he forgot hillsbrad foothills, the first zone that alliance and horde meet.
only horde are in the late teens/twenties and alliance are…more…so it’s only the first time from an alliance point of view.

Kind of difficult to argue in favour of a zone that the majority of players would willingly skip, given half the chance.

For me, the thematic allure of the Nesingwary quests wears thin around tiger number 12. The problem is that the number of tigers is the obstacle, not the tigers themselves. It’s not a Quest; it’s an Achievement.

STV seems made for Hunters and is probably the best designed zone in WoW. That could be a good reason why the class is popular. I once loved playing my Hunter but it eventually dawned on me; playing WoW for 6+ hours per day makes in you into a game toad and nothing more.

I understand what he’s saying, in the sense that he’s writing English and I recognize the words, but frankly, most of it is nonsense.

The stepped nature of these hunting quests mean that whatever level you first encounter the Nesingwary camp in STV, there’s going to be a quest of an appropriate level for you. It’s like a net, spread wide to catch players.

You saw that? A net, spread wide to catch players?

Players may believe that they’re in the driving seat here, hunting down the wildlife Nesingwary and his colleagues have listed, but the players themselves are prey! The Nesingwary camp is a content trap, and they fell right into it. This quest hub is saying: as you do unto others, so shall others do unto you. That’s just … stunning! I was awed when I saw it.

This is frankly just bizarre. A ‘net spread wide to catch players’ is otherwise known as a quest hub, and there are about 200 of them in any standard MMO. Quest hubs that involve hunting (oh the irony!) make up about 90% of them. So. . . yeah. If Bartle actually got that excited every time he found a quest hub, more power to him, but it’s not an incredible design insight.

Most of the article is like that. As I wrote elsewhere on the same topic, Bartle explicitly states that he doesn’t even know or care if the elements he’s excited about are intentionally placed. And he clearly doesn’t have a strong conception of whether they’re fun (because they’re not. 9 out of 10 MMO players agree). So he’s basically just having an orgasmic conversation with himself through a game, to absolutely no benefit to anyone else. Fine, but I would think this would disqualify him from significant ‘game design’ coverage oxygen. He’s just some guy. Why are we paying attention?

Funny enough, while I do acknowledge his point that it was expertly designed in allowing the Horde to meet the Alliance for the first time, this was the zone that killed the game for me.

First, I was silly enough as to talk myself into playing on a PvP server. Since it was here where Horde met Alliance, I found it annoying that I was now getting ganked while I was trying to conduct my business in Booty Bay (the guards didn’t have much of an impact then – maybe they weren’t in the game when I was playing it) or while I was simply hunting gorillas to fill a quest quota.

Second, when I played it back near release (perhaps they tweaked things since then) I actually found the quest progression to be atrocious. Yes, it was very thematically tied, but somehow the “kill x gorillas” quest really got to me. I knew that killing ten rats was already a tired old staple of MMORPGs, but Blizzard had managed to spin this with a flair up until that gorilla hunting quest. It was a combination of the previously mentioned ganking, that I had to kill a high number of gorillas (25?) and that the gorillas were actually in short supply when I was playing (near release).

Maybe the real lesson here is that MMORPGs are continual works in progress. This observation of what Bartle is so impressed here may actually reflect a version of Stranglethorn Vale far later than when I bored of the game (four weeks after release). While he’s right that creating an MMO — really, any game — is an artform, games are best treated not only an interactive art, but a temporal one as well.

I don’t mind the design language, but the reality does not live up to the Bartle ideal. The level tiered content only works properly if you showed up at the earliest possible level and completed all of the quests in order. The player who shows up at level 35 has to do a bunch of trivial content to unlock the quest that’s actually appropriate to their level. Perhaps it would have worked if you could jump in and kill an extra 20 “elder stranglethorn tigers” to compensate for having missed the young tigers and tigers. Meanwhile, the primary challenge in the questline is actually finding the targets, which almost guarantees that players will end up doing at least some of the quests out of order and at an inappropriate level.

I’ll concede that it must have looked good on paper, though.

Having experienced STV mainly from a Horde perspective, Bartle’s post came off much like wankery to me. The Horde has little to no reason to visit northern STV due to the absolute lack of quests. Additionally, since they are based mostly out of Grom’gol, halfway down the zone and far off the mystical road, the difficulty progression similar, but not at all thematically tied together. Additionally, the mobs are strongest on the south-central coasts and islands rather than the absolute southern parts of the zone.

I still like leveling in STV, mainly because I don’t play on PVP servers, but the post reads like a stoned fanboy review of some psychedelic jam band.

I sort of get what Bartle is saying regarding Booty Bay as a funnel (for the Alliance only, since the Horde is totally different). You start with smaller remote hubs and work your way through the funnel, building up your level until you’re ready to reach the city in relative safety. In many zones, you *start* with the major city as your initial hub (or at least you get there more quickly), and you work out from there (for the good reason, usually, that this is where your ingress/egress is in the form of flight points).

Even so, the “funnel” is not unique to STV – many other zones place the “city” as the end goal rather than the starting point (for example, all newbie zones do this).

He loses me a bit with talk of building a desire to hunt animals by having them be annoying. I see it differently – by the time I talk to Nessigwary, I’m already tired of dealing with panthers. I’ve killed countless numbers of these things out of necessity, and the bugger seems totally uninterested in this fact. Kill 10 panthers? What do you think I’ve been doing for the past hour! Where were you when I started running into these things?

Also, Bartle seems to totally gloss over the fact that the lower level quests are prerequisites for the higher ones – so if you do end up at Nessigwary’s by following the bread crumbs from Booty Bay, you’ll be greeted by quests that are most likely not level appropriate. In one of the grandest flaws in WoW’s quest design, you’d have to go back and do these lower level quests to get at the level appropriate content.

Of course, perhaps I’m just unable to see past my own mixed feelings about this zone, as I think it largely fails due to its massive size and relatively poor mob density. Kill 10 gorillas? Sure, I’ll do that – except that I can’t *find* 10 of the things in close proximity. The amount of running around is obscene, and needlessly drags out these quests (which only enhances the tedium).

I guess I’m really missing just what makes this zone special in Bartle’s eyes. I see how it’s supposed to work, and think it’s close to working, but even so I don’t see much at work here beyond the same zone layout strategies used more effectively in other zones.

STV cannot be as bad as all you people make it out to be. Almost every WoW player went there, and it didn’t make them quit the game.

After reading Bartle’s statements, I get the distinct feeling it’s about design for the sake of design (meta-design, as it were), rather than functionality. This is where it gets a little weird, since design functionality pretty much focuses on what players really care about:

A. Does it provide and promote tasks that are fun?
B. Does it reduce the elements that are less fun?

The players are never going to think about it in the meta-design ways that Bartle is talking about. The theme of hunter and hunted is a pretty big one in STV, and the whole idea of using the breadcrumb quests and methods of catching the various players as if it were a fairly widespread net is a pleasant surprise that’s very elegant in the meta-design. That stuff’s cool to some people, like English majors finding out how not only does word choice in a particular novel evoke certain imagery, but also the very sentence structure itself. Not many folks besides writers and literary critics are going to care about it though, not even the average reader.

This isn’t to say I think that STV is a great zone. It’s cool in the themes and such it presents, but it certainly is lacking in the functionality, and that’s something the players tend to pick up on more. Points A and B up there are what players really care about, and the whole idea of grinding basilisks for low-percentage-drop crystals, slaughtering hordes of local wildlife repeatedly (not only do you have to do it with tigers, panthers and raptors, but you also need to do it for basilisks and gorillas) becomes tiresome extremely quickly. I think the biggest problem with the Nesingwary quests in specific, though, is that you feel a lack of overall guiding purpose. Why do I have to kill 10 of these? Does that make me a better big game hunter than killing 5? It breaks the immersion because it shifts the player from feeling powerful to just bored and being given busywork tasks to do. You get kicked out of the ‘flow’ channel, and that’s a terrible way to break the immersion. In Duskwood, you’ve got the whole culminating story of the Embalmer and Stalvan and the like… for Nesingwary, it’s just “Hey, good job, you killed a bigger critter.” The way they designed Sholazar was much better; it provided some breakup to the monotony of repeated wholesale wildlife slaughter, and incorporated tasks that still stayed true to theme (tracking, hunting, searching, camouflage, etc.). The zone may not be designed quite as elegantly from a meta-design sense, but the functional design is a lot higher caliber and it shows.

–Rawr

I’m rather surprised to see designer wax lyrical about the beauty of design that’s supposed to trick player into killing 90 rats, while glossing over the underlying silliness that’s asking player to kill 90 rats –and very little else– to begin with.

Somehow it comes across as missing the forest for the trees. But maybe it’s just me…

I have to say STV is one of my favorite zones in WoW, especially on a PvP server. It was my first serious horde/alliance interaction and felt more like Vietnam. Booty Bay being littered with corpses just added so much atmosphere to the pirate town. The pages quest was particularly bad, but other than that, it’s a stellar zone. On a PVE server it’s not quite the same (and as people have moved on to new content), but still an excellent place to quest.

Great. Literary criticism comes to the MMO. Just what we needed.

From a Horde perspective, I have to say that Bartle’s wrong; STV is a poorly designed zone. To begin with, the first time you’re likely to go to arrive in STV as a Horde is not necessarily Grom’gol; to do so, you’d have to leave for STV from either Ogrimmar or Undercity. The arrival point for many people I played with when the game came out was Booty Bay, at level 30. Suffice to say, it was not very fun, and either arrival point for Horde does not really allow for a logical progression of quests, quest hubs or levels.

That’s not to say I didn’t ‘enjoy’ STV. STV is a right of passage on a PvP server. My guildies would often follow up any mention of STV with the phrase ‘Charlie’s in the trees.’ Its where most first ganks for newbies occur because rogues just seem to hang out in STV, at some Douche-Bag watercooler near Nesingwary’s. Its where every old timer I know first learned to fear the dreaded rogue stealth sound, mostly cause the goddamn cats were all making the same sound. STV was a horribly paranoid place, where even the buddy system didn’t always work. STV is a zone of terror on a PvP server, where desperate runs from Grom’gol to Booty Bay often culminate in a rapid sequence of elation and panic as you almost reach your target ‘safe’ area, hounded by gorrilas, or alligators, or the Black Panthers, and just as you take the last necessary step to come into range of the guards, a pansy Night Elf rogue stunlocks you to death and says ‘KEK!’. Its a great zone; I just don’t feel like the designers actually intended it to be the horror-show that it is.

I loved STV the first time through as Alliance, it was my favorite zone. That said, it was certainly a chore for me on my alts.

I don’t think Mr. Bartle is saying it’s the most fun zone ever created in any virtual world. He’s just talking about what he likes about the design.

I loved the diving quests and I loved the jungle theme.
There are also things to love in Stranglethorn.

I dare to say what people hated in Stranglethorn: The competition for quest drops with your own faction, and the conflict with the Horde.
Yeah, Stranglethorn is still when hardly anyone plays in the lower levels a place where Horde and Alliance clash.

I want to criticize the “funnel” and the “cruise director” quest model per se. Give players back some freedom of exploration and give them interesting things to find rather than have them “play as intended” for loot. I am a bit tired of following quest paths and ! and –> arrows.

But well, this is how WoW works, but maybe they can get rid of quest design gone wild in their planned NextGen MMO.

STV made me quit WoW. I loved the previous zones but being told to kill ANOTHER 10 Tigers, the distance to anywhere else, the higher level mobs waiting around random corners and the both lack of the creature I needed to kill and the lack of groups to do it killed WoW for me. I’ve never been back .

Richard Bartle appears to have forgotten one critical thing about game design: the purpose of a game is to entertain the players. If the majority, or even a decent plurality, of the players passionately hate some element of the game (and I’ve heard more hate for STV than the entire remainder of the old world put together) then that element has failed to do its job. If the players are not being entertained by having to find and kill the requisite number of the requisite mobs (with or without bonus PvP gankage) then the quest is a failure.

The Nesingwary quests are, pure and simple, busywork. They’re boring. They’re annoying. They contribute nothing to the story or the player experience (except perhaps a moment’s feeling of satisfaction when we unscramble Papa’s name). They’re just there to waste players’ time. We are not quite as stupid as most game designers think we are; we know they’re just there to waste our time. And, aside from our annoyance at being bored to tears as we plod about seeking the right size of tigers or raptors or panthers, we hate having our time blatantly wasted.

I was horribly disappointed, at the end of the druid quests in Borean Tundra, that I didn’t get to kill Nesingwary himself. I would pay a very large amount of gold to have a shot at Nesingwary. It is rare that any character in a video game can inspire actual emotion in me, but Hemet Nesingwary has: pure, unadulterated hate, which is shared with his designer.

If Blizzard ever wants to run a charity fundraiser at Blizzcon, they could get one of those carnival dunk tanks and have the guy who inflicted Nesingwary and his never to be sufficiently condemned quest chains on us up in the chair. I guarantee you, the StarCraft II preview would be empty because all of the players would be lined up at the dunk tank, eager to shell out five bucks for a chance to drop a dev in the water. Ten bucks if there’s piranhas.

I am forced to conclude from Lum’s post and this thread that most of the hatas are infected with carebearitis.

STV, in the early days before battlegrounds and such, was the absolute best place for world PvP. Bar none. As an earlier poster said, it was the MMO version of Vietnam- random people jumping out of the brush constantly to gank you, a well traveled central road where you could meet people to gank, etc.

Hell, the best time I had in WoW was when I got my Stranglethorn Arena master trinket at level 38-39ish. I didn’t do it by getting lucky at 4 AM when the Arena was deserted over six months. I just put on a Goblin rocket helmet, let all the 60s fight it out, and when the last one was left I just hit him with it and stole the chest. Then, I’d get chased all over the zone and ganked repeatedly.

The place was a blast. I guess now when everyone is 60-80 it isn’t so much a community hotspot, but its still my favorite place in WoW.

Because Someone Not a PvE Monster Attacked Them ™.

If a zone achieves what it’s supposed to, but no one is around to hear, does it still make a sound?

Basically, if the zone pleases Bartle and people like Bartle, but not the majority who play the game, then is it really successful? I mean, considering the resources put into it, and what else those resources could accomplish?

Personally, I enjoyed STV the very first time I did it (except for The Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest).

Every time after that, it sucked. I think that’s the general problem with making players really dig deep for a reward in WoW. The class based structure means that most serious players will play many characters to max level, which means that for the most part they want content that allows them to produce advancement as quickly as possible.

The best design would be to include “deep” elements to your game that players really need to work through, but to have those elements carry over and not ever need to be repeated. Then you put in content that is more convenient/replayable (say, to grind XP or gain coin) and that doesn’t need to be profound, just accessible.

The problem with STV then is not the zone, but its placement as a “leveling” zone, rather than an end game zone.

Edit: The more time that goes by and the more things I am able to compare against each other, the more I believe that Final Fantasy XI is the best fantasy MMO made to date. I’d love to see that sort of hardcore design matched to a superior interface like world of warcraft.

As a very early adopter of the feral druid, from the horde side of a pvp server, STV was like a playground made just for me. Stealth, humanoid tracking, and a boundless supply of fresh meat to stalk and kill. I didn’t even try to level for almost a month, it was so much fun in there.

Now the questing itself, not for me. Very repetitive and grindy. Kinda like the end game raiding. And the “PvP”. Which is why I don’t play WoW anymore. But at the time, great fun to be had in STV. I was sad when the 60′s starting coming back, because that was the end of my fun. I think I took my show to the Hinterlands(?) after that, but it just wasn’t the same.

Lum>It’s too large

It has to be large because it’s fitting two populations together for the first time. It has to be big enough to collect them so it can put them on the same tracks. That said, yes, it could probably have been a little smaller and still achieved that goal.

>This is especially annoying for Alliance players – they have a small NPC hub, without a “innkeeper” resting area, in the northern end of the zone, while Horde players have a more central location, with an innkeeper, to work from.

Yes, this was something of a pain. I suspect it was in part to do with increasing the desire among Alliance players to spark down the road; certainly I can’t imagine that the issue of whether to put an inn nearby was not discussed (but was rejected). As to why it was rejected, well I wouldn’t say it was necessarily not in keeping with the rest of the game in its formative years; I recall taking 20 minutes to get from SW to Gadgetzan just so I could find out if there were any groups there wanting to do ZF. Travel was a lot more of an experience back then. The inn in Darkshire was perhaps “close enough”.

Also, as a mitigating factor, this is the zone where people finally get their (at the time) level 40 mount. The zone’s size means they really, really want it. I don’t personally think this is a good reason for making the zone as big as it is, but I can see how it would feed into the decision-making process.

>it keeps you there far too long.

It tails off, but yes, there are still unfinished quests lying around until quite late. I think the first time round I did my last quest there at level 50 (killing that big gorilla on the island).

All things considered, though, given that their hands were tied by the fact it had to be big, I thought they did a superb job under the circumstances.

>Another zone, Dustwallow Marsh, was recently revamped specifically to give players a place to escape to during that level range.

This was an incomplete zone at launch. That’s not a design thing, it’s a production thing.

>those sorts of concentrated kill quests, while gravy to powergamers looking for the easiest way to leverage the mindless button pressing that destroys them of everything that makes them human, really highlight the artificiality of the enterprise.

Well yes, but that’s one of the points being made here isn’t it? You’re in a zone with other people, some of whom are out to get you.

Hmm, how to explain how I look at this…

OK, so, Picasso could paint “properly”. His early paintings were representational; he could do realist if he wanted to. His later paintings look like they were done by someone who couldn’t paint. Except, because we know he could paint, we can tell that they’re supposed to look exactly like they do look. He painted them that way for a reason. Their odd appearance is a feature, not a bug.

The designers of WoW had, both prior to STV and within STV, demonstrated that they knew how to create a variety of quests. Thus, when I see a clump of quests that all ask me to kill 10 rats, I don’t think “huh, they’ve taken their eyes off the ball”, I think “why did they decide to do that?”. They’ve earned my trust enough from showing me what they can do in the past that I’m prepared to look at this as a feature, not a bug.

So, if we accept that they meant to have a swathe of these K10R quests, the question is: why did they do it? Well it has to be something to do with what this zone is “about”.

Now you may be too hard-boiled a cynic to believe that anything this sophisticated is going on, and you may indeed be right. Maybe there is a more prosaic explanation – they were pressed for time, perhaps. However, if for a moment you indulge the notion that those K10R quests were there in number for a reason, what could that reason be?

When you start to think about why a designer has done what they’ve done, you start to treat that design as art. That’s what I was trying to get across in my post, nothing more.

>because WoW is usually so good at this smoke-and-mirror hand waving style of quest-driven storytelling, when it breaks down, it’s notable. And STV is an excellent example of where this breaks down.

You’re almost there. You just have to make the leap that says, ” – and this is deliberate”. Then you can ask why, and then the door to reading it opens.

I mean, honestly, if they’re “so good at this smoke-and-mirror hand waving style of quest-driven storytelling”, why would you think that this ability would suddenly desert them? Isn’t it more likely that they did what they did on purpose?

Whether what they did was wise or not is another matter, of course, but unless you try figure out why they did it you’re not going to know either way.

Maybe I’m being naively idealistic, but I know that when I created areas in MUD back in the day I gave this kind of thought to them; I don’t see why things should have changed 30 years later. If they have, and designers don’t think deeply about what they’re doing, then OK, I’m basically ascribing meanings to patterns that are meaningless (kinda like in astrology). However, speaking to other designers, I know that at least some of them do think this way, so I don’t believe I’m entirely wasting my time.

>STV is where players begin to be punished in earnest by poorly thought out world design.

I agree that this is where some of the broad decisions made earlier on start to bite. The design of STV deadens these a little, though. Put it this way: things could have been a lot worse.

>very few people actually think “Hmm – we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, we should group up and kill them together!”. Instead, they think “Hmm, we’re all hunting for 10 panthers, I BETTER TAG THEM FIRST!”.

Maybe the aim was to get them to think about co-operating?

This is a zone where groups from the opposing faction will walk around looking for easy ganks. You are a designer. You know this will happen. How would you encourage people new to the zone to group up, so they don’t get ganked?

I’m not saying that this group-for-the-K10R-quests solution necessarily works, I’m just saying that I can see where the designers are coming from with them.

>Other poorly thought out mechanics include the “Green Hills of Stranglethorn” mega-collection quest

Yes, I mentioned this in my post. It had a laudable aim, but was let down by the practicalities. Sometimes, what looks like a design bug really is a design bug…

>So, that’s generally what I think of when I remember that zone

As a player, yes, sure. What do you remember of it as a designer, though? Not how it affected you as a player, but how, if you’d done it, you’d have done it the same way – and why.

>Generally, if a well-regarded part of your content involves killing off a quest giver, that may be a sign people didn’t like those quests.

Maybe they didn’t like them after having run them 6 times on their alts, yes.

>Thanks to how WoW quest chain dependencies work, you actually have to start at the beginning no matter what your level, and work your way through the chain.

It’s not exactly onerous to do that, though. It’s basically free XP.

>It would be awfully nice if the quest givers did actually recognize that, yes, thanks to being Level Awesome you can dispense with the Somewhat Mighty Junglecat slaying and move straight on to the Fiercely Mighty Junglecat part of the quest.

Well, this is one of those matters for debate. If you let people skip the precondition quests, then some players feel they’re missing out on XP. However, if you respond by giving extra XP to people who come to the quest late, no-one does the early steps.

I agree that there are better ways to do it, though. Maybe putting them in family groups and having 1 elder tiger = 2 tigers = 3 young tigers would be a start…

>Bartle’s primary point, to move away from nitpicking semantics, however, is that the entire Hemet Nesingwary saga is an artful storytelling device

No, it’s not a storytelling device – any story there is here exists only to provide some fictional cover. What’s happening is communication through gameplay, not through story.

>forcing you to ask if you were predator or prey

I wouldn’t say “forcing” – I’m pretty sure that very few people have even noticed it, let alone felt strongly enough about it to ask themselves anything. As with subtext in other media, it speaks primarily through resonances, not by a direct message; you have to experience it, not read it on a signpost. Only people who look for it are going to see it, which is indeed how it should be: the fun for players is, as you say, partly based on an illusion that they wish to believe, and if a designer points it out to them then the illusion is shattered.

>And yet, even with that well-executed promise, there are problems along the way. Server queues. Lack of meaningful social gameplay. Class imbalance. Lack of meaningful PvP. Same old diku, different day. And STV mirrors that as well

It does yes. It manifests many of the faults that are inherent to the current MMO paradigm. This is what happens when designers begin with a set of “givens” – things they regard as must-have features. Earlier designers who created those elements of the paradigm did so for a reason; unless you know that reason, and consider whether it applies to your own situation or not, you’re in danger of propagating its flaws. To be fair, some of the pressure comes from external sources (player expectations, marketing demands), but still, you need to know what foundations you’re building on. You have to ask “why?”.

>And so we have Dustwallow Marsh. Which is everything STV isn’t – a hub-spoke model of world design, less immersive world crafting, more attention to detail and interesting quest mechanics.

And a player base that has run through STV so many times that they’d hit a cat in a sack with a baseball bat if it meant they didn’t have to run it again!

>And with a game and community the size of WoW’s, this is really the solution to STV’s problems – simply create so many options that everyone can be happily grinding their way to virtual nirvana.

As a general solution, yes.

The point of my post was not to sing the praises of STV as a work of model design. As I said, my aim was to show that there is art in game design. I chose the Nesingwary quest hub in STV because: it’s simple; it’s elegant under pressure; it says something that the non-gamers who scoff at any suggestion that there is art in game design might possibly understand; it has an easy-to-state external symbolism I could flag up. There were plenty of other examples I could have given, some general (the Scarlet Monastery chain, why the Eastern Plaguelands, the ambiguities of Felwood) and some specific (Hogger, Ringo in Un’Goro, A Striking Absence of Boar [from LotRO]), but from a standing start that one was the best that came to mind.

As usual, I’m grateful that my post was picked this up on your site first, as most of the people here actually look at what I said, rather than what they think I must have said. This fate does not await me elsewhere, where the likes of Infinity48 (above) await in packs.

I’ve tried to answer honestly, even if it’s going to make me look like a pretentious jerk. This is part of how I see MMOs; I can’t really do much about it.

Richard

I’ve played WoW at release, PvE server, Alliance, Hunter, Duskwood > STV route. I was having a lot of fun in the game overall. I don’t remember much frustration caused by the switch from skinnables to undead, none from the allegedly the long starvation caused by the lack of quests involving cats. I don’t remember this zone to be more expertly designed than any other, but this:

Jeremy T :
He loses me a bit with talk of building a desire to hunt animals by having them be annoying. I see it differently – by the time I talk to Nessigwary, I’m already tired of dealing with panthers. I’ve killed countless numbers of these things out of necessity, and the bugger seems totally uninterested in this fact. Kill 10 panthers? What do you think I’ve been doing for the past hour! Where were you when I started running into these things?

and this:

Noel Walling :
* Much too large a level range (30 to 45) meant that completing all the quests in zone at a certain level wouldn’t yield enough to actually level, forcing you out of the zone, and then to come back later.

I do remember.

Of course I am not a designer, I’m just one of the guys paying the bills who this content was designed for, so sorry for not fully understanding the beauty of the theory behind everything that was thrown at me. Or maybe the beauty was drowned inside something not as beautiful. But it looks more like a bag of rice was spilled on the floor and someone saw the face of the Virgin Mary in the mess.