From an effectiveness perspective, I can understand that people are frustrated by the no-fly thing. But at the same time, that min/max hyper-effective attitude is probably the number one killer for players feeling burnt out. My favourite zone in the game remains Vashj'ir, and I'm not entirely unconvinced it's not because I was forced to go around it slowly and take in the atmosphere. They've got some pretty amazing world designers in this game!
I understand the "just queue, why bother questing" aspect too, though. There are things they could/should do with questing to make it more interesting. When doing Loremaster, I found that reading the quest text made it so much more interesting - but also, of course, a lot slower. It's hard to care about the "whys" of the game when you're trying to hit the level cap as quickly as possible, but I do really think having an engaging story is something even the most hardcore questers care about. Somewhere, deep within their caffeine-riddled souls.
I'm a huge fan of the way random lore is presented through books in Diablo III, I think that's a splendid way of doing things. For those who aren't familiar with it, you randomly find books/letters and things containing small bits of lore - and when you click them, the text pops up in a window and they get read out to you by a voice actor. You can close the text, and also stop the voice (separately) at any time, and access them later in an archive. You can go about your questing, yet get the lore fed to you by characters you get a closer bond to through hearing their voice.
So perhaps we could have a similar system for at least the larger, main-storyline quests? Each quest hub should have one main quest with voice so that you can happily accept all the other quests at once without having to wait for the voice dude to finish. Say, when you get to a new quest hub there'll only be one quest available. As you accept it, the voice starts going and a few other quests pop up nearby. The voice tells you all you need to know about why you're doing these quests in this hub! If you want to know more about the individual quests, you can look up their text in your log as you're doing them.
There also really should be an archive to access all the quests you've done. Just the quest name and the quest text, with a simple search feature. Anyone who's done Loremaster in a retrospective manner knows the feeling of trying to figure out where you left off in a zone.. Of course, now there's addons for that!
Anyway, sorry for the rant, seems I had some pent up creativity.
Have a BSc in IT & Game Design that I'm not using for anything productive because I chose a different path. >_>
halabar wrote:It's not really so bad that Blizz is saying, "slow down and enjoy the content..."
"Sloooow doooooownhhh, life is to be savoured!" - Every Pandaren Ever
