World of Warcraft's latest patch is in full swing now. The race to world-first Manaforge Omega is underway, Season 3 of the Delver's Journey has begun, and you have to do 19 quests about bees. Sorry.
In case you're unfamiliar, this new questline is part of the Ecological Succession activity—K'aresh was blown up in a struggle with Dimensius, but the Ethereals left over are trying to kick-start the shattered planet's ecosystem in little domes. On paper (and for the most part, in practice) it's a cute, harmless little side-activity.
Only, completing the quest chain unlocks a weekly quest that gives players a cache that can contain a Restored Coffer Key. Which means that anyone who's super hardcore about getting their delve gear will have to buzz about ticking off this initial checklist.
Everyone's taking it so well.
"I was almost yelling at my monitor at that point where you have to return the bees to the hive and then the 'hive' is a bunch of damn barely visible bees on the ground," writes one player on the WoW subreddit. "I think I hate bees now." Another adds.
Here's my favourite: "I love bees. I've always dreamed of having an apiary when I retire. This quest line made me want to burn every hive I ever see again." A potential apiarist is now a bee-hater. You did this, Blizzard, are you happy?
In all seriousness, I hopped in to play through some of this questline and it's… kind of a lot. Here's a screenshot courtesy of varenne on WoWhead where you can see just how many quests are in this thing. The answer is 19—25 if you count the non-bee related quests required to get onto the questline.
In fairness, you're often doing two of these suckers at once, but it's still quite a bit of investment to unlock a weekly activity that's (pardon the pun) key to gear progression—one feels like they could've plonked that unlock a few quests deep, and simply let players have-at, with the questline as an optional jolly.
On the other hand, as someone who has been playing MMOs forever, this does seem like a lot of buzz about a moderately-annoying questline in an MMO, which, man. I remember back when you had to run all around Azeroth just to get your bloomin' Shaman totems. I remember when you had to actually farm gold for your mount. I remember having to do attunements just to unlock raids. You kids don't know how good you've got it.
And bar a few bugs (technical ones) here and there, the quests themselves are just okay. You tranquilise bees. You hoover bees up. You dance at bees. You document bees. You tranquilise bees again. Their biggest crime is being extremely bee-focused, which, in fairness, is probably hard to sustain excitement about over the course of 25-odd quests.
The questline's perhaps a bit much (and for some the questline was actually bugged), but on the whole, this just reinforces my feelings that the MMO crowds of today are not the same as the ones of yore.
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