Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.Does this look familiar to you? I bet it does. Many players of WoW don't read the stories told in the quests, or in the books you can sometimes find. The background story is often simply not relevant, and with WoW having several thousand quests, very few of them could possibly be considered as literary gems. Even Blizzard is making fun of themselves in this area, there is one quest description telling you "You will also need to collect 10 Intact Elemental Cores from the Ragereaver Golems and Warbringer Constructs protecting Argelmach. You know this because you are psychic."
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here.
> Talk elf
"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty years ago the Dwarf Lord Al'ham'bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the ..."
> Click Accept
"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven ..."
> Click Accept
"OK, fine. Bring me six kobold tails."
Most people don't mind there being a story, and everybody being free to read or not read it. But unfortunately I'm now in a quest series where the wish of the developers to tell a story makes the quest less good than it could be: The tier 0.5 (or Dungeon set 2, as Blizzard calls them) upgrade quest series.
A story is linear, and thus the tier 0.5 upgrade quest series is linear too. You first upgrade your bracers, then simultaneously your belt and gloves, then simultaneously your legs, boots, and shoulders (Thanks, Graktar, for that info), and finally the head and chest piece (not sure if together or separate). I've already told how my priest is stuck in the series, because he has the belt and not the gloves. Now imagine somebody having everything except the bracers, and not even being able to start the quest series, and you'll see how linear story telling is hurting. The story, involving some ghostly attackers, ectoplasm, and engineering devices to make ghosts visible, isn't good enough to be worth the negative effect on game play.
If I had designed the tier 0.5 upgrade quests, I would have done 8 parallel quests, one each for each piece of the set to upgrade. The principle of making the better upgrades more difficult to achieve isn't bad, although I probably would have tweaked things like the 45 minutes timer on the Stratholme UD run to a value which is more likely to be achievable by an average player after two or three tries. But I certainly wouldn't have strung all the upgrades into a linear quest chain, just to tell a story.
As it is, there won't be all that many people ever finishing this quest series. Getting a complete tier 0 set is so hard and time consuming that most people get better, epic loot from Molten Core before they get their set together, if ever. The people who would like to have the "Dungeon set 2" armor are unable to get it, because it is incompatible with a casual play style. And the people that would be able to get the Dungeon set 2 armor don't want it, because they can get something better with similar effort.
As for me, I'll finish the quest for gloves and belt with Raslebol, and if I ever get the opportunity to get the gloves for Kyroc, I'll upgrade him too to that step. But neither of my characters is likely to get legs, boots, and shoulders of the dungeon set 1 together, so upgrading it to set 2 won't be possible. What a waste of new content.
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