WoW - 9 Quest Design Problems

1. "The Christmas Tree Effect"
What this means, and this is kind of a weird one, but you show up to a quest hub, and your minimap is lit up like a Christmas tree with quest exclamation marks. The weird thing is, if you ask our fans, they love this. This is to them a good quest hub... They go in and vacuum up the quests. But we've lost all control to guide them to a really fun experience.
Kaplan noted that this leads to users not reading the quests, not bothering to remember which quest giver gave what, and forgetting the order in which to do the quests.
"It's much better to have a slow, guided experience," he said. "I think if you go to [Lich King zones] Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, you'll always have a ton of quests to do, but you'll never have more than 6 or 7 quests in your quest log."

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Then Kaplan dropped a real bomb: he was responsible for the infamous Green Hills of Stranglethorn collection quest.

"This is the worst quest in World of Warcraft," he said. "I made it. It's the Green Hills of Strangelthorn. Yeah, it teaches you to use the auction house. Or the cancellation page."


"So I'm the asshole that wrote this quest. My philosophy was, I'm going to drop all these things around Stranglethorn, and it's going to be a whole economy unto itself... It was horrible."


"It was utterly stupid of me. The worst part... one of the things that taxes a player in a game like WOW is inventory management. Your base backpack that the game shipped with only has 16 slots in it. But basically at all times, players are making decisions. For a single quest to consume 19 spaces in your bags is just ridiculous.

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