Project Lore

QuestHelper/Carbonite & Extended QuestLog/DoubleWide Features Incoming I've never been one to play on the PTR.  Like many other players I don't want to spoil the upcoming content or experience "unfinished" gameplay.  And yet I spend hours a week just staying current with the latest news and revelations, from the Live realms and the PTR.  I guess that would make me a bit of a hypocrite - I won't spoil by playing, but get spoiled by reading occasionally - but that is the price I pay for knowledge.  So when my buddy noticed that the patch notes had changed again, he knew I would be interested. Blizzard began implementing QuestHelper functionality as part of the Secrets of Ulduar patch, and I was okay with it.  They have been trying to make leveling easier for some time now, and that change was the next logical step.  The devs seemed to have found a happy middle ground between the hardcore and the casual players thanks to additions to the tooltips.  In essence you still had to read the quest text to find out where mob X or item Y was located.  Only when you were in the general location - being able to mouseover an objective - would you be tipped off.  No biggie.  Enter Call of the Crusade, which is taking it a step further.

• A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest.
• A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects.
• A gear/cogwheel graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot quest objects found in the world.
• A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC for a quest.
• A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.

Aside from these obvious benefits, former downloaders of quest helping mods should see an increase in available system resources and (slightly) more secure accounts. Okay, this is way further then I expected Blizzard to go.  Before the hardcore base goes all "reading comprehension" on us let's take a step back.  Remove yourself from the discussion and just look at WoW as a product.  Blizzard, the creator of said product, is looking at QuestHelper, and mods like it, and realizes that it is one of the most downloaded add-ons for World of Warcraft.  What would you expect them to do?  Would you want them to simply ignore the actions of millions of players?  No, of course not. Here's the rub, many other UI changes are getting the option to be toggled on or off, but Zarhym's updates make no mention of that for the topic at hand.  If you want to play WoW the hardcore old school way it doesn't seem to be an option.  The freedom of choice is what the hardcore should be complaining about, not the dumbing down of a part of WoW that you are no longer a part of. Under what circumstances would you accept the added features to the world map?  Would it have been acceptable to you if it was implemented back in 2004?  Should the option be defaulted off?  Are you going to abandon your helpful questing mod if the feature goes live?  With the amount of subscribers reaching a plateau, does it even matter at this stage in the game? Let the QQ begin. <popcorn>

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Blizzard Entertainment is well known for tapping their addon community for ideas.  They have implemented pieces of CT_RaidAssist, Omen Threat Meter, Deadly Boss Mods, SCT (Scrolling Combat Text), the various mods that allow chat customization and even the third party application of Ventrilo.  If changes to the mob tooltips on the PTR are anything to go by, the latest mod that the User Interface team has borrowed from is QuestHelper.  Quest information, which quest the target mob applies to and how many are needed, will now be displayed on applicable tooltips. The discovery of this change has already sparked off a bit of controversy - as will any change when dealing with such a large community.  Which side of the camp do you fall on?  Do you feel that this addition to the standard UI is dumbing down the game further?  Or, is the modification a common sense, time saving change?  Is your immersion ruined? I'll admit that I use Quest Helper to its fullest potential.  The mod enables me to get the most out of my playtime, which can be limited windows depending on that thing called life.  But I will agree that it is almost cheating, with its pinpoint mob locations and all.  At the same time, I always read the quest text for the story, even if the more important information - mob location hints - becomes redundant. I believe that Blizzard found a perfect middle ground by implementing just one of Quest Helper's many features.  Players still have to do the hard work of finding a mob's location (for the love of god, read the quest text three times before you ask in General chat) before the tweak offers any benefit.  In its current implementation, I can't see how it could be "dumbing down" the game.  Is going to your quest log, jumping to the associated quest and reading the summary at the bottom difficult?  Not by any means.  When the changes go so far as to put a giant X on your map and say "You need to kill the mobs right here!" then the opposing camp can complain their heads off. Till that time, it's just a friendly time saver to me. Other games - notably Warhammer Online and their Tome of Knowledge - actually have Quest Helper-type functionality built into their basic UI.  WAR's implementation was heralded as one of the title's key features.  Heck, people went so far as to consider it innovative!  It seems that just because WoW didn't launch with it, adding it now would sully the "hardcore" memory.  Would it really be that horrible?

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