Killing is My Business...

One of the things that World of Warcraft has missed is the need of some players to spend large amounts of time just killing stuff.

The leveling grind has a few opportunities with gathering and culling quests. But when you are in a leveling vibe, it is difficult to break from it so once you have done the task, the players move on.

However, in dungeon crawl games such as Diablo, people enjoy just killing large groups of mobs. They enjoy it so much that they not only play to the end of the game, but they play it over and over.

So, when Blizzard said that they do not want to include achievements in World of Warcraft that would entice players to spend countless hours killing mobs, I scratched my head and exclaimed, "Why not?".

There were times in Burning Crusade that I would head over to Netherstorm and cull the blood elves over and over. That was before a daily was introduced to do just that. Then I would do the daily, but not more than I needed to acquire the book or orders or whatever. Mostly because sometimes the drop rate required me to kill a few dozen of them.

Mob-killing achievements would work the same way. For instance, in Northrend I spent weeks just killing beasts in the Howling Fjord. Part of the reason was to get some vendor trash to sell, part of it was to get quick/easy experience, but mostly I just wanted to kill stuff for a while.

It is a part of gaming that we sometimes just want to spend hours mindlessly killing things. Making achievements for such tasks is not a bad thing, but instead would give us some rhyme or reason for doing so. At least until the achievement was acquired.

One cool perk for such tasks would that after a high number of kills, mobs would drop more highly-valued items. Not gear or craft materials, just trash that is worth more to vendor.

The one issue would be AOE killers. They can tag entire zones it seems. So, to make things more fair, just add some islands or mountain flats and fill them with mobs. So if a mage is camping your favorite spot one night, you can fly off to another.

Or, Blizzard could make a bunch of instances where players are transported to small zones where they are by themselves (or grouped) and on the rampage. I played a game called Dungeon Runners a while back that was build around this style of game. Blizzard already does raid instances, so why not add solo instances?

Maybe that is fruit for another post...