will be very different than doing them with a priest or warrior. And sometimes it is better to opt out of goals which require too much unfun prerequisites. If you find the preparation for raiding too time consuming, then why not do something else than raiding altogether? For example heroic instances offer challenging group play, not unlike raids, and are economically more balanced, especially with the new daily dungeon quests of patch 2.3. There is no way to actually "win" a MMORPG, no activity that you are really forced to do. So if you find yourself grinding something boring to reach the fun part, maybe you just need better goals. Do you really need a 5,000 gold epic flying mount to have fun in World of Warcraft? I don't think so.