Now I realize that not everything can be fun and games: hard work and reward, pleasure and pain, suffering and relief … one cannot exist without the other. Not every quest can, or should, be “run out five feet, kill 3 of these and return for uberness.” But, dammmn, some of these 50+ quests in Warcraft are a real bitch.

Lately, I’ve been camping these craft components for at least a century in gametime, and all those excrutiating quests from other worlds are passing before my eyes like a House of Horrors. Mountains of corpses at my feet, and, all I have to show for it are backpacks full of crap and ONE of the target items … ONE of sixteen.

It occurs to me, if They (that’s the Developer They Collective) were trying to piss me off, They’re succeeding admirably. And, if I were to write a short list of ways They can infuriate me with Their quests, it would look like this:

1. Criminal drop rates. Any drop rate of a quest item less than roughly 10 percent is criminal. As long as I’m killing mobs of appropriate level, I deserve 10 percent. And don’t let that Randomizer fuck me over. I’ll believe 9, 8, even 7 percent, but we start talking less than 5 percent, that isn’t random — that’s a conspiracy.

2. Toss a few elite mobs into the mix. I’ll dodge one, MAYBE two, elite (tough nameds) mobs while I’m camping this crap for hours, but any more than that, and Their quest designer is just being a dick.

3. Extra steps required before I can even begin the quest, especially if I skip out to the hunt area unaware. (read: faction issues) I thought this was a one-shot deal — I travel, I kill, I loot, I finish — but turns out that I need faction or keys or a rogue or some shit, before I can even begin. Now I’m entertaining murderous thoughts, and I don’t mean to gain faction.

4. Mystery rewards. Most of the time, I don’t even take these quests, and certainly don’t accept them without doing a thottbot check. I need to be properly motivated. I see a quest reward with a question mark, I think “crap I can’t use and/or don’t want.” But that might just be me. After all, I played EverQuest.

5. Insane number of required items. If They require dozens of items to finish the quest, a 10 percent drop rate just isn’t cutting it anymore. And if inventory space is at a premium, like in Warcraft (where I am constantly asking myself, “hmm, what should I destroy now that won’t set me back either 20 gold or 20 hours in camp time?”), don’t require a bunch of different items or have the items stack like 5 a piece. What the fuck is with those stacks of 5? It’s hell on anyone with a craft profession, which is EVERYONE.

There’s this quest in Stranglethorn Vale, I’m sure most know this one, where the player collects all these different pages for a book that the quest NPC lost somehow. From memory, I think there’s a total of 16 pages to collect to complete the quest. That’s over a dozen precious slots used for saving pages — even though the pages can be returned in stages, OF COURSE, I was always missing one page from each of the 4 stages so I had to destroy mountains of vendor loot while I was out in the field.

That’s a bad level to have players doing that shit: most don’t have even 12-slot bags yet and are trying to save for their mounts.

I’m still bitter about that.